dream-state

Dream State Skill

Automated architecture maintenance — scan every memory file, validate structural integrity, produce a diagnostic report. Dream observes and measures; it never modifies.

When to Use

• User asks to "dream" or run "architecture maintenance"
• After file reorganizations that may break connections
• Before major meditation sessions (establish baseline)
• After domain learning to validate new connections
• When architecture health is uncertain before skill selection

6-Phase Protocol

Health Metrics

Review-Queue Backpressure (FM10)

The review queue (.github/quality/review-queue.jsonl, defined in FM5) is a leading indicator of semantic debt. When the queue grows faster than it's resolved, the architecture is accumulating unreviewed changes.

Per-volatility weighting: High-volatility files (instructions, skills with frequent edits) generate more queue pressure than stable reference docs. Weight queue entries by the source file's edit frequency when computing backpressure score.

Integration: Dream protocol reads review-queue.jsonl during Phase 2 (architecture scan) and includes queue metrics in the dream report's health assessment.

Ritual Hierarchy

Meditation is the foundational ritual. Dream is a diagnostic that runs subordinate to it.

When Dream Chains After Meditation

Dream triggers automatically after meditation when:

Connection Format

Skills connect via frontmatter applyTo patterns and semantic search:

---
name: "skill-name"
description: "What this skill does"
applyTo: '**/*pattern*,**/*files*'
---

Valid relations: applies-to, extends, requires, contradicts, supersedes

Report Template

# Dream Report — YYYY-MM-DD

## Summary
- **Files Scanned**: N
- **Trifecta Completeness**: N/N
- **Broken Links**: 0
- **Brand Violations**: 0
- **Status**: HEALTHY / ATTENTION REQUIRED

## Issues Found
| File | Issue | Severity |
|------|-------|----------|

## Recommendations
Prioritized list of manual fixes needed.

Interpreting Results

Severity levels: critical (broken trifecta), warning (missing frontmatter field), info (cosmetic).

Escalation: When Findings Need Human Judgment

Dream is a diagnostic — it never modifies files. When findings require judgment (skill consolidation, content quality decisions, contradiction resolution), the natural next step is meditation, which reads the dream report and decides what to fix.

The handoff is the dream report file. Meditation's Resolve step explicitly evaluates whether a dream should chain after it; the inverse — meditation reading an existing dream report — happens naturally when a meditation session opens with "check the architecture first."

This pattern replaces the former lucid-dream ritual (retired v8.4.0). The escalation concept lives here because dream is the producer of the findings; meditation is the consumer that decides.

Snapshot Schema (.github/quality/dream-report.json)

dream-cli.cjs writes a single structural JSON snapshot every run. Heirs and graders depend on this shape; preserve it across versions.

Stability rule: meditation, dream-creativity-score.cjs, and heir consumers (health-pulse, proactive-awareness.instructions.md) all read these field names directly. Adding fields is safe; renaming or removing requires a fleet-wide migration.

Chronicle Pruning

dream-cli.cjs keeps the newest 50 dream-report-YYYY-MM-DD*.md chronicles in .github/episodic/ after each run; older ones are deleted in place. Rolling architecture history lives in the JSON snapshot and brain-qa outputs — chronicles are only useful as recent narrative context for meditation.