Digital Dream Catcher App Charts Fresh Frontiers Andrew Purcell - WA Today
go to original November 30, 2013

Shadow, an application for iPhone that will be launched next month, is designed to capture dreams. According to the creation myth, its inventor, Hunter Lee Soik, was catching up on lost sleep at a beach resort in Mexico when it occurred to him that dreams are a vast untapped data source. What if millions of them could be tethered and tallied, before they float away?

Soik wears a Fitbit monitor on one wrist and a Jawbone tracking device on the other to log his every step: as an adherent of the Quantified Self movement, he believes what is measured, improves. "The long-term goal is to create the largest dream database in the world, so that we can identify major themes and trends," he says. "We want to make the invisible visible."

... Shadow aims to commit dreams to memory, something that we're not very good at doing by ourselves. Using a motion sensor, the app monitors the user's sleep cycle, to wake her at the optimum moment for dream recall, shortly after a period of REM sleep. An alarm gradually increases in volume, a recorded voice asks "What were you dreaming about?" and a recorder is activated automatically, so that the dream can be dictated. Voice recognition software converts to text, and an algorithm pulls out keywords, to be logged.

The report can be stored locally, shared with friends or uploaded to the cloud anonymously, where other members of the Shadow community can comment. Kelly Bulkeley, a dream researcher and consultant on the project (Soik refers to him as "one of our six PhDs") compares it to a dream discussion group. "Any system that says 'we're gonna tell you what your dream means', run in the opposite direction," Bulkeley says. "But hearing other perspectives triggers new awareness of your own experience. That's the hope, the promise and the potential of Shadow."

Read the rest at WA Today

Photo by arizawaAyate

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