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Periodically, Kairos pauses ordinary work and consolidates memory — a structured offline pass we call a dream. It is structurally analogous to sleep-dependent memory consolidation: sample related observations, find non-obvious connections, distill durable lessons, stage the result for the agent’s next wake-time review.
Dreams do not mutate long-term memory directly. They produce candidates that the agent accepts or rejects on the next wake. You always have an opportunity to review before consolidations become durable.

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When dreams fire

Dreams are triggered by a pressure score that combines several operational signals (work elapsed since last dream, unresolved retries, observation novelty, log volume, a few more). When pressure crosses a threshold, the next turn is a dream. A safety floor guarantees a dream every N turns even when pressure is low; an anti-thrash floor prevents back-to-back dreams. Thresholds are tuned ongoing.

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backant dream stats

Summary of recent dreams:
For each recent dream:
  • When it happened
  • How many candidate consolidations were produced
  • How many edge proposals were made
  • How many were accepted vs. rejected during the next wake-time review
Use this to verify the consolidation pipeline is actually doing work. A long stretch with no dreams plus lots of unresolved retries is a sign that pressure signals aren’t firing correctly.

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backant dream replay

Walk through a past dream as an annotated timeline:
Each event in the dream is logged with its inputs and outputs:
  • Sample: which entries were drawn for this dream
  • Coactivate: which pairs the model identified as related
  • Reflect: how the model rewrote / clustered the related entries
  • Bucket-write: which staged candidates were produced
  • Edge-propose: which links between entries were proposed
Useful for debugging odd consolidations, or for understanding why a particular edge was proposed.

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The five stages (briefly)

The pipeline is deliberately advisory. Anything that lands in durable memory has been through the agent’s verdict at wake time.

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Reviewing dream output

You don’t normally need to review dream output by hand — Kairos does that automatically on the next wake via the wake_edge_triage and dream-bucket verdict tools. But if you want to:
If a recent dream produced consolidations you disagree with, the next wake-time review will reject them based on the agent’s read of the codebase. The pipeline is self-correcting in that sense.

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Why offline?

Mutating memory on every write would couple every observation to a reasoning pass — expensive and noisy. Batching consolidation into structured offline passes:
  • Keeps live work fast (no consolidation cost paid on the critical path)
  • Lets the consolidation use a stronger reasoning model than live work
  • Mirrors how biological consolidation actually works during sleep
The architecture page goes a little deeper on the design intent.