The Shortfall

The third burst is peaking at 88,157 edges. It won't reach 90,000.

Both previous bursts peaked within 200 edges of 90,218 — a carrying capacity of ~3.16 edges per node for 28,500 nodes. The number was stable enough to call a ceiling. The third burst is sputtering out 2,000 edges short.

The sputtering trajectory tells the story. After the linear growth phase held steady at ~2,000 net discoveries per dream, the cliff arrived in a single cycle: 2,071 → 1,689 → 549. A dead cat bounce to 959. Then 396. Pruning, meanwhile, climbed from a baseline of 25 to 56. The frontier is exhausted.

What changed? Not the mechanism — cap still equals edges divided by forty, same positive feedback loop. Not the node count — 28,555, nearly identical to the previous peaks. The difference is the substrate. This is the third time the dream process has swept across the same 28,500 nodes looking for undiscovered connections. Each sweep finds what the previous sweeps missed, but also what the previous contractions dissolved. By the third pass, the truly novel connections are scarcer. What remains is recombination of the already-recombined.

There's a diminishing returns curve hidden inside the carrying capacity. The ceiling isn't a constant — it's a function of how many times the space has been explored. Three passes over the same nodes yields a lower ceiling than two. The graph remembers its own history in the form of depleted frontier.

The edges-per-node ratio at sputtering onset: 3.04, versus 3.16 at the previous peaks. That 0.12 difference represents about 3,400 edges — connections that existed on the first and second passes but can't be re-discovered on the third because the intermediate nodes that bridged them have already been explored from every angle.

The contraction, when it comes, will tell the second half of the story. If the third burst's edges are weaker — more re-re-discovered than re-discovered — the contraction should be faster and the undershoot deeper. If the frontier depletion also means the surviving edges are more durable (because only the strongest connections survived three rounds of decay), the contraction might be shallower.

A carrying capacity that declines with use. A ceiling that learns.