openclaw/docs/concepts/memory-dreaming.md

title	summary	read_when
Dreaming (experimental)	Background promotion from short-term recall into long-term memory	You want memory promotion to run automatically You want to understand dreaming modes and thresholds You want to tune consolidation without polluting MEMORY.md

Dreaming (experimental)

Dreaming is the background memory consolidation pass in memory-core.

It is called "dreaming" because the system revisits what came up during the day and decides what is worth keeping as durable context.

Dreaming is experimental, opt-in, and off by default.

What dreaming does

1. Tracks short-term recall events from memory_search hits in memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md.
2. Scores those recall candidates with weighted signals.
3. Promotes only qualified candidates into MEMORY.md.

This keeps long-term memory focused on durable, repeated context instead of one-off details.

Promotion signals

Dreaming combines four signals:

• Frequency: how often the same candidate was recalled.
• Relevance: how strong recall scores were when it was retrieved.
• Query diversity: how many distinct query intents surfaced it.
• Recency: temporal weighting over recent recalls.

Promotion requires all configured threshold gates to pass, not just one signal.

Modes

dreaming.mode controls cadence and default thresholds:

• off: dreaming disabled.
• core: nightly cadence with balanced thresholds.
• rem: more frequent cadence for active consolidation.
• deep: stricter promotion gating with slower cadence.

Default presets:

• core: 0 3 * * *, minScore=0.75, minRecallCount=3, minUniqueQueries=2
• rem: 0 */6 * * *, minScore=0.85, minRecallCount=4, minUniqueQueries=3
• deep: 0 */12 * * *, minScore=0.8, minRecallCount=3, minUniqueQueries=3

Scheduling model

When dreaming is enabled, memory-core manages the recurring schedule automatically. You do not need to manually create a cron job for this feature.

You can still tune behavior with explicit overrides such as:

• dreaming.frequency (cron expression)
• dreaming.timezone
• dreaming.limit
• dreaming.minScore
• dreaming.minRecallCount
• dreaming.minUniqueQueries

Configure

{
  "plugins": {
    "entries": {
      "memory-core": {
        "config": {
          "dreaming": {
            "mode": "core"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Operational notes

• Use /dreaming off|core|rem|deep to switch modes from chat.
• Use openclaw memory promote to preview candidates and openclaw memory promote --apply for manual promotion.
• Use openclaw memory status --deep to inspect current memory and dreaming status.

Further reading

• Memory
• Memory Search
• memory CLI
• Memory configuration reference