Dream Agent
The Dream agent is Cortexa's generative cognition layer. Where reflection looks for patterns within what you already believe, the Dream agent does something different: during quiet periods it deliberately recombines distant, unrelated thoughts into speculative new insights — the kind of unexpected connection you'd stumble onto in the shower, not at your desk.
Dreams are low-confidence by design and tagged dream. They're proposals, not facts. You stay in control: every dream surfaces on a dedicated page where you accept or dismiss it.
Off by default
Like every Cortexa feature, the Dream agent is opt-in. Enable it in Settings → Cognition → Dream agent.
What it does
- During idle periods (configurable interval), the agent samples thoughts from across your vault — favoring pairs that are semantically distant rather than near-duplicates.
- It asks the LLM to find a non-obvious connection, tension, or synthesis between them.
- The result is stored as a speculative item tagged
dream, with low starting confidence and links back to the source thoughts. - It appears in the Dreams page as a suggestion you can accept (keep the link/insight) or dismiss (discard it).
The agent only operates on substantive inputs — trivial or empty thoughts are skipped — and has an empty-output guard so a model that returns nothing never produces a junk dream.
The Dreams page
A dedicated Dreams tab shows each speculative insight as a card with:
- the generated insight text,
- links to the two (or more) source thoughts it combined,
- Accept / Dismiss controls.
The Dreams tab hides itself when the agent is disabled, so it never adds clutter if you're not using it. You can also trigger a one-off pass with the Dream now button instead of waiting for the scheduled interval.
Settings
Settings → Cognition → Dream agent:
| Setting | What it controls | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Enable Dream agent | Master toggle | Off |
| Interval (minutes) | How often a dream pass runs during quiet periods | — |
| Dreams per session | How many speculative insights to generate per pass | — |
Because dreams are low-confidence and decay like any other thought, the ones you don't accept naturally fade from search ranking over time (see confidence & decay).
When to use it
- Research and ideation — surface cross-domain connections you wouldn't search for.
- Long-lived vaults — the more thoughts you've captured, the richer the recombination space.
- Breaking out of a rut — when reflection keeps confirming what you already think, dreams push in the opposite direction.
If you want grounded pattern detection instead, use background reflection. The two are complementary: reflection consolidates, the Dream agent diverges.