DayDream

DayDream

Never lose your place again.

DayDream keeps a timeline of your Mac: the apps, windows and Chrome pages you used, and what you typed. It stays on your Mac, so you can find anything again, and AI apps you connect can check it when you ask about your own work.

[!IMPORTANT] DayDream is beta software. Expect bugs.

• Find your place. Search one word. Jump to the moment, on its own day, with the window or page you had open.
• Ask your AI. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other AI apps can answer "where did I leave off yesterday?" from your real day.
• Get short notes. DayDream writes short notes about your moments and days, on your Mac.
• Keep it yours. No account. No screenshots. Your history is stored on your Mac.

Install

You need an Apple silicon Mac with macOS 15 or later.

1. Download DayDream from getdaydream.app or the Releases page.
2. Drag it to Applications and open it. Setup asks for two permissions and what to remember.
3. Press Start Recording.

Updates download quietly and install the next time DayDream quits. Step by step: install guide.

Connect an AI app

In Settings › Connections, one click connects ChatGPT, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor or Windsurf. Then ask things like "where did I leave off yesterday?" or "write my standup".

In Lost Thread, an open benchmark of questions about three made-up work weeks, Claude's helpful answers went from 3.7% to 66.7% with DayDream.

What it records

Recorded	Never recorded
The app in front, its window title, and when	Screenshots, the screen, audio or the camera
That you clicked (not where, or on what)	Password fields, or anything while macOS secure input is on
Page titles and sites in Google Chrome	Incognito and Guest windows, Safari and the other browsers DayDream knows
What you type in the apps and sites you allow	Common password managers, and any app or site you exclude

Typing and Chrome pages start on in setup, and one click turns either off. The full list, app by app: what DayDream records.

How it works

DayDream is a native Swift app. Everything it records goes into one folder on your Mac, ~/Library/Application Support/DayDream/, which only your macOS account can open.

Recording

macOS permission	What DayDream uses it for
Accessibility	The app in front and its window title. It also checks that a text field is safe before any typing is saved.
Input Monitoring	Clicks, and what you type while typing is on. Password fields are skipped. DayDream only listens: it can't change or block a key or a click.
Automation: Google Chrome (optional)	Apple Events ask Chrome for the front tab's title and address, and whether any window is Incognito. No scripts run inside Chrome.

DayDream doesn't use Screen Recording, the microphone or the camera. It reads nothing from Chrome until it has checked that the Chrome in front is signed by Google, and nothing at all while an Incognito or Guest window is open.

Storage and search

• History is a SQLite database, memory.sqlite, in DayDream's folder.
• Typed words are encrypted with AES-GCM, with a 256-bit key for each day kept in your macOS Keychain. The exact words are deleted after 7 days unless you choose another time.
• Search runs on a bundled copy of Typesense 30.2, the unmodified official build. It listens on 127.0.0.1 only, with search and access logging off. Typed words never go into its index: DayDream searches them itself, on your Mac. If the index isn't ready, search reads SQLite directly.

AI apps (MCP)

The AI app starts mac-mem mcp and talks to it over standard input and output. The server opens no network port and connects to nothing outside your Mac: it only asks DayDream's own search server on 127.0.0.1. It has four read-only tools:

Tool	What it returns
timeline	What you did in a period, like today or this week, ending with where you left off
search	One thing across your history: a doc, site, person or project
details	One item in full: its visits, its notes, and the words you typed in it if you allow that
status	Whether DayDream is set up and recording, and whether this connection works

The tools can't start or stop recording, change settings, delete or send anything. Typed words reach an AI app only while Let AI apps see your typed words is on and DayDream is open. The DayDream app hands them over through a private local socket after it checks that AI app's key. Disconnect removes DayDream's entry from the AI app and turns its key off. What an AI app reads goes to its AI provider as part of that chat.

Summaries

• On this Mac (the default where it can run): llama.cpp libraries inside the app run Qwen3.5-4B (Q4_K_M, 2.74 GB) in the DayDream process. There is no server or port. The model is downloaded once from Hugging Face and checked against its size and SHA-256 before it's used. It needs 8 GB of memory.
• Cloud (off until you add your own OpenRouter key): each request asks for a model host that keeps no data, with no fallback to other hosts. Only activity recorded after you turn it on is sent. The key is kept in your Keychain.

How notes are written and checked: docs/summaries.md.

Updates and signing

The app is signed with DayDream's Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple. Updates come through Sparkle and are signed with an EdDSA key. DayDream checks once a day and refuses an update whose signature doesn't match. You can turn automatic updates off in Settings › Advanced › App updates.

Anonymous usage counts

About once an hour, DayDream sends a few counts to PostHog (us.i.posthog.com) with a random ID made for your copy: that it was installed, setup steps finished, a daily check of which features are on and about how long it recorded, how many summaries were written or failed, how often AI apps use each tool, how often you open and search DayDream, and the version after an update. Never your history, typed words, titles, sites or searches. Turn them off with Share anonymous usage counts in Settings › Advanced, where See what's sent shows the last counts exactly as they go. The full list.

Your data

• History is kept until you delete it. Forget This Moment… deletes a moment, and excluding an app hides what it recorded.
• Uninstall DayDream… in Settings › Advanced removes the app, with or without your history (uninstall guide).
• Backup and restore in Settings › Advanced saves your history to a folder you choose (backups).
• For full-disk encryption, turn on FileVault.

Every network connection DayDream makes is listed in Network connections. Privacy policy · Security details · FAQ

Build from source

You need an Apple silicon Mac with Xcode or the Xcode Command Line Tools.

git clone https://github.com/getnorthlight/daydream.git
cd daydream
scripts/bootstrap.sh   # fetches Sparkle 2.9.6 and checks its SHA-256
swift build

Product	What it is
MacMem	The app: menu bar, windows, recorder and summaries
mac-mem	The command-line tool and MCP server. It also starts and watches the search server
mac-mem-backup	The backup and restore helper
typesense-server	Not built here: the release app carries the official Typesense build, and its GPL source kit is attached to every release

Try the command-line tool on made-up data:

demo="$(mktemp -d)/daydream-demo"
.build/debug/mac-mem --home "$demo" demo
.build/debug/mac-mem --home "$demo" --local search SQLite

Release flags, project layout and checks: Build from source, project layout and CONTRIBUTING.md.

Feedback

Choose Report a Problem… in DayDream's menu. It opens an email for you to read and send, with app details and no history. Please don't paste your history into a public issue.

License

MIT. The DayDream name and icon aren't covered; see TRADEMARKS.md. DayDream builds on open-codex-computer-history, Sparkle, llama.cpp, Qwen and Typesense (GPL-3.0); see credits.