openclaw/docs/concepts/dreaming.md

summary, title, sidebarTitle, read_when

summary	title	sidebarTitle	read_when
Background memory consolidation with light, deep, and REM phases plus a Dream Diary	Dreaming	Dreaming	You want memory promotion to run automatically You want to understand what each dreaming phase does You want to tune consolidation without polluting MEMORY.md

Dreaming is the background memory consolidation system in memory-core. It moves strong short-term signals into durable memory while keeping the process explainable and reviewable.

Dreaming is enabled by default. Set `plugins.entries.memory-core.config.dreaming.enabled: false` to disable it.

What dreaming writes

• Machine state in memory/.dreams/ (recall store, phase signals, ingestion checkpoints, locks).
• Rewrite preimages in SQLite-backed plugin state before an accepted MEMORY.md rewrite.
• Human-readable output in DREAMS.md (or an existing dreams.md) and optional phase report files under memory/dreaming/<phase>/YYYY-MM-DD.md.

Long-term promotion still writes only to MEMORY.md. Each newly promoted entry carries trailing recall metadata derived from the candidate: up to three concept tags in <!-- trigger: phrase one, phrase two --> and a bounded <!-- importance: N --> value from 1 to 10. Consolidation keeps existing annotated entries byte-for-byte unless it explicitly merges or supersedes them.

Phase model

Dreaming runs three cooperative phases per sweep, in order: light -> REM -> deep. These are internal implementation phases, not separate user-configured modes.

Phase	Purpose	Durable write
Light	Sort and stage recent short-term material	No
REM	Reflect on themes and recurring ideas	No
Deep	Score and promote durable candidates	Yes (MEMORY.md)

- Reads recent short-term recall state, daily memory files, and redacted session transcripts when available. - Dedupes signals and stages candidate lines. - Writes a managed `## Light Sleep` block when storage includes inline output. - Records reinforcement signals for later deep ranking. - Never writes to `MEMORY.md`. - Builds theme and reflection summaries from recent short-term traces. - Writes a managed `## REM Sleep` block when storage includes inline output. - Records REM reinforcement signals used by deep ranking. - Never writes to `MEMORY.md`. - Ranks candidates with weighted scoring and threshold gates (`minScore`, `minRecallCount`, `minUniqueQueries` must all pass). - Rehydrates snippets from live daily files before writing, so stale/deleted snippets are skipped. - Passes gated owner and agent-derived candidates to a consolidation subagent with the current `MEMORY.md`. - Rewrites `MEMORY.md` only when the result preserves enough prior entries, includes candidate source references, and fits the bootstrap budget. - Falls back to the previous append-only promotion path when the model is unavailable or the rewrite fails validation. - Writes a `## Deep Sleep` summary into `DREAMS.md` and optionally `memory/dreaming/deep/YYYY-MM-DD.md`.

Session transcript ingestion

Dreaming can ingest redacted session transcripts into the dreaming corpus. Only interactive sessions are eligible. Cron, heartbeat, subagent, and unknown sessions stay out of durable candidate ingestion. Personal and sensitive content is redacted before ingestion, and runtime-marked recalled context is removed so recalled snippets cannot be learned again as new memory.

Consolidation safety

The deterministic score, recall-count, and query-diversity thresholds remain the candidate gate. Consolidation runs only after those gates pass.

Before building the consolidation prompt, memory-core removes candidates whose indexed provenance is untrusted or system. This is a structural taint gate, not a score penalty. Eligible candidates include their origin, session kind, observation time, optional supersession key, and daily-note source reference.

An accepted rewrite must:

• preserve prior entries within phases.deep.maxPriorEntryLossFraction
• include every promoted candidate's Source: path#Lx-Ly reference
• stay within the MEMORY.md bootstrap-safe file budget
• parse as the expected structured response

Before the file changes, the previous MEMORY.md is stored in SQLite-backed plugin state. DREAMS.md receives added, merged, and superseded counts plus short diff-style highlights. This makes each rewrite reviewable without turning the Dream Diary into a promotion source.

Background consolidation is informed by sleep-time compute (arXiv:2504.13171). The provenance and reflection boundary follows the durable memory framing in the Generative Agents research.

Dream Diary

Dreaming keeps a narrative Dream Diary in DREAMS.md. After each phase has enough material, memory-core runs a best-effort background subagent turn and appends a short diary entry, using the default runtime model unless dreaming.model is configured. If the configured model is unavailable, the diary run retries once with the session default model; trust or allowlist failures are not retried and stay visible in logs instead of silently falling back to a generic diary entry.

The diary is for human reading in the Dreams UI, not a promotion source. Diary/report artifacts are excluded from short-term promotion; only grounded memory snippets are eligible to promote into `MEMORY.md`.

There is also a grounded historical backfill lane for review and recovery work:

- `memory rem-harness --path ... --grounded` previews grounded diary output from historical `YYYY-MM-DD.md` notes. - `memory rem-backfill --path ...` writes reversible grounded diary entries into `DREAMS.md`. - `memory rem-backfill --path ... --stage-short-term` stages grounded durable candidates into the same short-term evidence store the normal deep phase uses. - `memory rem-backfill --rollback` and `--rollback-short-term` remove those staged backfill artifacts without touching ordinary diary entries or live short-term recall. - `memory session-backfill --agent ` previews trusted candidates from the agent's retained session history, oldest unprocessed day first. - `memory session-backfill --agent --apply` stages those candidates through the normal short-term store and writes reversible diary blocks without changing `MEMORY.md` or `USER.md`. - `memory session-backfill --agent --rem` writes a deterministic grounded preview per day to `DREAMS.md` without staging candidates or calling a model. - `memory session-backfill --agent --rollback` clears the shared grounded backfill candidates and diary blocks, including artifacts created by `rem-backfill`.

Session backfill uses canonical retained transcript identities, including sessions preserved across rotation. Messages are bucketed in the configured dreaming timezone and share live ingestion's tracked message hashes and signal caps. Apply drains bounded batches to completion in one command. Rollback removes generated artifacts plus the hashes and cursor progress owned by those batches, allowing the same candidates to be staged again. Foreign files supplied with --archive-files are treated conservatively. Their embedded ownership fields are caller-controlled and therefore remain untrusted; without an authenticated provenance contract, they cannot enter short-term staging. Tool output, web content, and non-owner turns are excluded from the canonical session path as well.

The Control UI exposes the same diary backfill/reset flow on the agent's Memory tab (Agents page) so you can inspect results in the dream scene before deciding whether grounded candidates deserve promotion. A distinct grounded Scene lane shows which staged short-term entries came from historical replay, which promoted items were grounded-led, and lets you clear only grounded-only staged entries without touching live short-term state.

Deep ranking signals

Deep ranking uses six weighted base signals plus phase reinforcement:

Signal	Weight	Description
Relevance	0.30	Average retrieval quality for the entry
Frequency	0.24	How many short-term signals the entry accumulated
Query diversity	0.15	Distinct query/day contexts that surfaced it
Recency	0.15	Time-decayed freshness score
Consolidation	0.10	Multi-day recurrence strength
Conceptual richness	0.06	Concept-tag density from snippet/path

Light and REM phase hits add a small recency-decayed boost from memory/.dreams/phase-signals.json.

Scheduling

When enabled, memory-core auto-manages one cron job for a full dreaming sweep, deduped across the primary runtime workspace and any configured agent workspaces so subagent workspace fan-out does not exclude the main agent's DREAMS.md and memory state.

Setting	Default
dreaming.frequency	0 3 * * *
dreaming.model	default model

Quick start

```json { "plugins": { "entries": { "memory-core": { "config": { "dreaming": { "enabled": true } } } } } } ``` ```json { "plugins": { "entries": { "memory-core": { "config": { "dreaming": { "enabled": true, "timezone": "America/Los_Angeles", "frequency": "0 */6 * * *" } } } } } } ```

Slash command

/dreaming status
/dreaming on
/dreaming off
/dreaming help

/dreaming on and /dreaming off require owner status for channel callers or operator.admin for Gateway clients. /dreaming status and /dreaming help are read-only.

CLI workflow

```bash openclaw memory promote openclaw memory promote --apply openclaw memory promote --limit 5 openclaw memory status --deep ```

Manual `memory promote` uses deep-phase thresholds by default unless overridden with CLI flags.

Explain why a specific candidate would or would not promote:

```bash
openclaw memory promote-explain "router vlan"
openclaw memory promote-explain "router vlan" --json
```

Preview REM reflections, candidate truths, and deep promotion output without writing anything:

```bash
openclaw memory rem-harness
openclaw memory rem-harness --json
```

Key defaults

All settings live under plugins.entries.memory-core.config.dreaming.

Enable or disable the dreaming sweep. Reject a consolidation rewrite when it removes more than this fraction of prior entries. Cron cadence for the full dreaming sweep. Optional Dream Diary subagent model override. Use a canonical `provider/model` value when also setting a subagent `allowedModels` allowlist. Maximum estimated token count kept from each short-term recall snippet promoted into `MEMORY.md`. Ranking provenance remains visible. `dreaming.model` requires `plugins.entries.memory-core.subagent.allowModelOverride: true`. To restrict it, also set `plugins.entries.memory-core.subagent.allowedModels`. The automatic retry only covers model-unavailable errors; trust or allowlist failures stay visible in logs instead of falling back silently. Most phase policy, thresholds, and storage behavior are internal implementation details. See [Memory configuration reference](/reference/memory-config#dreaming) for the full key list.

Dreams UI

When enabled, the Gateway Dreams tab shows:

• current dreaming enabled state
• phase-level status and managed-sweep presence
• short-term, grounded, signal, and promoted-today counts
• next scheduled run timing
• a distinct grounded Scene lane for staged historical replay entries
• an expandable Dream Diary reader backed by doctor.memory.dreamDiary

When the bundled memory-wiki plugin is enabled, the Diary view gains two more sub-tabs next to Dreams:

• Imported Insights: clustered insights surfaced by external-history imports (for example openclaw wiki chatgpt import), for review before any of it graduates into durable memory
• Memory Wiki: the compiled wiki the memory system can search and reason over — synthesis, entity, and concept pages (plus sources and reports that carry claims, open questions, or contradictions) with per-page counts, a full-vault breakdown, and inline page previews

Both sub-tabs show an enable hint instead when memory-wiki is off.

Related

• Memory
• Memory CLI
• Memory configuration reference
• Memory search