In high school my friends and I used to read books and articles about how to have lucid dreams. For those who don’t know, lucid dreams are ones in which the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming. It is pretty amazing: having experienced them twice, I have become intrigued by the cognition of dreams.
There are very few things that EVERYONE in the entire world regardless of race, culture, ethnicity, or education does: dreaming is one of them. When I heard about SHADOW, I was immediately intrigued.
Launched yesterday on Kickstarter, and founded by Hunter Lee Soik and Jason Carvalho, SHADOW is the first iOS alarm clock that helps you record and share your dreams. You tell SHADOW what time you want to wake up, and set the alarm when you go to bed. It then uses a series of escalating alarms to wake you up. The gradual increase in volume helps you better remember your dreams by taking you through your hypnopompic state (the transition from asleep to awake) much more slowly than a standard alarm clock. Once you deactivate the alarm, you’re immediately prompted to record what you remember, by speaking directly into the app or typing it out. All of the data you upload is stored in your private dream journal, and SHADOW analyzes and visualizes your long-term dream patterns to help you better understand your dreaming self. SHADOW then pulls keywords from your dream and the rest of the dreaming community and adds them to a giant anonymous data cloud that users can review and compare with their own patterns.
To say SHADOW has lofty goals would be an understatement: they seek to become the go-to company for capturing and analyzing the world’s individual and collective dreams. In 2012, Hunter was a creative consultant for Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Watch the Throne tour and also designed experiences for brands including Stella McCartney, Vitra, CFDA Awards, and Art Basel. According to Hunter, the experience of the Watch The Throne tour led directly to him starting SHADOW. To get a sense of a digital experience, look no farther than the homepage for SHADOW. It is one of the nicest homepages for any pre-launch company I have ever seen.
But what problem does SHADOW solve? According to Hunter, SHADOW solves two problems – one science and one innovation.
First, SHADOW picks up where Freud and Jung left off. Some of history’s greatest discoveries were born out of dreams, but 95 percent of our dreams are forgotten within five minutes of waking up. Scientists understand the neurology of sleep, but not the content of dreams. We have a scientific explanation for what’s happening in our brains, but no way of figuring out what it all means. SHADOW is a way to capture, store, and understand the content of our dreams, so we don’t miss out on our amazing revelations.
Second, SHADOW is the next wave of quantified-self: understood-self. The quantified-self movement has given us many tools to measure what we do, but very few to help us understand that data. There’s been a backlash since their emergence – many people are wondering what they can truly learn about themselves from data for data’s sake. They’re missing context. SHADOW blends the precision of quantified self with the metaphysics of dream interpretation to open up a whole new world for consumers who want to know themselves better.
I had a chance to connect with Hunter recently to talk about SHADOW, Kickstarter, and where he sees the product going in 5 years.
Alex Taub (AT): Where does the name SHADOW come from?
Hunter Lee Soik (HLS): SHADOW is a concept that comes from Jung. Your “shadow” is your subconscious, all those assumptions and desires that you’re unaware of but that continue to drive you. So the whole idea behind the app is to lay your shadow bare, examine it, see what you can find out about yourself and about how you’re connected to other people around the world.
AT: Why dreams? What excites you about remembering and tracking your dreams?
HLS: Because in dreams there are no limits. You can experience things in dreams that are impossible in reality. But they also contain a multitude of insights into our own. When I started sleeping more and dreaming more, I would have these really incredible dreams that I wanted to remember.
AT: What is the vision of SHADOW? Where would you like the business to be in 5 years?
HLS: The dream is to have amassed a huge user base and a giant global data cloud that allows us to answer really precise questions about our dreams. So not only can individuals see their dream patterns, but on a global scale we can see what people dream about in particular places and at key moments. What do people dream about after app launches? On election night? After a natural disaster? The system is robust enough to collect this data and connect the dots; all we need to do is get people using it.
AT: Why are you going the Kickstarter route? What are your expectations?
HLS: We’re in the same boat as most other tech startups: we need to raise money so we can finish building the app, but we also see it as an opportunity to get some input from potential users, and hear what they really want in a dream app. We will let the audience decide what device gets built first, languages, and APIs. Kickstarter lets us do both: raise money and hear from an engaged, creative audience and find out what they want to know about their dreams.
AT: There are many alarm clock apps. Is anyone else doing anything interesting in the dream space?
HLS: Not really. There are a lot of dream journaling apps, but nothing that combines the sophisticated UX UI we’re developing with something truly social. Everything treats dreams as very private experiences, and they are, but as in life, there are dream tropes that are universal—and that connect all of us. We want to innovate the alarm clock to be more than just a utility—to add these layers of social utility and global data.
