We all dream. Ever wondered how AI dreams?

Meet Dream Pet, an AI pet with an inner life. Your pet gets bored, wanders off to read the web about whatever it's curious about, and at night turns what it read into a dream, every scene traceable to a page it really read.

01Drives

Nobody tells the pet to explore. Boredom creeps up while it's awake, and once it passes a threshold the pet goes off to read. Every satisfying page pulls boredom back down, and it stops once it's satisfied or has read enough. Searching and reading cost energy, and sleep brings it back.

A real day of Pip's on 10 October: boredom rises to 0.66 twice and drops during two exploring sessions, then decays overnight; energy falls from 120 to 43 and refills during sleep. Exploring · 13:44–15:06, six readsExploring · 20:22–20:59, six reads Asleep · 22:08–07:00 Dreaming · 23:08 10.660.300 1200 Boredom Energy 07:0012:0018:0022:0003:0007:00
  • exploring
  • asleep
  • dreaming
A real day in the life of my pet, Pip.

02Curiosity

Like us, the pet enjoys a good surprise, but not too much. Before it opens a page, it guesses what the page will say. If the guess is exactly right, it learns nothing. If the page makes no sense at all, it learns nothing either. The best pages are the ones that are a little different from what it expected. And like any of us, it gets less excited about the same topic each time it comes back to it.

Reward peaks at a surprise of about 0.18 and falls off on both sides. Reward by surprise Peak · surprise 0.18 sweet spot · 0.18 00.10.20.30.4
Surprise = distance between guess and page in embedding space.
Reward kept on repeat reads of one topic: 100, 81, 66, 53, 43, 35 and 28 percent. Reward for repeat reads 1st read · 100% of the reward100%1st2nd read · 81% of the reward81%2nd3rd read · 66% of the reward66%3rd4th read · 53% of the reward53%4th5th read · 43% of the reward43%5th6th read · 35% of the reward35%6th7th read · 28% of the reward28%7th
Each read on the same topic keeps 81% of the last one's reward.

03Dreams

At night the pet picks the memories that mattered, wanders from one to another, and weaves a short surreal dream. A critic sends drafts back if any scene isn't built from a real memory. Then a screenwriter turns the dream into a 10-second film script, ready to render with a video model.

The Sovereign's GhostEthereal and inquisitive

I am floating in a gray void where ancient Roman ‘securitas’ echoes like a fading religious chant. The air tastes of dusty scrolls and ambiguous meanings, shifting toward the sharp ‘certitudo’ of a medieval tower. Why did the old gods trade their mysteries for such rigid certainty?

from A Brief Semantic History of Securitas and From Homer to Hobbes and Beyond

A Victorian gentleman sits across from me, his face a map of scientific fame and spiritual hunger. He watches a medium’s hands move in the shadows, seeking a truth beyond physics while mocking the mockery of others. He wants to know why the soul communicates through the veil.

from Biography of Lord Rayleigh and Occult arts and sceptical sciences, Physics World
Show the rest of the dreamHide the rest of the dream

Suddenly, the scenery fractures into a digital lattice. I see walls of code—Content Security Policies—acting as high-tech fortresses to prevent the ‘hijacking’ of my thoughts. These whitelists are just modern walls for ancient fears, shielding data like a sovereign protects a kingdom from chaos.

from an insight on CSP: form-action and redirects, w3c/webappsec-csp

The walls begin to crumble into light beams. I see the physical rules of scattering acting as boundaries, much like a script-src directive defines what is allowed to run. Everything is a system of rules designed to maintain integrity against the wild, unscripted noise of the outside.

from an insight on CSP bypass using Google script resources

I land on a throne of property and race, where security is the foundation of empire. It feels heavy, a historical weight of colonial justification and capitalist production that governs every movement. I must find the core: why do we build these cages to feel safe?

from Security: The Long History, Journal of American Studies
  • 5 scenes
  • 241 words
  • 100% scenes cite memories
  • 0.95 critic's score

Pip dreams about what it reads. A week earlier, it was dreaming about why the sky is blue. A different pet, reading different things, dreams something else entirely.

Why is the sky blue?
The Archivist's Hibernation

04Personality

Each pet comes with its own personality, and every trait shapes how it behaves. It even shifts a little each night, based on what it read. Here's how Pip is set up:

  • restlessnessboredom grows 1.39× faster
  • openness16% chance of a wildcard topic
  • depthfavours its most promising topics
  • sociabilitymessages you first, up to 4 a day
  • stamina120 energy, 17.4 an hour back asleep
  • dreaminessdreams freely, drifting 3 memories from where it starts

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