By: Lester Bundrage
Shadow is an app that helps you record and remember your dreams. Shadow is also an alarm clock that wakes you up by increasing the volume and vibration. This allows you to gently rise from sleep, which in return increases the percentage of you remembering your dreams.
So it goes something like this: The alarm goes off, you open your eyes, and forget everything that passed through your brain during the night. It's also estimated that we forget about 95 percent of our dreams within five minutes of waking up, meaning we lose the bulk of the weird and potentially insightful stuff we think about while asleep. There are ways to abate that, but none are ideal. Dream journals are high-maintenance and just a little too new age, and the apps available leave much to be desired from an interaction and design standpoint. But Shadow, a new app recently launched on Kickstarter for funding, could be a convenient and beautifully designed solution to the problem of forgetting our dreams. Hunter Lee Soik and Jason Carvalho are the ones who came up with this great idea and created Shadow. since, Shadow is an app, it makes recording and remembering your dreams very simple. Shadow is an alarm clock/digital dream recorder, but the designers mostly want to create the largest dream database in the world. Most of the time, you have your alarm clock that goes off and quickly blasts through your sleep, waking you up immediately from your sleep. So, Shadow's alarm system slowly transitions you through your hypnopompic state. So during your not-quite-asleep, not-quite-awake phase of sleep, it has be proven to help you better remember your dreams.
Soon as you turn off the alarm, you can record your dreams either with your voice or typing with text. The app then tracks your dreams by writing them and storing them in a growing digital dream journal that keeps track of your long-term dreams and sleep patterns. For your privacy settings, you can either keep the dream data to yourself, or you can share your dreams with others, allowing the data to be put on the online cloud storage where your dreams can be studied and analyzed. The more you use the app, the better it gets at visualizing patterns and making connections between your sleep patterns, daily life, and what you dream about. "There's a lot going on in the subconscious mind that if you can start to pull out little details, you start to get a wider picture of yourself," says Soik. The goal is to make a massive dream database that can be used to analyze our collective subconscious thoughts and potentially be an information source for scientists who study dreams.
Shadow is hoping to use the dream data you put in to boost the entire service. Apps like Nike Plus already allow you to keep detailed notes on your physiological self. You get to monitor your heart rate, how many calories burned during exercise, and how much sleep you get each night, but we have little understanding of how it connects to the bigger picture of "the inner self." "Shadow wanted to be the next level, which was getting to understand the whole psychological layer," Soik said. They wanted to know things like, what does this data mean to me? For example, if I walk about 10,000 steps, will I fall asleep 5 percent faster, or would I have more positive dreams?"
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Dreams have always been fascinating as it pertains to psychology and your subconscious to an extent. It's the interpretations and meaning of your dreams that we are curious to know. I believe this app is useful for someone who chronically dreams and wants to document them. Also, it would be useful to analyze and make some correlations on your own to understand what you are dreaming. I see this app as a social network as well as a way to learn about what others are dreaming about on a global scale. It would be fun to use and be able to read about interesting dreams from people and their backgrounds to try and make sense out of them.
ReplyDeleteNow this is something that I would love to see and invest in. I've always want to capture my dreams because in many cases I cannot remember them. This would also her very helpful with connecting the symbolism of our dreams and get a better understanding of why they may be occurring.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to read that they had actually got the tech right for capturing our dreams. I love my dreams, and even my nightmares would serve as great learning tools. The psyche department could benefit greatly from that invention, as well as the marketers. What if they could put commercials in my dreams, or if I could sell access to my dreams like movie tickets? That's crazzy.
ReplyDeleteGreat post Mr.Bundrage. I found this app very interesting and curious to see how it works. I feel as though psycologists would love this app and can use something like thiss to help with their patients
ReplyDeleteI must be honest. The article was a bit disappointing. I was expecting to to find that there was actually an application that monitored the way that we sleep. Instead, it is still our responsibility to wake up and try to record what we can remember before it slips. I think its cool that the wakes you up slowly - perhaps that would make me a bit less cranky in the mornings. Great information. I just thought that there was some greater technology at work.
ReplyDeleteThis article is very interesting.I never would have for seen dreams as a promising market. What makes the app profitable, is not recording dreams and monitoring sleep patterns. Its making dreams and interactive experience in that they can be shared socially. In addition to that, it assigns a tangible interface to our dreams. I'm looking forward to how the general public reacts to Shadow. Its too early to say wether or not this will be an app that can easily be incorporated into human lifestyles. Its longevity depends on its necessity. Is this just anotger cool idea, or will it be somethung more?
ReplyDeleteThe fact that technology is getting to a point where we can even begin to concieve of recording dreams is incredible. although I am waiting for the technology to get to the point where it's perfected, the concept itself is still fascinating. Now, if they can get to the point of recording via video, and not through speech or text, then the dream app would be next level revolutionary.
ReplyDeleteRecording dreams is the next step of the future. Technology is growing and growing and this to me, can change socially change that we way look at ourselves and each other.
ReplyDeleteI feel that this is a little to advanced for my mind to comprehend. Only reason say that is because I tend to forget most of my dreams or not dream at all, so if that's the case whats the point of keeping track of your dreams? Are dreams soon to be ultimate reality? is just a lot of questions that have yet to be answered.
ReplyDeleteThis is an amazing concept. I never remember my dreams. I even wonder most times if I have dreams at all. I wonder if one should be very enthused about the data-sharing part of it, out of concern for privacy, but the app itself seems like a great idea. I definitely need an alarm that would cause me to get up for real, and actually want to get up and start my day. And then the ability to remember and record my dreams so that I could evaluate them later is a plus.
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