Tether

At the Sitri Institute, researchers Meg and Tessa confront a disturbing discovery that seems to expose the darkest secrets of the facility itself. But their certainty gives way to something far more unsettling: the realization that they have been operating inside a Freudian nightmare parlor, where the line between investigation and entrapment has already collapsed. A new case file arrives: Oona Reyes, a thirty-two-year-old former TikTok wellness celebrity whose past involvement in intensive retreats employed experimental mind synchronization headbands and synchronized dreaming protocols.

At the Sitri Institute, researchers Meg and Tessa confront their own observations with mounting horror. In a heated session conducted under the watchful eye of Dr. June Lowell, they discuss the mechanisms of control operating within these walls. But their certainty shatters when they recognize the machinery they are describing is already operating on them. Their own speech becomes evidence of their subjugation. They realize they have been operating inside a Freudian nightmare parlor, where the line between investigation and entrapment has already collapsed.

Before they can fully process this revelation, a new case file arrives: Oona Reyes, thirty-two, former TikTok wellness celebrity and TempleBridge facilitator. The dossier chronicles her career trajectory from pole dancer to fitness influencer to wellness guru to something the legal system struggled to categorize. The file details her involvement in intensive retreats employing experimental mind synchronization headbands and synchronized dreaming protocols. Participants spent weeks in shared sleep states, their brainwaves aligned through proprietary technology, their unconscious minds woven together in what cult exit counselors called dream linking.

As Meg and Tessa examine Oona's archived case materials, they uncover evidence of something far more sophisticated than typical cult manipulation. Multiple participants reported not merely similar dreams but identical dream narratives, identical landscapes, identical voices. Eight individuals entered a unified trance state and emerged having shared the same nocturnal experiences.

But as the researchers dig deeper, they begin to recognize something chilling: the architecture of Oona's experiments is mirrored precisely in the protocols of the Sitri Institute itself. The synchronized dreaming techniques she pioneered are not so different from the observation chambers where Meg and Tessa now work. The nightmare parlor does not contain Oona's work; Oona's work is merely one manifestation of a much larger machinery. The Sitri Institute is not an institution observing pathology from a position of clinical safety. It is itself a technology of control.