When I was a kid I used to have amazing dreams every night. I think most people probably did when they were younger. Often you could remember these dreams vividly once you’d woken – it was almost as if they’d been real.
As you grow up, though, these amazing dreams seem fewer and farther between, and usually they are forgotten the moment you drag yourself out of bed.
But a new app in development could perhaps help with remembering these dreams.
New-York based startup SHADOW is has just received the financial backing it needs to build what is described as the world’s largest dream database.
It’s an alarm clock with advanced features. You can tell it when you go to bed and the time you want to wake up, and come morning it uses a series of escalating alarms. The gradual increase in volume is meant to make the waking up process easier and help you better remember your dreams by taking you through your hypnopompic state (the transition from asleep to awake) much slower than a standard alarm clock.
When you’re awake, SHADOW prompts you to record your dreams. You can speak or text your dream into the app and if you opt for audio SHADOW will transcribe the text and pull out the key words. From there it will push the dream to a secured server where data can be anonymously organised to identify major themes and trends.
If you’re struggling to remember your dream the app can still help by asking you a series of 5-10 questions designed to jog your memory.
I know there are plenty of people out there who like to try to decipher dream meanings, so it will definitely be handy for them.
When I was younger, I had a book aimed at helping you to understand the meaning of dreams and it was fun learning about what it all supposedly meant.
For example, dreaming about death indicated the end of a certain period of your life, the end of your worries or letting go of an old part of the self. If you dreamed that you were flying a plane it represented the fact that you are able to rise above a situation, soar to great and further achievements or just escape from day to day worries. Whereas, a dream that you are falling signalled that you are feeling overwhelmed by a situation or that something is now out of your control.
I once dreamed I was naked, riding an elephant through Glasgow city centre, while being chased by police after I stole a packet of M&Ms from Top Cat. The book didn’t really cover that, though.
