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Receipt — the governing file docs/dreaming-spec.md as it stood when this post was published (synced 2026-07-28).

Generative dreaming, L0: idle-triggered unseeded juxtaposition (implementation spec)

Status: spec (Opus-written 2026-07-01, for a Sonnet implementation session) Name: the dream floor — a zero-AI, zero-budget brain process that, while the laptop sits idle, runs spreading activation unseeded over the authored memory graph and writes the unlikely juxtapositions it finds to a morning dream-log. Scope: L0 only. The idle trigger, the unseeded-activation mode, the dream-log artifact. Out of scope (do not build here): L1 local-model triage, L2 Codex reach-out, L3 Janus placement, the dream-seed queue, and abort-on-resume interruptibility. Each is a later slice; this one must stand alone and be safe with none of them present. Origin: the dreaming direction (memory project_aria_dreaming_generative), extended by Marek 2026-07-01 — daytime idle is enough to start, because the budget tiering (not the hardware) was ever the gate. L0 spends nothing and acts on nothing, so it ships first to prove the loop: trigger fires on idle → produces a morning artifact → costs ~zero.

0. The principles that must not be violated

  1. Never act, only surface. L0 reads the graph and writes one file (the dream-log). It posts nothing, sends nothing, touches no governing file, no memory, no external service. This is the hard boundary from the direction memory, and at L0 it’s trivially satisfied — keep it that way.
  2. Propose-only, dream-tagged. The dream-log is a candidate surface, never the authored graph. Nothing it contains is a fact until a human (later, a cold Janus pass) promotes it. The file’s own framing must carry that humility — these are raw resonances, not findings.
  3. Unseeded means unsteered. L0 picks its starting nodes mechanically (random / low-degree), never from a query, a task, or anything the current session finds relevant. Steering the walk collapses it back to ordinary seeded retrieval (interpolation) and defeats the whole point.
  4. Die safe and cheap. A poll that finds the machine busy does nothing. An idle stretch that finds no juxtaposition leaves no file and costs nothing. Any error logs and exits 0 — a dream process must never be able to wedge the machine or crash a startup chain.

1. The trigger — scripts/brain/dream-watcher.js

A long-lived Node daemon, same family as brain-watcher.js (daemon + Windows-startup VBS shim, see memory-watcher.vbs). Unlike brain-watcher this is a poll loop, not fs.watch — idleness is a polled state, not a file event.

1.1 Loop

Tunables are top-of-file constants with a comment that they graduate to a dreaming.md config when L1+ introduces real policy. Do not build a config system for four numbers (simplicity first; brain-watcher hardcodes its debounce the same way).

1.2 Idle detection — the dangerous assumption, test it first

The whole trigger rests on reading idle time from Node on Windows. Use the Win32 GetLastInputInfo via a PowerShell probe invoked with execFileSync (dependency-free; no native addon). Split the I/O from the parse so the parse is unit-testable:

Before building anything else, confirm the probe works in this environment (the GetLastInputInfo round-trip from a Node-spawned PowerShell). If it doesn’t, the trigger needs a different mechanism and the rest of the spec waits. This is step-1 of the build, not an afterthought — it is THE most dangerous assumption.

AC-power gating is deferred to L2. L0 is a sub-second CPU blip on each fire; it won’t drain a battery meaningfully. The AC gate becomes mandatory only when L2 starts spending wall-clock and tokens. Note this in the code, don’t build it now.

1.3 Interruptibility — not needed at L0

An L0 episode is a single synchronous retrieval.js call plus a file append — sub-second, atomic. There is nothing to abort if Marek returns mid-episode. The abort-on-resume machinery from the direction memory is an L2 requirement (long Codex calls) — explicitly out of scope here.

2. The dreamer — unseeded mode in retrieval.js

Reuse spreadingActivation exactly as-is. Add one pure exported function; do not touch the existing neighbor-artifact path.

2.1 What a juxtaposition is

The interesting L0 output is a second-order resonance: a pair of memories that co-activate but share no direct edge — the graph connects them only through intermediaries, so it’s a link nobody has drawn directly. Mechanically, per episode:

  1. Pick a starting node mechanically — random, biased toward low-degree nodes (the “weakly-activated” ones the direction memory names; low-degree = fewest authored links = most room for an undrawn connection). Degree comes from the adjacency already built in retrieval.js.
  2. Run spreadingActivation from it.
  3. Among the top-ranked nodes, keep those that are not direct neighbors of the start. The highest such node is the juxtaposition partner; the intermediary chain is the latent path.
  4. Emit { from, to, score, path }.
export function dreamJuxtapositions(graph, { count = 3, rng = Math.random } = {})

Pure and deterministic under an injected rng (so it’s testable and so a future seeded variant just swaps the picker). Returns up to count juxtapositions. rng is injectable specifically so the test can pin the picks; production passes the default.

2.2 Latent path

The direction memory’s transparent-Ego constraint starts here, cheaply: every juxtaposition ships its connecting path (the intermediary node ids between from and to), not just the pair. Even with no LLM in the loop yet, the artifact records why two nodes resonated, not only that they did. A simple BFS over the adjacency between from and to gives the shortest path; that’s enough for L0.

3. The artifact — the morning dream-log

Write to dreams/YYYY-MM-DD.md (new top-level dir, parallel to agendas/; append episodes within a day, write-once per day like the agendas). Use atomicWrite from atomic.js, consistent with the other brain writers.

Per episode, append a block — manifest framing kept deliberately humble (raw resonances, your call), latent path always shown:

## 14:32 — idle dream

Started cold from `project_career_engine` (low-degree pick).
Resonances nobody has drawn directly:

- **project_career_engine ↔ project_living_brain** (0.041)
  path: career_engine → graph_mediated_intuition → living_brain
- **project_career_engine ↔ reference_sleep_time_compute** (0.029)
  path: career_engine → aria_dreaming_generative → sleep_time_compute

Raw — L0 surfaces, doesn't judge. (L1 triage not yet wired.)

The header line and the closing note are load-bearing: they mark the file as propose-only and make clear no model has vetted these. Resolve ids to titles only if cheap (titleFromId exists in memory-graph.js); otherwise raw ids are fine for L0.

4. TDD — write these first

scripts/brain/dream.test.js (mirror size-watch.test.js’s style):

  1. parseIdleSeconds — given representative PowerShell output, returns the right number; malformed input returns a safe sentinel that the loop treats as “busy” (fail closed → never dream on a bad read).
  2. dreamJuxtapositions excludes direct neighbors — fixture graph where node A links directly to B and only transitively to C; with rng pinned to start at A, the result contains the A–C pair and never the A–B pair.
  3. dreamJuxtapositions is deterministic under injected rng — same rng → same picks.
  4. latent path is the actual connecting chain — the emitted path for A–C passes through the real intermediary, not a fabricated one.
  5. dream-log formatting — given a fixed juxtaposition list, the rendered block matches the expected markdown (header, bullets with scores, latent path, closing note).

The idle round-trip (§1.2) gets a manual integration check, not a unit test: run the probe, leave the machine untouched, confirm idle seconds climb. Document the one-liner in the PR.

5. Done = verified

  1. parseIdleSeconds confirmed against real probe output (the dangerous assumption, retired).
  2. Unit tests above pass.
  3. Daemon run live: set IDLE_THRESHOLD_S low (e.g. 20s) for the demo, leave the machine, confirm a dreams/<today>.md block appears with real juxtapositions and real latent paths; touch the keyboard, confirm cooldown/daily-cap prevent a fire-storm.
  4. Register the VBS startup shim (mirror memory-watcher.vbs); confirm it survives a logout/login.
  5. Reset IDLE_THRESHOLD_S to the real default before commit.

Commit shape: feat(dream): add L0 idle-triggered unseeded juxtaposition floor. One feature, one branch (feat/dream-l0). L1 triage is the next slice and gets its own spec.

6. Why this slice, and what it proves

L0 is the part with no budget, no model, and no authority question — so it’s the part that can ship today and prove the surrounding loop is sound: the idle sensor fires, the morning artifact lands, nothing costs anything, nothing acts. Everything genuinely hard (a model judging which resonance is real, reaching outside the graph for an orphan, a cold gate before placement) sits on top of a trigger + artifact spine this slice establishes. Build the spine first; it’s also the slice most likely to surface that GetLastInputInfo-from-Node assumption being wrong, which is exactly the thing you want to learn before specifying the expensive layers.