What a view | HBO Asia’s Dream Raider: The Matrix meets Inception in Taiwan

Available on HBO Go and HBO (new episodes on Sundays at 9pm), Dream Raider borrows from Total Recall, The Matrix and Inception to consider the possibilities of barging in on the slumbers of the unsuspecting, reading their brainwaves and ultimately manipulating their dreams.

And given that the aims of such intrusions will probably never comprise more than mass mind control, brainwashing or commercial avarice, the perpetrators, especially in works of fiction, are always going to be villains.

Here, an awkward bunch of scientists, criminals and police officers join unlikely forces to thwart a scarred, vengeful, mind-mining orchestrator intent on hacking into the oddly steampunk-inspired dream-raiding machine to control the dreamscapes of innocent victims across Taiwan, driving them to suicide, violence or insanity. And who can resist a siren call to doom when it emanates from a sword-slinging femme fatale squeezed into a red PVC suit?

But as machine inventor Tianli Cheng (Jason Wang), detective Li Xiao (Weber Yang) and noetic science researcher Dr Anya Cheng (Ellen Wu) realise, human consciousness, prone to fragmented delusions, cannot always be relied upon and a spot of reverse neural engineering is sometimes necessary to avert a psychological short circuit.

When you’re up against a dodgy corporation, a mysterious Super Mind and the beckoning Abyss of Consciousness, who you gonna call? The Dream Raider Special Task Force, obviously.

In Connected on Netflix, Latif Nasser presents science at its most accessible