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.
