Aboard the Chthonic, the fog is warm and the whales are circling. A cosmic horror audio drama about what gets in when the self dissolves.

This is Episode Five of the dystopian fiction Deep Dream State, an audio drama exploring identity and desire.

(The Chthonic arc is classified as cosmic horror.)

Deep Dream State is written and produced by Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns, with co-production by Bliss.

Somewhere below decks, Amanda and Brittany are sharing a shower neither of them remembers turning on.  The crew watches on monitors and evaluates.  What the entity they serve actually wants is a mind that still pushes back, and Sara and Kara have spent the entire voyage doing exactly that in the ship’s library, chasing whale prophecies and binding rites down a trail the crew planted for them.  A hidden note sends Sara deeper into the ship alone.  Kara stays behind with a knife and a deadline and the growing suspicion that following the breadcrumbs and walking into the trap are the same thing.

Shower opens in the Chthonic’s surveillance room, where Captain Dyer and her senior crew are reviewing the progress of a passenger named Emma.  She’s been through multiple cycles of adjustment, and she still isn’t what they need. She hesitated. In the world the Chthonic’s crew are building, hesitation is disqualifying. The conversation between Dyer, Alistair, Olivia, and Holly is the language of people running a program rather than a cruise.  What emerges from it is the outline of something with serious infrastructure behind it: trials, wipes, cycles, and a very specific end goal that Emma’s softness has put at risk.

Below decks, two other passengers are having a different kind of morning. Amanda was the responsible one in her social group, the woman who kept the sorority from burning down, and now she can’t string two thoughts together without giggling.  Brittany describes the feeling as pink fog, and Amanda finds she can’t argue. Their conversation loops and doubles, sentences finishing in unison, memories failing to reconstruct.  The shower in their cabin is already running when they notice it, and neither of them turned it on.  They work out slowly that they dreamed it at the same time: standing under the water while something hummed through everything. They’ve always heard it, they agree.  They’re not suffering and that’s precisely what makes it frightening.

Back in the surveillance room, Dyer and Alistair watch Amanda and Brittany on the monitors and write them off as too far gone to be useful. This is where Shower opens into something larger than a cruise ship drama. Holly, one of the crew, tells them that the entity the entire operation is designed to serve doesn’t want empty vessels. She knows because she hears it when she’s the offering. What it wants, she reports, is something left to corrupt: resistance, consciousness, the specific quality of a mind that hasn’t yet surrendered. Amanda and Brittany are kept aboard now as warnings rather than candidates, while the crew turns its attention to two other passengers currently in the ship’s library: Sara and Kara, who have spent the voyage chasing every strange thing they’ve noticed aboard the Chthonic and getting closer to the truth than the crew expected. The files they’ve been finding, the legends uploaded to their research feeds, the cryptic trails: none of it was accidental.

Sara and Kara have independently arrived at the same conclusion from different directions. Every coastal mythology they can find points toward the same structure: brides of the sea, offerings to the deep, binding rites that appear from Norse tradition to Polynesian sacred sites. A text called The Binding of Waters names it directly, referencing a bride, a vessel, and an entity it calls the Old Groom. The ritual cleansing passages explain what happened to Amanda and Brittany. The hundreds of whales circling the ship outside with no feeding pattern and no migration logic match the prophecy exactly. What Sara and Kara believe is an investigation is the final stage of their own selection. Their compulsion to understand, their refusal to stop pulling at the thread: these are the exact qualities that made the crew plant the trail for them in the first place.

When a handwritten note falls out of one of the archive books directing Sara toward a secondary archive elsewhere on the ship, Kara calls it immediately: it’s a trap, horror trope central, hard pass. Sara goes anyway because knowing less at this point feels worse than the risk. They split up, Sara heading deeper into the Chthonic’s interior while Kara waits in the library with a knife and a thirty minute deadline. Shower ends there, not with a revelation but with a door opening further in, Sara walking toward whatever the Old Groom has been patient enough to wait for, and Kara alone in the library with the realization that understanding a trap and escaping it are not the same thing.

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Deep Dream State is an explicit adult production containing cosmic horror, erotic content, and scenes of ritual transformation. Devotional surrender, boundary dissolution, and encounters with ancient non-human entities. Not for the faint of heart or the firmly landlocked.

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