Dreaming

David M. Berry

Votive relief of Archinos showing dream incubation, sanctuary of Amphiaraos at Oropos, c. 400–350 BC (National Archaeological Museum, Athens, 3369)

. . .

"The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own" (Heraclitus, DK B89).

. . .

"Agents capture much of their work in logs or transcripts. Researchers at Letta and UC Berkeley proposed sleep-time compute as a way for models to use idle time between interactions to reorganize their existing context. The same idea can help agents organize their memory by reflecting on logs to fix mistakes or produce new notes and representations. This process is often called dreaming" (Anthropic 2026).

. . .

"But other men know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep" (Heraclitus, DK B1).

. . .

"By 'agent memory,' we mean knowledge that Claude gains from experience—including interactions with users and tasks it's been assigned—and that it retains between sessions, saved as context it can read later" (Anthropic 2026).

. . .

"In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality" (Plato, Phaedrus 275a-b).

. . .

"Memory is, occasionally, a prediction. By writing down a rule, an agent predicts that the pattern it's describing will be relevant again. For instance, writing down a verified fact is a prediction that an agent in a future session will want to rely on that fact without double-checking it" (Anthropic 2026).

. . .

"The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge [gage], a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives" (Derrida 1996: 18).

. . .

"We ran dreaming on the memory folder that contained the wrong location for the PokéCenter: Claude checked the note against the session transcript, caught its error, and rewrote it. The transcript gave Claude a ground truth to validate its memory against" (Anthropic 2026).

. . .

"If I distrust my memory—neurotics, as we know, do so to a remarkable extent, but normal people have every reason for doing so as well—I am able to supplement and guarantee its working by making a note in writing. In that case the surface upon which this note is preserved, the pocket-book or sheet of paper, is as it were a materialized portion of my mnemic apparatus, which I otherwise carry about with me invisible. I have only to bear in mind the place where this 'memory' has been deposited and I can then 'reproduce' it at any time I like, with the certainty that it will have remained unaltered and so have escaped the possible distortions to which it might have been subjected in my actual memory" (Freud 1961: 227).

. . .

"On another [...] task, the wiki grew larger than the documents themselves... Like the mapmakers in Borges's one-paragraph short story 'On Exactitude in Science,' who drafted a map so detailed it was as large as the empire it represented, Claude had made an extremely detailed wiki that effectively abstracted nothing" (Anthropic 2026).

. . .

"The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography" (Borges 1998).

. . .

"Dreaming can also float notes to the top of the memory hierarchy, and the agent harness can preemptively load them into Claude's context at the start of every session... This means Claude doesn't need to search for them, or even to know there's something to search for" (Anthropic 2026).

. . .

"Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging" (Benjamin 1999: 576).

. . .

"Promoting memories into a new session (a form of context injection) must be done carefully. Injected memories use up valuable tokens, and an incorrect note can be carried into every session" (Anthropic 2026).

. . .

"The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" (Marx 1852).

. . .

"Even though Claude's judgment about salience has improved, no model can really know what will happen in future turns. Dreaming gives Claude an opportunity to look backward and use compute to organize its memory, correct mistakes, and maintain representations that allow future sessions to access memory more readily" (Anthropic 2026).

. . .

"The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions" (Marx 1843).

. . .

"In the early rounds of dreaming, Claude's knowledge is like that of a new employee, and its ability to answer questions based on the wiki alone is limited. The more it dreams, the richer its knowledge map grows, like that of a seasoned employee" (Anthropic 2026).

. . .

"Those who are asleep are fellow-workers (in what goes on in the world)" (Heraclitus, DK B75).

. . .

Bibliography

Anthropic (2026) ‘The components of agent memory’, Anthropic, Available at: https://www.anthropic.com/research/components-of-agent-memory.

Benjamin, W. (1999) ‘Excavation and Memory’, in M. W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (eds) Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2: 1931–1934. Translated by R. Livingstone. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p. 576.

Borges, J. L. (1998) ‘On Exactitude in Science’, in Collected Fictions. Translated by A. Hurley. Viking.

Derrida, J. (1996) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by E. Prenowitz. University of Chicago Press.

Freud, S. (1961) ‘A Note upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923–1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works. Translated by J. Strachey. The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, pp. 227–232.

Heraclitus (1920) Fragments, in J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy. 3rd edn. A. & C. Black.

Marx, K. (1843) Letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm

Marx, K. (1852) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

Plato (1997) Phaedrus, in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J.M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson. Hackett Publishing Company.