Dream — sleep, self-lore, consolidation

What it does#

Three things that belong together because they are all about Bea knowing herself:

• self-lore — what she has learned about herself, always in her prompt
• hot facts — a few "right now" things that decay on their own
• the dreamer — the offline pass that turns raw sessions into durable memory

src/core/skills/dream/
├── surface.py   DreamSkill — context, the morning pass, the nightly job
└── dreamer.py   Dreamer — the consolidation itself

Self-lore is separate from her soul (data/prompts/soul.md), which never moves. The soul is who she is; self-lore is what she has picked up since.

Always in context#

[RIGHT NOW] belongs to the clock alone (ClockSkill): the day, the time and the configured zone. Hot facts used to reuse the same header, so every briefing carried two of them.

Hot facts have a TTL and prune themselves: an expired row is simply not selected, so there is no sweeper job.

The morning pass#

Runs once at startup, after clear_source("morning_pass") so it never accumulates. It derives volatile facts she would otherwise have no way to know:

• how many days until her birthday (from the structured self_profile)
• how long it has been since the last session
• a line or two from yesterday

The nightly dream#

while self.active:
    await asyncio.sleep(300)
    if now.hour != hour or last_dreamed_on == now.date():
        continue
    await self.run_dream()

The hour is checked rather than a timer being set, so restarting the process neither skips a night nor doubles one.

Two dates are kept in settings. dream.last_night is the nightly guard and is only written by the nightly job, so a nap after midnight does not stand in for the night. dream.last_dream is written by every successful pass, nightly or not; the dashboard shows the later of the two.

For every un-dreamed session the dreamer asks the background model to extract a title, self-facts, per-person facts and hot facts, then writes them into the live stores. Processed sessions are marked (sessions.dreamed), so re-dreaming is a no-op.

A reply that carries none of the expected keys — an error, an empty object, or some other JSON the parser found in the reply — is not a consolidation. The session stays un-dreamed and the next pass tries it again; after MAX_DREAM_ATTEMPTS (3) unusable replies (sessions.dream_attempts) it is marked done and logged as an error, so a session that always fails does not cost a call every night.

Self-facts are what is now true about her own life — something that happened to her, a decision, something she learned about her own world — and never her character, which is the soul's. The pass is shown the self-facts she already has (the newest MAX_KNOWN_SELF_FACTS) above the transcript, so a night does not write the same thing again in new words.

People are resolved against the stream, which records which account said each line. A name that exactly one account spoke under in that session resolves to that account's card (card_for_identity): the card the live prompt reads. A name nobody spoke under — someone talked about — goes through the name path (record_person), which only mints a card at the usual thresholds.

The diary is a phase of the pass. Every session the dreamer read with something said in it gets its page from the memory skill, awaited before she wakes (MemorySkill.write_pages). Pages that already exist are skipped.

It runs on the background pool, never the mind's: a dream pass is dozens of calls in a row and must not take the mind's model — or its rate limit — hostage.

Waiting for the nightly dreamer would leave a regular a stranger all evening, which is why the profiler also builds person cards during the day, on a message count. Per-conversation continuity needs no such pass: the dreamer keeps one recap per conversation key, and the morning reads those back.

Sleeping#

While asleep the consciousness loop still drains the bus and frees any waiting HTTP caller — it just does not think about any of it.

The dashboard's Activity page can trigger the same pass (POST /dream/run) and wake her (POST /dream/wake).

Configuration#

"dream": {
  "enabled": true,
  "hour": 4
}

The dreamer needs the social skill, a background model and the history manager. If any is missing it logs a warning and stays unwired rather than failing at startup.