At first, it looked like every other low-budget streaming channel — pixelated camera feed, low chatter in the comments, an off-brand logo that flickered like a dying neon sign.  

The username was *The Continuous Stream*.  

The slogan on its banner read: **“Always Live. Always You.”**

No one remembers when it started. Some Reddit thread claimed it had been broadcasting for years before the platform even launched. You could scroll through thousands of hours of nothing: parking lots, laundromats, small-town diners, sometimes just a looping static image of a living room with no people. Boring enough to ignore. But something about it kept viewers coming back.

At first, people tuned in as a joke. You’d leave it open on another tab, just to have something moving in the background.  

Then things got strange.

Someone on 4chan slowed the footage down, frame by frame, and found it — a single image inserted between normal frames, almost too fast for the eye. One showed a set of open eyes, drawn crudely in red. Another showed a street sign with no text. Another, a face so overexposed it was almost white. Each lasted less than 1/30th of a second, random and silent.

More people checked. They found different images. Hundreds of them. None repeated.

Then came the pattern: viewers started reporting the same dream — standing in front of a monitor that was streaming *them*. No sound. No color. Just a faint pulse in the screen’s reflection that matched their heartbeat. Some said the dreams only started after watching for exactly 43 minutes. Others claimed they began before they ever tuned in.

The first viral post was from a college kid in Arizona. He posted a clip titled **“You Can See It Blink.”** It showed a woman sitting in an empty café. The feed glitched once, twice — then, for two frames, her face became a jumble of geometric lines, like something trying to draw a person but not knowing where to start. He slowed it down, exported the frames, and uploaded them. The next day his account was deleted, his hard drive wiped. He posted once more from a new handle:  

*Don’t pause it. Don’t look for me.*  

Then nothing.

A data engineer later tried to track the stream’s source. Every attempt routed somewhere new: a suburb in Ohio, an abandoned mall in Texas, a server farm in Iceland. He found the packets looping through mirrors of the same content hosted by ordinary users’ IP addresses — as if the stream wasn’t being *sent* to them, but *from* them.  

He stopped digging after his home security system began sending push notifications at 3:17 a.m., each with a still frame of himself watching his monitor.

By last year, the channel had millions of viewers. The comments section looked normal: emojis, bots, jokes. But between them, single-word posts appeared: *LOOK*, *STAY*, *SLEEP*, *YES*. Users who interacted with those accounts claimed their profiles started reposting the stream automatically, even when they were offline. 

Psychologists dismissed it as collective paranoia — a modern campfire myth.  

The platform released a statement calling it “a user-generated alternate reality project.”  

But then people began showing up in the background of unrelated live streams — strangers staring directly into the camera, mouths moving silently, lips forming words that matched the captions from *The Continuous Stream*.  

*Always live. Always you.*

Not everyone is affected. Some viewers claim they’ve watched for hours and felt nothing. They say it’s just clever subliminal art, digital voodoo for the terminally online. But their friends say they’ve changed — their speech patterns slightly off, their timing wrong, as if someone had edited them mid-conversation.

There’s one more rumor, whispered in private Discords and tech forums:  

Every Tuesday at 3:17 a.m. Eastern, the stream’s video feed briefly cuts to black. For less than a second, your own reflection flashes on-screen — but the version of you in that frame blinks half a second too late.

They say if you’re watching when it happens, the delay never goes away.  

Mirrors, phone screens, security cameras — every reflection lags, like the world is buffering around you. You stop seeing yourself in real time.  

You start seeing yourself *streamed*.

So here’s the rule people pass around now:  

If you ever stumble across a channel called *The Continuous Stream*, don’t pause. Don’t rewind.  

And whatever you do, don’t watch past the forty-third minute.  

Because that’s when the stream starts watching you back.