By Ryan Hurd © 2013

For the last six months, I have been advising a tech start-up called SHADOW, which is currently building software for tracking and recording dreams. It‘s been fun influencing this project from the ground up, all the while thinking about how useful a free, open-source digital dream journal would also be for lucid dreamers.

 

After a successful Kickstarter campaign, SHADOW is now building the app for iPhone. It tracks your sleep using actigraphy, wakes you up with a ―dream-centric alarm‖ that targets dream sleep (or whenever you need to get up of course), allows you to record your dreams via text or talk, and keeps your dreams in a private digital dream journal so you can code them and play with the patterns of your dreaming life.

 

SHADOW also gives the dreamer the choice to upload the dream to a secure dream database, where your dream is scrubbed of your unique identifiers, yet still tagged with the demographic information you have given permission to share. In this way, SHADOW is making it easy to remember and work with dreams, and at the same time building a database that could be analyzed to find worldwide dreaming patterns.

 

How is this valuable for lucid dreamers? Well, the number one prerequisite to lucid dreaming is having high dream recall, and SHADOW‘s unique alarm clock is especially built for remembering more dreams. Secondly, dreamers will be able to tag their dreams and track dreamsigns over time. Also, dreamers could use the alarm to target middle of the night dreaming patterns, allowing them to wake up to practice wake-back-to-bed, middle of the night meditation, and other tactics for facilitating entry into lucid dreaming through hypnagogia.

For videos on lucid dreaming check this great youtube channel 

I am also excited to be building a multimedia lucid dreaming course for SHADOW, along with educational psychologist G. Scott Sparrow and lucid dreaming coach Alice Grinda. At this point, the details of the course are still in planning, but look for it in Spring 2014.

 

BIO: Ryan Hurd is the editor of DreamStudies.org, a website dedicated to sleep, dreams and consciousness studies, and author of Lucid Immersion Guidebook. His introduction to sleep and dreams, Dream Like a Boss, is now in press: check it out on Amazon in mid December 2013. He has recently been featured on TEDMED as a sleep expert, and is co-editor (with Kelly Bulkeley) of the upcoming reference anthology Lucid Dreaming: New Perspectives of Consciousness in Sleep, to be published by Praeger in Summer 2014.