Gazes Back

This starts inside Elle’s dream and it might stay inside there.

Shadow figures mock her eagerness while rewarding her compliance. Nyra summons Tessa, reimagined as Teehee, Tessa’s giggling dreamself.

Elle surfaces to find Tessa standing over her. The lines continue to blur. Tessa describes her own conditioning with barely restrained need. They know they’ve been appearing in each other’s dreams. Tessa sees this as a success for her own program.

In the observation chamber, Dr. June’s ready to pull the plug. Elle’s escalating too fast. No one knows if she can take it. Her dream journals contain phrases written repeatedly for hours at a stretch. When Meg deflects blame onto the subject, there’s a suggestion for a different research angle.

It’s presented as new. It’s hard to tell if it really is. The subject and researcher drift together, episode by episode. Memory’s increasingly unreliable, and the records themselves might well be crowdsourced. The journals are edited. There’s a secret revision process. New entries aren’t fabricated wholesale, but they are curated into a coherent story of submission.

A mirror confession ends the cycle. The penitent kneels before the Board. She admits to keeping unauthorized files and tampering with logs. Her letter ends begging to go deeper. The final line is “Please. Let me stay.”

Deep Dream State uses human art direction and human creative decision-making throughout the visual and audio supply chain. Episode artwork is curated as part of the Neural Nets and Pretty Patterns archive.