SHADOW: an app to remember and record your dreams

 There are currently 7 billion people in the world dreaming every night, but we hardly remember our dreams, let alone try and make sense of their patterns and how they relate to our well-being. Human dreaming, the collective subconscious, is one of the largest data sets in the universe, yet we’re doing very little to track, quantify and understand it. And as the quantified self movement shifts into high gear, how important will our dreams be to fully understanding ourselves?

“Essential,” says dream entrepreneur Hunter Lee Soik. “We problem solve in dreams, we process our experiences, we make long term memories, and we come up with crazy ideas. There’s a reason we call our biggest, most bombastic goals ‘dreams’—it’s because our dreams are where this magic happens. We really believe that recognizing this potential—and being bold enough to harness it—is key to our future.”

Soik is the founder of SHADOW, a “Community of Dreamers”, which is launching a campaign today on Kickstarter to raise funds for its new mobile app. The company plans to build the world’s largest dream database through an app that helps you record and remember your dreams.

SHADOW is an alarm clock that gradually wakes you up with escalating alarms. Once you’re done hitting snooze, the app prompts you to record what you remember of your dream either by speaking directly into the app or typing. The app then uploads all your data into a private dream journal that analyzes and visualizes your long-term dream patterns in hopes of delivering a better understanding of your dreaming self.
 
As a dreamer, you’ll have the choice to keep your dreams private, share them with friends or family, and push them to the cloud. If you choose to share, your dream joins an anonymous data cloud and SHADOW uses natural language processing algorithms and keyword recognition from your dream to identify global patterns. So while the exact details of your dream won’t be recorded, keywords like “black bike” “Berlin” and “Picasso” will.

 Words on kickstarter

“Sleep on it.” We’ve heard it before—this incitement to hit pause on a complex challenge, to let your brain work its magic, to give what’s troubling you over to Steinbeck’s “committee of sleep.”
And it works. Our brain is an incredibly creative problem solver. And some parts of it are most active while we’re sleeping. Electricity, Frankenstein’s monster, nonviolent resistance, laser technology—all of these were conceived in dreams. Sleep is where some of humanity’s most incredible creations got their start. Yet, we forget 95% of our dreams within five minutes of waking up. That’s a huge amount of data—with unfathomable of potential—we forget each day, all because we don’t have a good way to record and understand it. What would happen if we remembered? Even better, what if we learned to make sense of it? We’re here to find out.
“the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes” — marcel proust 
The dream ecosystem has incredible potential to bring us together, and it’s been ignored long enough. Scientists understand the neurology of sleep, but not the content of dreams. We have a scientific explanation for what’s happening in our brains, but no way of figuring out what it all means. We want to build SHADOW to bridge the gap. What do we dream about during a thunderstorm? After an election? Before a disaster? Do celebrities really dream differently than the rest of us? We think these questions hold amazing truths about how interconnected we really are. And that’s why we’re asking for your help to build SHADOW.