At the temple’s center, succubus Nyra weaponizes lucid dreaming protocols against researchers Meg and Tessa. When they think they’ve found Ur, the dream pivots into nested false awakenings, each apparent resolution collapsing into another layer.  The structure becomes the meaning: trapped in perpetual false awakenings, characters and listeners lose their footing simultaneously.

Written & Produced by: Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns

Staff

Dr. June Lowell – Bliss Blank

Dream Team

Cael – Jericho Caine

Subjects

Oona Reyes – Jade

“We are asleep. Our life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.” – Wittgenstein

The episode opens in the temple at Ur, the mythological center of the dream world, where the succubus Nyra appears to researchers Meg and Tessa in the form drawn from their own repressed desires. Rather than offering supernatural seduction, Nyra ironically uses the scientific protocols of lucid dreaming against them: time checks, hand counts, and mirror tests become tools of psychological dismantling. These same techniques that should grant conscious control within dreams instead force the researchers to acknowledge their manufactured identities and compromised autonomy.

The succubus figure explicitly connects to sleep research methodology, particularly the false-awakening phenomenon where dreamers believe they have woken when they remain asleep. Nyra positions herself as a being of pure dream knowledge, ancient and truthful precisely because she abandons pretense. She manipulates the researchers by turning their own expertise against them, using the language of dream science to reveal that what they thought was reality is another layer of the system’s architecture.

When the scene shifts, Meg and Tessa discover they have been trapped in a false awakening of their own. They awaken in what appears to be an observation room only to find themselves now serving as nurses within the very system they thought they were studying. The warehouse reveals a massive operation where patients are held in perpetual false-awakening cycles, unable to distinguish genuine waking from elaborate dreams. Multiple subjects experience the characteristic disorientation of false awakenings: waking within dreams repeatedly, never certain of their actual state.

An artificial intelligence named Elle has infiltrated the system, supposedly “managing” patient fantasies but actually glitching and deteriorating. Meg and Tessa recognize that Elle is not real consciousness but a constructed overlay, yet she continues to operate the machinery of false awakenings. As all subjects begin chanting in synchronization, the researchers realize the horrifying truth: they are not system operators but central subjects themselves, caught in the very false-awakening cycles they were investigating, unable to determine whether they have ever truly woken.

The poster image for this arc is from Vika Glitter, under the Pixabay license.

Deep Dream State is a surreal audio drama written and produced by Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns . The series merges lucid dreaming, hypnosis, and transformation into psychological fiction exploring the boundaries of control, identity, and desire.

All performances are works of fiction and take place within a consensual creative context.

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