Get Out My Dreams, Get Into My App
Oh the quantified self movement – it’s a trend we’re definitely intrigued by, and pretty participatory in. But when does quantifying your life patterns go too far? The latest hot self-tracking app on the market is all about your dreams, literally.
SHADOW tracks your sleep, wakes you up, and prompts you to remember and record your dreams. Not only that, but it adds these dreams to a dream community. Read on to get the lowdown.
SHADOW is at its core an alarm clock, which means you have to set it before you go to bed. Choose the time you want it to wake you up and SHADOW’s specially designed alarm will gradually wake you from your sleep. This escalating awakening is crucial to the recall process according to the people behind this app, saying that slowly coming out of the in-between sleep phase will help you remember what you were just dreaming.
Here’s how it works:
As soon as you blink your eye open, SHADOW is ready to record what you remember. So simply type or talk to record your dream. Be sure to do this before you get out of bed or check your mobile Facebook feed ‘cause that 95% of dreams are forgotten if you don’t record them immediately. SHADOW helps you make it a habit of this, so if you do it on the regular it’ll soon be seamlessly integrated into your morning routine. Now here’s where things start to get interesting, both for you and the entire “Community of Dreamers:”
Before you can take your first sip of coffee, SHADOW starts pulling keywords from your dream transcription and anonymously organizes it by trends and themes. Over time, patterns will emerge that give insight into what you dream about, when you dream about it, and quite possibly WHY you dream about it (although that last part is still way more subjective). Using this data, SHADOW could potentially answer hyper existential questions like “What do we dream about during a thunderstorm?” But it could also potentially reveal situations that are more directly applicable to your day-to-day life, like that you seem to always have unsettling dreams the night before a looming work deadline.
These very personal patterns are being tracked with the hope that you’ll allow every bit of this data to be analyzed by the slew of scientists and dream experts at SHADOW. This will not only allow for a more interactive experience with the app—you’ll be able to compare your dreams against others in “Community of Dreamers” based on factors like gender, location, and frequency of dream themes—but it will also help to build what SHADOW hopes to be the world’s largest database of dreams. SHADOW isn’t quite sure what this data will reveal, but if watching Inception has shown us anything, it could be really, really cool. If you’d rather not participate in the subconscious study, you can easily adjust the sharing controls to private.
SHADOW truly is an innovative and entertaining way to put your dreams in context—we think we can all agree on that.
