TRANSCRIPT: SOMNARIUM. S.008 – HERE THEY SLEEP
Case of Maddy Palmer. Consulted in relation to a secured directory recovered from Dr. Susan Renwyck’s archive. The subject describes prior exposure to an organized network conducting structured sleep deprivation trials, followed by the disappearance of a close associate.
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INTRO
[HARD DRIVE POWERS ON]
I’ve postponed this long enough.
I need to know what’s in the encrypted folder.
My hundreds of failed attempts at gaining access to this folder have only grown my curiosity.
I have a friend. She works in network security, pen testing, forensics. She used to be a deep web hacker, but she went legit a few years ago.
I haven’t told her much, just that I need help opening a damaged archive.
If anyone can get in, it’s her.
The problem is… the drive won’t let me copy anything off of it. So I’m taking it with me.
And I’m not letting it out of my sight. Not after last time. Not after what it did.
Anyway, I’m going to take the drive, get in my car and go see her.
I’ll be recording updates along the way from here on.
Alright, let’s go.
[HARD DRIVE POWERS DOWN]
THE CAR RIDE
[RECORDING BEEP]
Okay I’m in the car.
I don’t really know why I’m doing this. Why I can’t just leave this alone.
It’s just an encrypted folder. It’s probably confidential material Renwyck didn’t want anyone to see. Private patient notes. Something sealed for a reason.
There’s a part of me that feels like I’m crossing a line just thinking about getting in there.
[sighs]
Ever since I got my hands on this hard drive, everything’s been… tilted.
I go to work. I do what I’m supposed to do. Fix things. Clean up systems other people break. That’s my job.
And then I come home and spend all my free time listening to recordings from twenty years ago.
That’s not normal.
And now, I’m taking a long drive to see an old friend to break into something that doesn’t belong to me.
[chuckles]
If this turns out to be a hoax… honestly, that would be the best possible outcome.
Because what I experienced… that thing…
I can still feel how close it was. How real it felt.
You don’t just hallucinate something like that.
Right?
Unless you do.
And if I did… then what does that say about me?
I’ve been sleeping badly. I’ve been obsessing over this. I’ve been sitting in a quiet room with that drive humming for hours at a time.
Anyone would start imagining things.
[longer silence]
But then there are the files.
The repeated names in the margins. The phrasing that shows up across cases that weren’t supposed to be connected. The way certain themes keep resurfacing even in the corrupted fragments.
That could just be how Renwyck worked. Clinicians reuse terminology. Patterns appear when you archive enough material.
I work with systems. I look for structure. That’s what I do for a living.
Maybe I’m just doing it here because I don’t like unfinished puzzles.
[silence]
But why can’t I find anything about her?
No publications. No archived profiles. Nothing that lines up cleanly.
That’s strange.
Not impossible. People retire. Records get lost. Websites disappear.
But people don’t just vanish.
[sigh]
I’m overthinking this.
[silence again]
And then there’s a city with no sky.
It’s shown up more than once. Even in fragments I couldn’t fully recover.
Why do these people keep seeing the same places in their dreams?
[silence]
But.. Raynor noticed it too… the patterns.
And from what I could recover from the files, he seems to know more about this.
Was he on to this before she was?
The last two cases were related to the Blackwell family.
And like the files suggested, they own a large amount of real estate. Not just in the United States. All across the world. That much I’ve confirmed.
I mean… it’s not hard to find their name attached to something.
That doesn’t mean conspiracy. Wealthy families show up everywhere. If you look long enough, you can connect anyone to anything.
But still… it’s there.
If there are answers, they’re probably on the drive.
I mean… I’m just guessing here. But saying it all out loud… well it makes a lot of sense.
[silence]
No.
That’s me jumping ahead.
I’m filling in gaps with dramatic explanations because the alternative is admitting I don’t know.
And I don’t know.
[silence again]
… Anyway, I still have a long drive ahead of me.
I’m going to try not to think about any of this for a minute.
I’ll check back in when I have any updates.
[RECORDING BEEP]
ARRIVED
[RECORDING BEEP]
Okay I’m here.
[train blares in the background]
I’m gonna go in, get that folder unlocked and get out.
I don’t want to risk her involvement in any of this.
[car door opens]
[car door closes]
[doorbell rings]
Maddy: Hello? [over intercom]
Alex: Maddy? Hey, it’s Alex.
Maddy: Oh… hey, let me buzz you in [over intercom]
[door buzzer]
Maddy: First floor, door on your left [over intercom]
Alex: Alright, coming up.
[RECORDING BEEP]
MADDIE’S APARTMENT
[RECORDING BEEP]
[HARD DRIVE POWERS ON]
MADDY
Okay… that’s old. You weren’t kidding.
ALEX
It’s temperamental.
MADDY
Temperamental isn’t the word I’d use.
So remind me again, where did you get this thing?
ALEX
Uhh… data center decommission a while back.
MADDY
So you stole it?
ALEX
No! I mean… technically… maybe?
MADDY
[small chuckle]
You haven’t changed one bit.
[pause, typing]
So. What have you tried?
ALEX
Basic stuff. Password attempts. Names from the files. Dates. Case numbers.
MADDY
Mm-hm.
ALEX
Variations. Symbols. Obvious combinations.
MADDY
You brute-forced it?
ALEX
With a wordlist, yeah.
MADDY
Of course you did.
ALEX
It was worth a shot.
MADDY
It’s always worth a shot. It just almost never works on something that looks like this.
[typing]
What else?
ALEX
Tried mounting it as a compressed archive. Renamed extensions. Ran it through 7zip, VeraCrypt. A couple recovery tools.
MADDY
You thought it might just be mislabeled?
ALEX
Or corrupted.
MADDY
It’s not corrupted.
ALEX
That’s what I’m starting to think.
MADDY
You opened it in a hex editor?
ALEX
Yeah.
MADDY
And?
ALEX
Didn’t recognize the header.
MADDY
That’s because you were looking for something standard.
[pause, typing]
ALEX
What does that mean?
MADDY
It means you’re assuming this is a locked folder with a password.
ALEX
Isn’t it?
MADDY
Not exactly.
[more typing]
You treated it like a box with a combination on it. But this isn’t a padlock situation.
ALEX
Okay, then what is it?
MADDY
It’s a container. Possibly layered. Maybe even nested. Could be a hidden volume inside something else on this drive.
ALEX
What do you mean hidden?
MADDY
Yeah. The visible data is just a shell. The real payload might only mount if you present it the right key file. Or the right structure.
ALEX
So it’s not about guessing a password.
MADDY
Not if it’s done properly.
[pause]
Did you try copying the entire disk image?
ALEX
It won’t let me. It stalls. Every single time.
MADDY
That’s interesting.
ALEX
You say that like it’s good.
MADDY
It means it’s doing something on access. Which means it’s not static.
ALEX
I don’t like the way you’re saying that.
MADDY
Relax. I mean it’s structured.
[typing]
Okay.
So what I’m gonna do is stop treating this like a password problem.
I’m going to clone the drive sector-by-sector into a forensic image, mount it read-only so nothing executes, and then analyze the file system directly.
If there’s a hidden container in there, I’ll find it.
[typing]
You might wanna grab a cup of coffee, this might take a while.
ALEX
Alright, boss.
MADDY
Don’t… do that.
ALEX
[laughs]
Do what?
MADDY
We’re not in high school anymore Alex.
[long pause]
ALEX
So… I’ve been meaning to ask.
What happened?
MADDY
What do you mean?
ALEX
You know, going legit.
MADDY
No, I don’t want to talk about it.
ALEX
Come on.
MADDY
I said NO.
ALEX
Well according to you, this might take a while.
MADDY
And?
ALEX
I just wanna know what happened to Trix, the deep web vigilante.
MADDY
Don’t call me that.
ALEX
Sorry…
MADDY
It’s been nearly 10 years since I turned myself in.
ALEX
But why, why did you turn yourself in?
MADDY
Will you stop asking questions for two seconds and just let me speak? I was getting to that.
ALEX
Okay, okay. Go ahead.
MADDY
Back then it wasn’t just me. May was there too.
I… didn’t know her real name, that was just the tag she went by online.
We met on some underground chat room for… security breaching enthusiasts.
Together we explored the deep web, looking for locked doors.
It wasn’t so much about what was behind them, it was about the challenge.
Often enough she sent me links to disturbing archives or strange experimental forums that looked like ARGs.
Not because of the content, because of the challenge.
“Had a good time breaking into this one, enjoy!”
Or “This one’s a little more unorthodox but if you think out of the box you’ll get it.”
And for a while, it was just that.
It all changed when some anon barged into the chat room.
“If you like a challenge, give this one a try”
And below that was a PGP-encrypted message.
It’s like… an invite addressed to you and only you can open it with the right key.
The same guy had messaged me directly with instructions and a public key block.
When I decrypted it, there was an onion link and a one-time access token.
Combining both together I was redirected to a page that simply had a login prompt.
Username and password. Like it was the most normal site in the world.
On the top of the page was a single line, which functioned as the title.
“And then they dream.”
I didn’t think much of it at the time, I mean there’s plenty of weird sites on the deep web with even more disturbing imagery and text.
Compared to all of that crap this was extremely mundane.
Anyway, I’ll spare you the technical details but May and I spent a good few days trying to break into this place. And…
Well we got in of course, I mean of course we did.
And before you ask, yeah it was a challenge.
First thing we managed to do was make ourselves an account. Last thing we wanted was to get caught actively breaching this site. We figured logging in with a username and exploring that way was more… inconspicuous.
The site was slow, not as in “my internet connection is slow”, like there was a lot of data to load.
And boy there was. There was so much data.
There seemed the be only one page and the whole site was organized in a folder structure.
It was just links with more links nested under each other.
Most of those links led to what looked like research papers.
Patient intake, consultation, testing, more testing and analysis of brain waves.
All of it was some kind of database for sleep related testing. It honestly kind of reminded me of the “Russian Sleep Experiment”.
You know that crazy urban legend. Or creepy pasta if you know what I mean.
This wasn’t in Russian though, all of it was in English. The dates on the papers went back to the early 2000s for as far as I could tell. And most of it was just… clinical lingo.
After searching through what seemed to be thousands of research reports, May found a hidden link somewhere embedded in the code of the site.
From what we could tell, only specific usernames would be able to see and access the link.
Obviously we made short work of whatever protection was keeping us out and looking back on it now that should’ve been our first clue to stop. But… our curiosity got the better of us again.
The link led us to a second site with a different URL and the same username and password field we had seen on the previous site. The title of this site was “Here they dream.”
The whole thing was starting to creep me out, but May insisted we keep going.
So… we kept going. Or, May did at least. I didn’t feel comfortable continuing. She shared her screen so I could watch along and muttered something under her breath that sounded like she was calling me a chicken.
The security on this site was nearly identical, so it didn’t take her long to get in.
She once again set up a username for herself and teasingly asked me if I was sure I didn’t want one.
I declined.
This site was even slower than the last one and when it finally loaded, we were greeted with video feeds. Nine of them, neatly arranged in a grid.
She clicked on the first one and we stared at a blank page for what seemed like forever.
When the video feed popped up, it started playing without a warning.
There was a room with a woman strapped into a desk chair. The whole room was filled with mirrors.
Behind a glass partition on one side of the room were silhouettes. We could hear laughter through speakers, it was faint but constant.
She kept trying to turn away, but there was nowhere to look that wasn’t herself.
At some point the laughter stopped.
The camera angle shifted slightly.
She froze. Then the lights went off, when they came back on the chair was empty.
The next feed showed the inside of an elevator. There was a man laying on the floor curled up into a ball.
When the lights flickered, the elevator came to life and you could see on the floor indicator that it was moving up. The man stood up, holding onto the railings on both sides and cried out.
“Please stop, make it stop!”
When the elevator came to a halt the man looked into the camera and pleaded once again.
“Please… no more…”
I remember the look on his face, he looked so scared.
Suddenly an alarm rang out and the fear on his face turned to pure terror.
When the light flickered once more he started screaming as his feet came off the ground.
The elevator came to a sudden stop and he hit the floor.
When the elevator doors opened, the camera cut.
The feed came back a few seconds later… and the man was gone.
May clicked over to the next feed.
The next room was dark, the only light coming into the room was from a slightly open door.
In the middle was a single hospital bed, with a man strapped down in it. He was connected to two separate drips. He seemed to constantly be shifting in and out of consciousness. We could tell by the way he would struggle to escape for a minute or two and then stop moving again.
We watched the feed for a while… when the door slowly opened completely. The lighting changed.
A minute passed and he stopped moving again. Somehow it looked like there was a shadow creeping from the door into the room.
When he woke up he tried to break free again. But no matter how hard he struggled he couldn’t free himself.
Right before the feed cut out, he looked up at the open door… and then he started screaming.
The screen went black and the screaming lasted for a few more seconds before the feed cut out entirely.
I told her that was enough, we shouldn’t be here. Whatever was going on I wanted to have nothing to do with it.
I ended the call and sat there for a while, going over what I had seen in my head.
When I looked back at my monitor, she had sent me multiple messages.
Asking me if I was angry or upset with her, apologizing for pushing me so hard.
I sent her that it was fine and logged off.
For the next week or so I didn’t really go online much, I spent a lot of free time reading and watching TV. I didn’t want to think about what I had seen on that site.
I mean sure, we had seen some pretty disturbing stuff in the past. But this was just… wrong.
They were experimenting on people. This wasn’t random cruelty. Everything was logged, timestamped. Like they were… measuring reaction.
When I finally logged in again, I had a bunch of missed calls from May and hundreds of messages.
“I’m sorry”
“Where are you?”
“Trix please, I’m so sorry.”
“I just wanna talk, please pick up.”
“I found something else, you need to see this.”
“I think I found who’s behind this.”
“Trix… I think I messed up, I think they might’ve traced me.”
“I keep getting anonymous messages”
“They’re saying they know who I am”
“I’m so scared”
“I think they found me.”
I… was too late. As soon as I saw the messages I tried calling her, but deep down I knew she wasn’t going to answer.
I sent her message after message, but she never answered again.
That’s when I decided that enough was enough. The experiments were inhumane enough already, but this just made it personal.
I went back in and I copied everything. And I mean everything.
I even recorded the video feeds to the best of my ability.
Then I made two physical copies. One of them I hid away.
The other one… I walked straight into the nearest police station. And I told them everything.
I was put on house arrest and was forbidden from going online until they knew what to do with me. They took all of my equipment and just left me in my apartment by myself, with a police officer watching the building.
It was about 9 months later that I got a knock at the door, it was the police officer who was keeping an eye on me.
After being locked up in my own home for such a long time they just told me the site had disappeared and everything was “under investigation” and I was free to go.
That’s the last I ever heard of it, I never got any closure.
I stopped hacking and I got a job in cybersecurity shortly after and moved into my current apartment. Haven’t looked back since.
ALEX
Wow… that was… a lot.
I’m sorry for making you relive that memory.
MADDY
It’s fine.
ALEX
Do you still…
MADDY
Don’t.
ALEX
Okay, okay.
[keyboard typing]
MADDY
Look at that, I’m in.
ALEX
Wait… Really?
MADDY
What, didn’t think I had it in me?
ALEX
I mean of course I knew you could do it, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked!
MADDY
Alright, alright. That’s enough.
So… let’s see what we have here.
[keyboard typing]
[pause]
A whole bunch of unsorted files and folders.
And what’s this?
“renwyck_guest_lecture_2004.mp4”
A video file of your renowned doctor. Largely corrupted by the looks of it.
Let’s see what’s left.
DR. RENWYCK — Guest Lecture, 2004
[corrupted glitching]
[Dr. Renwyck speaking in an auditorium]
To summarize, in modern sleep medicine we tend to treat dreams as a neurological event. A product of REM sleep. A cognitive by-product.
Historically, that’s not how most cultures approached it.
In a lot of older traditions, the dream wasn’t seen as incidental. It was treated as directive. Not just something you experienced, but something delivered. A message, or an instruction, depending on who you asked.
And once you treat dreams that way, you end up with a role that has to exist. A specialist.
Later Greek terminology gives us the word oneiromancer — a designated interpreter of dreams. Not the dreamer. The interpreter.
Because the authority usually wasn’t the dream itself.
It was the person who claimed to understand it.
And once interpretation becomes institutionalized, meaning starts to stabilize around the interpreter. Symbols get repeated. Patterns are reinforced. Expectations shape what people remember, and what they report.
We like to believe that by reducing dreams to neurochemistry, we dissolved that structure.
I don’t think we did.
I think we relocated it.
Wherever there’s a framework for explanation, there’s a center of authority.
And wherever there’s authority over meaning… interpretation resumes.
Thank you.
[light applause]
[corrupted glitching]
ALEX
Wow… so that’s Renwyck, I guess
MADDY
I’ll put the decrypted folder back onto the hard drive so you can analyze it.
ALEX
Thank you Maddy
MADDY
Whatever.
ALEX
I mean it. Thank you, this really helps.
MADDY
I hope that whatever you’re looking for is worth it.
ALEX
What do you mean?
MADDY
Curiosity isn’t always a good thing.
ALEX
Relax I know what I’m doing, I’m being careful.
MADDY
Do you?
Look, I can’t stop you from what you’re doing. Just… don’t dig too deep.
I’m here if you need any help.
ALEX
I know, thanks Maddy.
[HARD DRIVE POWERING DOWN]
MADDY
Here. Get this hunk of junk out of sight.
ALEX
Alright, I should get going now.
MADDY
Was nice seeing you again.
ALEX
Yea, we should do this more often.
MADDY
Decrypt mysterious hard drives?
ALEX
[laughing]
Haha, no. Meet up.
MADDY
I’ll think about it.
[sound of door opening]
ALEX
This really is a nice neighborhood.
Shame about the trains.
MADDY
What trains?
ALEX
The rail road? I heard it when I got here.
MADDY
There’s no rail road around here.
[short silence]
ALEX
Hmm. Must’ve imagined it then.
Anyways, see ya!
MADDY
Bye.
[RECORDING BEEPS]
OUTRO PLAYS