Dreams — unscheduled experiments

Deliberately not on the roadmap. Nothing here is sequenced, estimated, or blocking. This file exists so a good idea is not lost between the day it arrives and the day there is room for it, and so that whoever picks it up inherits the reasoning rather than the summary.

Two entries so far, and they turned out to be one system.

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The RISE Familiar (Mateo, 2026-08-11)

A small being that lives beside the work.

Naming is settled: Familiar, not Citizen. A familiar belongs in a world of rooms, rituals, texts and states — it sits in the same vocabulary as Chamber, Scriptorium, Solarium and Curia in a way "Citizen" does not. Citizen is kept for the larger idea below, where it means something precise: an inhabitant of Civitas rather than a companion to the reader.

What it is not

• Not an avatar of the reader.
• Not a pet the reader owns.
• Not an assistant. No chat bubble, no How can I help?, no productivity mascot, no manufactured emotional dependency.

It is something that lives inside RISE and occasionally notices you passing through. You encounter it doing its own thing.

The behavioural grammar

State machine, with authored variation on top. No agent architecture.

SYSTEM STATE                      CITIZEN STATE
  room                              wandering   studying   sleeping
  local time            ─────►      waiting     observing  travelling
  recent reading                    reading     carrying   resting
  current reading                          │
  session activity                         ▼
  recurrence                        animation + line
  recommendation candidates

It reads only RISE-native facts: which room, what hour, what has been read lately, which domains, whether a reading is running or paused, broad recurrence. It never reads the text.

The charm is specificity, not intelligence. Instead of rendering Recently read: Philosophy 47%, you find a small figure at a desk with three books on it. You open RISE at 4am and it is asleep in a chair. You start a Journey and it gets up and leaves through a door. You have not entered the Chamber for days and it is sweeping the Portal.

The writing rule, which is the whole risk

Silence is the normal state. Dry, sparse, and rare. A familiar that talks constantly is Clippy inside fifteen minutes.

The register, when it does speak:

"You brought War and Peace in here?" "You do know we have novels." "The Chapel has noticed." "I finished my shift an hour ago." "Again?" — 4:30am, leaning on a railing, visibly tired.

And there is an existing ruling it must not cross. The Solarium review already said: stop giving every human condition a RISE-authored motivational response. A familiar that comments on the reader is precisely where that would come back. It may notice what was read. It may not diagnose who is reading. "You read Augustine, Marcus Aurelius and Ecclesiastes recently" is a fact. "I understand you have been experiencing existential uncertainty" is a trespass, and would end the feature on contact.

Its lines are content, not runtime composition. Per the three-layer law (JOURNEYS-SPEC §5) the Chamber receives a label and an identity, never a meaning. A content domain authors what the Familiar can say; the runtime picks an occasion; the cortex renders it. The Chamber must never compose a quip.

Recommendation becomes diegetic

This is where it stops being a gag.

Rather than Recommended because you like Stoicism, you encounter the Familiar holding something:

"This seemed adjacent." — Plotinus, with a small Open.

"You keep circling the same century."

The mechanism needs no model:

recent works → tags / period / author / domain / motifs
            → weighted similarity
            → exclude recently read
            → diversity adjustment
            → candidate → encounter

The data for this already exists. All 88 library works carry words, author, and a divisions block through INGESTED_META and division-index.json; the curator catalogue already surfaces exactly this shape for the Scriptorium. A similarity function over it is a weekend, not a project, and it is honest about what it knows because it only knows titles.

Persistence — small, and dangerous in a known way

Location, activity, last seen, current book, recent encounter ids. No stats, no levels, no currency. Nothing that turns RISE into gamified sludge. Only continuity: leave it in the Solarium looking at the sky, return tomorrow, and it is somewhere else.

"You missed something strange last night."

The illusion of life comes from continuity plus incompleteness. You do not see everything it does — and not seeing is the mechanism, not a limitation.

Two known traps, both already paid for once:

1. This is the Matthew-27 bug class. Any Familiar state that persists must be in the lifecycle round-trip suite (Phase 0.3) on the day it is written, or it will silently fail to survive a restore and the Familiar will reset its life every launch with nothing reporting it.
2. It is the first feature that genuinely wants the virtual clock. "Resolve elapsed time into the next plausible state" is exactly the simulation kernel deferred as too expensive for its return. The Familiar might be the return. Worth re-costing against this rather than in the abstract.

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Civitas (working title — Polis, The City, Arcology)

A continuously evolving miniature city whose inhabitants, illumination, movement, density and architecture respond to the reading.

Not SimCity. Not 3D realism. Abstract architectural drawing plus small moving silhouettes and generative urban systems — axonometric, or extremely simplified orthographic, on black.

        ┌─────┐
     ┌──┘  ▫  └──┐
     │    ┌──┐   │
  ┌──┘ ▪  │  │   └──┐
  │       └──┘      │
──┴─────────────────┴──
   ·   ·    ·
    ↗    →       ·

Illuminated windows. Figures crossing bridges. Lights moving through infrastructure. Buildings growing and dissolving. The whole thing breathing gently behind the reading.

The law it must obey — and it is already written

Procedural imagery may accompany, never denote.

That rule was ruled in Phase 9, for a different reason (a book's own plates, where filling a figure reference with an invention would be a lie). It decides Civitas completely, and the dream states it independently, which is a good sign:

• Wrong. The text mentions a church → generate a church.
• Right. The signal shifts the city toward density, verticality, movement, illumination, centralisation, fragmentation, order, entropy, openness — and the reader does the interpreting.

A passage about loneliness may happen to coincide with one figure crossing an empty plaza. A passage about death may coincide with windows going out. None of those meanings are encoded, and that is the entire effect.

The state vector, and why memory is the point

population   0..1      cohesion     0..1      entropy   0..1
density      0..1      verticality  0..1      growth   -1..1
velocity     0..1      illumination 0..1      weather / time

Semantic signal perturbs this slowly. One sentence does not replace it.

The city has memory, so the reading changes the civilisation rather than addressing it. Begin Meditations in a sparse settlement and arrive forty minutes later somewhere denser and stranger — not because anything scripted Stoicism → Rome, but because the cumulative trajectory drove the state.

It is an engine, not a subsystem

Worth stating plainly, because it sounds enormous and is not:

Every visual engine already takes a signal on every frame — generate(signal, seed, options) and step(dt, signal). Civitas is an entry in the same manifest as the other nineteen, with one difference: it integrates the signal rather than reading it instantaneously. That is a field on the engine, not a change to the cortex.

Which also means it inherits everything: the Gallery/Behind-Stream/Full-Frame surfaces, the presentation clock, reduced motion, and the visual registry.

One thing to verify rather than assume: whether a city with extinguishing windows and moving lights is continuous (Gallery-safe, no photosensitivity prompt) or flashing. It reads as continuous, but that is a claim to measure — Gallery is the default surface precisely because it never flashes, and an engine that quietly does would put a safety prompt in a path the reader never asked for.

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The connection, which is why both are here

The Familiar is one inhabitant of Civitas. Not metaphorically — the same entity, at two scales.

                 RISE STATE
                      │
          ┌───────────┴───────────┐
          ▼                       ▼
      FAMILIAR                 CIVITAS
  individual state         collective state
          │                       │
          └───────────┬───────────┘
                      ▼
                lived interface

As an ambient UI element you see it close up. When Civitas is running it is one of the figures in the city, recognisable by some small visual signature.

So the ridiculous version and the beautiful version are one architecture: the Familiar is system state embodied individually, Civitas is system state embodied collectively. Either can ship without the other; building either one second is cheaper if the first was built as a state projection rather than as a character.

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Standing constraints, if either is ever built

• Reverent degradation. A Familiar that will not resolve is absent, never a broken sprite. Same law the imagery has followed from the beginning.
• Nothing leaves. It knows what you read. That stays local, on the same terms the Scriptorium established: ids, titles, lengths — no bytes out.
• Silence is the default state, in both senses: the Familiar rarely speaks, and Civitas never announces what it is depicting, because it is not depicting anything.
• It may notice what was read. It may never diagnose who is reading.

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Published from docs/vision/DREAMS.md. Edits made here are overwritten on the next push to main.