Rivers of the Mind is a combination of an Audio Book and audio play released as a Podcast. The show begins by following a homeless geologist named John Silvers who takes LSD under a hole in the universe created by a secret government laboratory in the Texas Hill Country disguised as a water treatment facility, which causes him to gain Psychic Powers, including Telepathy, and Astral Projection. John tries to use his powers to help people, including an elderly rancher named Gerry and a cashier at the local Walmart named Meagan. His efforts to do so do not always succeed. His impulsive Memory Wipe of a police officer named Phillip convinces the officer that he was Alien Abduction abducted by aliens. He attempts to rehabilitate Gerry's socipathic son Mick and sets off a chain of events that leave him imprisoned in his own mind by a mysterious time traveler named Ryan. Season 2 introduces a character named Meagan Cortez, who receives the gift of language from a field of psychedelic mushrooms; she must fight to free John from the time traveler before Ryan can use John's powers to Take Over the World. Season 1.5 and 2.5 follow Simultaneous Arcs wherein Phillip, his partner Grace, and an troubled internet conspiracy theorist as they investigate what they believe to be alien activity in their town; this is fueled, unbeknownst to them, by Ryan.
This show provides examples of:
- Contemplate Our Navels: The early episodes lean heavily on monologues and soliloquies that focus on the characters internal emotional state to tell the story.
- Drugs Are Good: Zigzagged, since most of the drugs encountered by John and Meagan are personified, but they both still receive superpowers either directly or indirectly through drugs.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The first four episodes suffer from uneven production quality, and the first season is written more as an audiobook than an audio drama given all the narration.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Tobacco being Tcinti introduced in Season 2 fits this description, as do the "White Flowers" that attack John, and the field of psychedelic mushrooms.
- Elemental Powers: Downplayed, but the powers are still structured in this way. John can control the element of "consciousness", while Meagan can control language, Ryan the element of time, and Dr. Whitebalm the element of radiation.
- Mistaken Identity: Phillip, Dusty, and Grace spend all of Season 1.5 and 2.5 investigating what they believe to be an alien, when it's in fact John.
- More than Three Dimensions: Seven are said to be accessible to humans, although a creature called the "arrogant mint" apparently has traveled to hundreds of dimensions beyond this.
- Mushroom Samba: Almost any episode narrated by John or Meagan has a lot of this, since the two are under the influence of psychedelic drugs through the entire show.
- Two Lines, No Waiting: The show follows two main plot threads, with occasional segments led by minor characters.
Episodes of this series provide examples of:
- A Fate Worse Than Death: Ryan explains that he has lived trillions upon trillions of years, all while remaining incapable of dying
- Alien Abduction: Phillip believes that he has suffered one after his memory is erased.
- The Alcoholic: Bobby was drunk when the second hole in the universe
- Astral Projection: In "Ocean of Dreams", John soars through a celestial ocean as an astral body while sleeping. When Meagan falls asleep, she accidentally ascends to a higher plane called the Hall of Venerated Ancestors.
- Beware the Mind Reader: Zig-zagged. John becomes friends with Gerry, Meagan, and Sapphire and none of them seem too frightened by his powers or paranoid around him, although people who see him in public tend to look at him with fear or disgust, and a conspiracy theory portraying him as an alien starts to circulate on the internet during Season 1.5.
- Breath Weapon: Bobby uses his powers combined with a bottle of vodka to breath fire at Meagan.
- Contemplating Your Hands: The characters will do this literally, especially the ones with psychedelic based powers.
- Close-Enough Timeline: Every time Ryan dies, he forms a new timeline.
- Dirty Mind-Reading: Unintentionally. John picks up on the fact that the police officer Grace is watching pornography on her phone, and that she fantasizes about what she'll do after she handcuffs him. He also picks up on Gerry's memories of talking dirty to his wife. As an asexual, this disturbs him and he tries to avoid picking up on people's sexual thoughts.
- The Empath: After Phillip is exposed to the same energy that gave John his powers, he gains the power to detect other people's emotions and to project his emotional state onto others.
- Epiphanic Prison: John attempts to convince Mick to change his ways by placing him through a series of nightmare scenarios, although this backfires.
- Erudite Stoner: Cameron, Jacob's friend, is tripping on acid when we are first introduced to him and offers Meagan and Jacob weed when they arrive at his house. Jacob insists that "he knows a lot about drugs", and sure enough, he manages to help Meagan enter the tobacco language by giving her a pack of nicotine gum.
- I Hate Past Me: Ryan has been trying to fight his past self for an impossibly long amount of time.
- Instant Sedation: Another potential use of Meagan's powers—she uses the language of silence (alprazolam or Xanax) in order to knock out the guards and escape the base, and the alcohol language to knock out Bobby and to calm her brother down after she overwhelmed him with her powers.
- Intoxication Ensues: Phillip after John tries to erase his memory. Meagan's powers also have this effect on people; she uses her powers to make a doctor at the base's hospital facility drunk so that he will tell her what happened before the alarm went off.
- Lovecraftian Superpower: Meagan and John both have the ability to access levels of reality beyond her own comprehension. In the case of Meagan, this includes contacting and communicating with personified drugs, and then using their powers as he own. John's telepathic powers, meanwhile, rip people's minds from their bodies, causing temporary personality disintegration and ego death. Ryan's powers are also suggested to be reality breaking. This becomes especially apparent when John climbs the stairway in Season 2, Episode 5. When John looks up, he witnesses a five dimensional battle between two alien skies made out of graph paper.
- Must Have Nicotine: Meagan sneaks out of the base to find tobacco, which she believes she needs in order to defeat Ryan.
- Playing with Fire: Bobby builds up a constant supply of ethanol in his body that he needs to literally burn off in order to survive. He can use this to fling burning alcohol at people or to cover his body in flames.
- Psychic Nosebleed: In the first episode, John gives one to Arthur Calloway, a kidnapper and human trafficker who stops at a gas station.
- Psychological Torment Zone: Starting in Episode 10, Ryan imprisons John in one of these, forcing him to relive traumatic experiences from his past. Meagan's ability to cause people in a certain radius to experience the effects of any given drug allows her to create one as well, such as with the methamphetamine language.
- Reality Warper: Meagan is able to warp people's perceived reality by manipulating language; her ability to do so is shown to be powerful enough to kill Ryan by collapsing all of the timelines his mind had been divided across into one.
- The Stoner: One character, mentioned in "Dear Mr. Heyerdahl", took some edibles and went for a walk on the day of the sinkhole; when he returned, he had cannabis-based superpowers that made everyone around him unbearably hungry. Subverted in some respects with Meagan, who is shown to use marijuana after work on a regular basis, but most of the stereotypes usually associated with this trope are averted. John, as the show's flagship character whose powers are based on LSD, would be expected to play into this trope, but he mentions that he can't smoke weed with most of his friends due to social anxiety.
- You Can See That, Right?: Invoked when Dusty first sees the alien. John asks Sapphire this in the first episode of Season 3, as he experiences the center of gravity shifting and his body turning into unwinding strings.
