A dizzying number of trackers are available for health and lifestyle. Enthusiasts can now chart every calorie burned or consumed, have their genetics broken down and backdated for centuries, or follow their stress levels through a family holiday. But while our waking moments become ever more transparent, the one-third of our life spent asleep has remained off limits.
Throughout history, dreams have proved resistant to interrogation. It is not known why we sleep at all beyond a general need to recharge and avoid the negative consequences of not sleeping, while an explanation for the substance of dreams has proved even more elusive, still dominated by the theories of wish fulfillment espoused by Freud and Jung.
But now, digital innovations are picking up the challenge.
The Shadow app seeks to connect users with their dreams, and to make them sociable. Its first function is as an alarm clock that wakes the user gradually over up to 30 minutes, easing them into consciousness so as to preserve more of the dream state, rather than shattering it abruptly. Dream researchers estimate that 95% of dreams vanish upon awakening.
Once the user touches their phone it begins recording and invites them to share the still-fresh memories of the night, prompting them with questions. The input is scanned for keywords and patterns so that the user can build a picture of their experiences over time.
More ambitiously, their personal data is anonymized and sent with gender and geographic data to cloud servers in the hope of building a global dream database. In this social network people can compare and discuss their experiences, while trends can be identified and analyzed.
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"We want to know what the most popular dream is in Japan, or Cambodia, at a given time", Shadow founder and CEO Hunter Lee Soik said. "You can see the dreams from each city organized by keywords and numbers".
Currently on a very limited launch of around 1,000 users, the data gathered is already offering insights. "Last week the most dreams were recorded in New York City and the most common subject was relationships. It makes sense that as we are social creatures, we are social in our dreams too."
Soik wants his creation to be "a whole other psychological layer" of quantified technology that people can use in conjunction with their daytime devices for a more complete picture.
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