Dream Recall Aid

Conceptual Design

I have been fascinated by my dreams for different reasons at different times in my life. When I was a child they were interesting and abstract and there are dreams from my childhood that I remember to this day. In high school I became interested in controlling my dreams through lucid dreaming and this is when I first began to write down my dreams. During this time I felt that I was able to recall my dreams more vividly than ever before but I eventually stopped writing down my dreams. After I stopped writing down my dreams I felt that I was not able to recall my dreams as clearly as when I was recording them but I was unsure if this was simply because I was not paying as much attention to my dreaming as when I was diligently recording my dreams. For this investigation, I wanted to explore dreaming again but this time with a focus on recall. I want to determine whether simply putting more effort into actually recalling my dreams could make me be able to recall my dreams more vividly. Dreams also often reflect our daily lives in many different ways and being able to recall our dreams clearly could be healthy just because it allows us to reflect on certain things that we often dream about.

I have been fascinated by my dreams for different reasons at different times in my life. When I was a child they were interesting and abstract and there are dreams from my childhood that I remember to this day. In high school I became interested in controlling my dreams through lucid dreaming and this is when I first began to write down my dreams. During this time I felt that I was able to recall my dreams more vividly than ever before but I eventually stopped writing down my dreams. After I stopped writing down my dreams I felt that I was not able to recall my dreams as clearly as when I was recording them but I was unsure if this was simply because I was not paying as much attention to my dreaming as when I was diligently recording my dreams. For this investigation, I wanted to explore dreaming again but this time with a focus on recall. I want to determine whether simply putting more effort into actually recalling my dreams could make me be able to recall my dreams more vividly. Dreams also often reflect our daily lives in many different ways and being able to recall our dreams clearly could be healthy just because it allows us to reflect on certain things that we often dream about.

Prototype

For the prototype I created an IPhone alarm clock application that forces the users to create a dream journal entry after they turn off their alarm. To do this I used a prebuilt alarm clock (https://github.com/natsu1211/Alarm-ios-swift) and then built the dream journaling on top of the existing alarm clock.  

This is a screen shot of the dream journal page. After you make a journal entry you can give that dream a name (pictured below) and then save the dream.

You can view a list of all past dreams that have been journaled and click on a dream to see the journal entry and the date the dream was noted. 

Precedents

For this project I read Cultural probes and the value of uncertainty and was intrigued by the idea presented by the authors of having users record their dreams. I considered using this idea of recording the dreams but decided against it because to be able to make a simpler prototype. I also took inspiration from Dreamcatchers, which inspired the name of the app. Dreamcatchers are Native American handmade nets that were believed to be able to give people good dreams. I also had the idea to combine these two ideas into a object that hung above a person's bed, like the a dreamcatcher, and was able to record the persons dream when they woke up.

Process

My original idea was to create a physical alarm clock that would unlock a notepad when the alarm went off but I decided against this because it did not seem feasible and then decided to create an app because I use my phone as an alarm and would be able to test the prototype myself. I also chose to create an app because it was technology I was already familiar with and would be able to prototype with quickly.

Questions

After this prototype there were a few questions that remained:

How much do we really value our dreams?

Are the memories we have of our dreams reliable?

Does it matter if our memories of our dreams are reliable?

Reflection

While the technical implementation was successful, the experiment was not as successful as I wanted because I did not have clear enough dreams to remember in the mornings. I think if I were to do this again I would have to use the app for longer so that I could actually see if I was able to remember more dreams as time went on.

References

Base Code for iOS clock App: https://github.com/natsu1211/Alarm-ios-swift

William W. Gaver, Andrew Boucher, Sarah Pennington, and Brendan Walker. 2004. Cultural probes and the value of uncertainty. interactions 11, 5 (September 2004), 53-56. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1015530.1015555