Dream Consolidation Cycle
Run a slower, deeper reflection pass every few hours to distill themes, release affective residue, and clear working memory — filling the gap between per-tick reflection and weekly insight extraction.
Intent & Description
🎯 Intent
Without a mid-frequency consolidation pass, hours of accumulated thoughts, mood spikes, and half-finished threads sit in a gap that per-tick reflection can’t touch and weekly extraction is too slow to reach.
📋 Context
The agent already has two cadences: a quick per-tick reflection pass and a slow weekly insight extraction. Between them there’s a gap of several hours where thoughts, mood, and partly-finished threads accumulate without any consolidation step.
💡 Solution
On a slow timer (every few hours, or when an affect scalar crosses a threshold), pause normal ticking. Load the last few hours of thoughts and affect history. Run a stronger model with a dream-pass prompt that: distills themes into journal entries, applies decay to all affect scalars, optionally clears workspace focus, and appends a dream summary to a dedicated dream-journal surface. The dream pass produces proposals only — a follow-up reflection pass ratifies them. Charter/rules/insights are never edited here.
Real-world Use Case
- The agent runs continuously enough to accumulate hours of thoughts that need consolidation.
- Affective residue or working-memory clutter measurably degrades reasoning quality over time.
- A separate dream-journal write surface exists, distinct from charter/rules/insights.
Source
Advantages
- Affective residue gets a release path without waiting for the weekly cycle
- Themes consolidate at a granularity between per-tick and per-week cadences
- Working memory resets without touching the long-term store
Disadvantages
- Stronger-model passes are expensive — cadence needs explicit budgeting and tuning
- Dream summary quality depends heavily on the prompt — a bad prompt produces journaling, not consolidation
- If proposals are never ratified by a follow-up pass, the dream pass becomes journaling without learning