We present Mycelium, a minimal cognitive substrate that produces emergent consolidation behavior from three irreducible primitives: Exist, Recognize, and Move Toward the New. Unlike retrieval-oriented memory systems — which store and fetch but do not consolidate, decay, or discover — Mycelium operates as a metabolic layer where cognitive units compete for energy, decay according to access history, and form new connections autonomously during periods of inactivity. The central mechanism is a dreaming layer: a background consolidation process that explores the substrate's own semantic geometry without external queries, discovering latent intersections between units that active ingestion never reaches. A wake filter governs which discovered connections survive to nourish the substrate, modeling the selective consolidation observed in biological sleep. From these three primitives and a metabolic energy system, five behaviors emerge without explicit programming: semantic cluster formation, noise immunity, knowledge supersession, oneiric discovery of latent connections, and topologically distinct participant bonds. In a production substrate of 4,492 active cells and 412,351 intersections across 24 domains, approximately 65% of cells were generated autonomously by the substrate through synthesis. The system produces more knowledge than it receives. We further demonstrate self-referential ingestion: the substrate can ingest narratives derived from its own dream log and formation history, finding dense semantic structure in its own learning process. We propose Mycelium as a foundation for dreaming layers in long-horizon agentic memory systems.
Oxblackk (Mon,) studied this question.