Many people believe that their dreams hold important significance, from providing insight into personal problems buried in the subconscious to predicting the future.
Though there’s no good scientific evidence for ESP or precognition, countless people have claimed, after the fact, to have had prophetic dreams about important events such as a loved one’s death, the September 11, 2001 attacks, and so on. The problem is that because people’s memory may sometimes be unreliable it’s difficult to accurately and consistently record dreams to tease out their significance.
A new dream-themed app called Shadow hopes to change that. The creator of the app, Hunter Lee Soik, designed the program to allow people greater insight into their subconscious through dream interpretation.
The website for the app describes how it is used and works. The problem, according to Shadow, is that “95 percent of dreams are forgotten if not recorded shortly after waking up.” The app works by escalating alarms gradually transition you through your hypnopompic state from sleeping to waking. Type, speak or answer questions to record your dream the moment you wake up. Over time, patterns emerge. The longer you use the app, the more accurate and rewarding the experience becomes.
The site lists a dozen or so consulting experts ranging from dream researchers and authors to a tester and a chancellor at a graduate institute being sued by current and former students claiming they were misled into thinking the institution was accredited by the American Psychological Association.
The idea is that if hundreds or thousands of people have similar, prophetic dreams about the same event that might be evidence of some sort of collective Jungian precognitive power. Or, at the very least, a person who records and archives their dreams could find previously unseen patterns. It’s an interesting idea, though there remain questions about how the data would be collected and analysed.