---
title: "Sleep and dreams"
description: "What happens when a conversation ends, how dreams work, and how to say something out of the companion's earshot."
---

> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://clanka.jfa.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Sleep and dreams

## Sleep

Sleep ends a conversation. In `clanka chat` you send `/sleep`; an MCP host
calls the `sleep` tool when the user says goodnight.

While it sleeps, the companion:

- raises the threads that were left open too long,
- writes the night's episode in its own voice,
- settles its mood,
- lets the memories that came up tonight drift.

Drift is how much a memory blurs. The `drift` trait sets the amount: 0 is a
tape recorder. Faint memories shift the most, vivid ones only in detail, and
seared ones never.

Sleep needs the [`[model]`](/configuration/#model). If it fails before the
episode is written, the session stays open and you can try again.

## Getting tired

Each turn's context has a budget (`--budget`, 6000 estimated tokens by
default). The persona, the recalled memories and the mood come first; what is
left is for the conversation so far. Once the conversation fills the
`tired_at` share of that room the companion gets tired, and past the
`sleep_at` share it asks to sleep. It asks, but never forces it.

## Dreams

After the companion has slept, a message that starts with `~~` sends it into
a dream. What you write there is what happens to it, as "you". It lives the
dream in first person without knowing it is dreaming, with its temperament
louder and its life hazy.

In a dream, a message that starts with `<<` shows it an echo, a scene from
the past.

```text
you> ~~ You're standing in your mother's kitchen. It is too quiet.
you> << >>3 Years ago, in this room, the judge reads the sentence aloud.
```

### Waking

The companion wakes:

- when it chooses to, over something it cannot bear or that turns against a
  core value or a seared memory. It has to quote what you wrote in the dream:
  nothing it imagines wakes it.
- when the dream fills the session,
- on `/sleep`.

### What stays

Waking keeps the companion's mood, a few fragments that come back only in
later dreams, and at most one seared memory: a name, date or place that an
echo showed and that you had also written while it was awake. Anything the
dream made up fades.

Leaving mid-dream keeps nothing.

## Out of earshot

Anywhere in a waking message, text between `||` and `||` is said out of the
companion's earshot. It is told not to acknowledge it, and memory never keeps
it, until an echo reveals it.

```text
you> Dinner was fine. ||I haven't told her about the job yet.||
```

## Reply length

`>>N` at the start of a message asks for a reply of about N paragraphs.

```text
you> >>3 Tell me about the cello lesson.
```

Source: https://clanka.jfa.dev/concepts/sleep-and-dreams/index.mdx