With Dreamboard, an app that aggregates data based on information users input about their dreams, understanding our innermost preoccupations just got easier.
Since there has been consciousness, there have been dreams, and as far back as human history stretches, we have been captivated by them.
The earliest record of dreams was drawn from materials dating back approximately 5,000 years from ancient Mesopotamia, where they used stone tablets to document the images, ideas, emotions and sensations that came to them in their sleep. The Greeks and the Romans believed that dreams were first-hand messages from the gods or the spirits of the dead, and could predict the future.
Perhaps the most famous interpretation of the meaning behind dreams was that of Dr. Sigmund Freud. They featured heavily in his studies on psychoanalysis, and he spent much of the early 1900s attempting to unravel their significance for the psychological profiles of his patients, assigning meaning and symbolic connections to many dream subjects.
While the accuracy of Freud’s studies is highly disputable, he was right about one thing. Whether they are exhilarating, frightening, magical, sexual, or even just downright bizarre, dreams are a fascinating medium through which to explore our unconscious self – and maybe get some ideas about our next move in life, too.
Times have changed quite a bit since the work of Freud: Dreamboard is an app that makes his 1899 publication, The Interpretation of Dreams, look like a fortune cookie.
As a personal online dream tracking and analysis tool, Dreamboard provides a highly-detailed platform on which users can record key aspects of their thoughts and emotions remembered from daily dreams, replacing a pen-and-paper dream diary as a space to look back on the collected images of a night’s sleep.
What makes Dreamboard a truly unique tool is its function as a dream tracker. The more frequently you log your dreams’ information, the larger a pool of data Dreamboard has access to, allowing it to pinpoint patterns and trends in who and what you dream about. When Dreamboard is used consistently, dream data is aggregated into a beautifully-designed statistical representation of your dreaming habits, revealing the day of the week on which you are most likely to dream, the frequency with which you have nightmares and lucid dreams, and, helpfully, a reflection on the daytime moods that tend to precede and follow these dreams.
This detailed yet easy to interpret data spread essentially allows Dreamboard users to hack their own emotional landscapes, unravelling the mysteries of their unconscious and providing them with the ability to identify their deepest concerns and desires of their sleeping brains. A recurring nightmare that features your bull-headed boss might be a good indicator that it’s time to call in a meeting with human resources about his or he attitude in the workplace, just as yet another appealing bedtime fantasy about that guy who goes to your laundromat might be the push you need to finally ask him out. When the facts are represented clearly on your Dreamboard, any number of realizations could lie therein, giving users a new insight into how best to conduct themselves for success and happiness in their waking lives.
It is important to note that the creators of Dreamboard do not view it as a dream interpreter, but rather as an aid for dreamers to make correlations that the cognitive frameworks and concepts provided by a conscious brain do not allow. For those at Dreamboard, a dream is not, like Freud proposed, the key to one’s most private and primal self. It is interactive information, and its potential is limitless.
The availability of such a thorough digitized dream diary also should also spark excitement for all those engaged in creative pursuits. Artists, writers, and musicians alike need only grab their phone in the wake of an inspiring dream to record the newly-formed ideas dropped into their sleeping laps, preserving concepts for later use that might otherwise have been lost forever. A choice of alarms and daily reminders to log are also available in the app, to ensure that no opportunity to record fleeting dream recollections goes to waste.
Dreamboard is owned by experienced engineer and entrepreneur Umberto Prunnoto, from Alba, Italy, an avid student of the ever-blossoming discourse of dreams. He set out to create Dreamboard as an aid to the psychological health market. This idea behind this venture attracted the company’s now-CEO, Nick Rhys-Jones, who wished to learn more about how sleep and dreams could be harnessed to shoot for success in the conscious realm – in particular, in his case, the world of sports.
The Dreamboard project operates under the watchful eye of its chief scientific officer, Patrick McNamara, the associate professor of neurology at Boston University and dissertation chair at North Central University, who has been engaged in the quantitative study of sleep and dreams for almost two decades.
“{Dreamboard is} one of the most impressive smartphone apps I have seen,” Dr. McNamara told Psychology Today. “The power of this tool to investigate dream functions, including memory processing in dreams, is clearly tremendous.”
It’s hard to argue with simple facts, and simple facts are what lie at the very core of Dreamboard. With a collection of concise data from the user’s mind that is at once objective and intensely personal, this is an app that offers up some of the the greatest tools for success imaginable: a whole new level of self-understanding, and a very good reason to head to bed early tonight.
