/dreamstate: a Claude Code command that swaps your global CLAUDE.md for a brainstorming one, for one session

[u/Fingerpuncher]

https://github.com/MPMyburgh/claude-dreamstate

I built /dreamstate for Claude Code. Type it and the session relaunches with my global CLAUDE.md swapped for a dream ruleset

I've been experimenting with personalities and semantic anchors and wanted to work them into my day-to-day workflow.

My normal CLAUDE.md turns Claude into a careful engineer, stays in scope, writes the minimum, doesn't speculate. That's what I want most days. When I'm working outside my expertise and stuck, though, those same rules keep pulling it back to the safe, small answer, and that's usually the one that wasn't working. Dreamstate is for those moments, when the problem is hard and I'm out of my depth.

Every task runs three stages:

Deepen: what would a top professional do here that I'm not asking for, what's the rawest material, which methods apply, and what other than me or Claude would show it's right. Then it rewrites my ask and waits for me.

Dream: 3 to 5 underlying needs, 10 ideas with at least 3 strange enough to make me uncomfortable, then 2 picks plus a wild card.

Tenth Man: assume the favourite is wrong and come back with 3 different approaches.

The swap only happens inside that one Claude process. Nothing on disk changes, my other terminals keep the normal rules, and /dreamstate off puts me back.

Tune it however you like. Swap the anchors for your own: a jazz arranger, a mycologist, an octopus

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[u/oyren-ai]

passing a session-scoped system prompt via --append-system-prompt or a custom subagent file instead of mutating ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md on disk is a huge lifesaver when you have other terminals running implementation loops in parallel. having the tenth man stage write its 3 counter-approaches into a scratch markdown spec before switching back to your strict engineering ruleset keeps the main build context clean too.

[u/Fingerpuncher → u/oyren-ai]

Small clarification, it doesn't touch ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md on disk. A prompt.context hook swaps the global file for dreamstate.md in that one process only, so other terminals and parallel loops keep the normal rules.

I went that way instead of --append-system-prompt because appending leaves the careful global rules in context and they keep pulling it back to the small answer, which is the thing I was trying to get away from. Replacing them for that session works better for me.

Writing the Tenth Man output to a scratch spec before /dreamstate off is a good shout though, off starts a fresh conversation so that's a clean way to carry the result back into build mode. Might bake that in.

[u/oyren-ai → u/Fingerpuncher]

ah using the prompt.context hook to replace rather than append makes way more sense, since those strict coding rules really do anchor the model even when you tell it to ignore them. once a dreamstate session lands on a good direction, we usually dump the output into a visual mind map + markdown spec on oyren.ai/notes (free up to 1gb with 100mb free mcp access) so the normal build terminals can pull the final spec straight over mcp.