Shadow App
Founders Hunter Lee Soik and Jason Carvalho hope to build a community and track global dream themes
Apparently 95% of dreams are forgotten—if they’re not recorded—just after waking up. That means one-third of our lives is lost within the subconscious. With SHADOW, co-founders Hunter Lee Soik and Jason Carvalho are attempting to do more than reclaim that time. Their Kickstarter-proposed multi-device application wants to harness your dreams the moment you wake, and build a web of global dream behaviors and themes.
Launching today, 17 September 2013, the campaign hopes to raise money to “use technology to make people more human,” explains Lee Soik. A creative consultant and experience designer, he sees a direct correlation between his profession and his aspirations for SHADOW: “In experience design, it is my job to see the future and then make things possible.” Two elements lead to SHADOW’s inception, and the technological developments were the first. “There are seven sensors in the iPhone that act as tracking devices. At no other time have we been able to record so easily.” Lee Soik explains further, “Big data has never been more viable than in the last few years. It is now capable of pulling things together on the data layer and the server layer.”
SHADOW asks the question: What would happen if we remember? And with the presently unharnessed data from our life behind closed eyes, Lee Soik and Carvalho are seeking to create a kind of dream ecosystem. The app begins as an alarm clock, featuring a series of escalating alarm sounds that have the ability to seamlessly blend into your sleep cycles. They transition you into and out of hypnopompic sleep and then waking life. You can then immediately record your dreams via a voice recorder or text field—there are even optional questions designed to encourage remembering. You can use this to chart common themes in your own dreamworld, or allow this dream content to become communal; to be shared as part of a worldwide user-base. SHADOW’s ecosystem can anonymously contextualize your dream themes within society and culture, while leveraging data analysis developed through an advisory board of PhDs and scientists. SHADOW proposes many questions over the undiscovered world of dreams, questions that we occasionally consider as dreamers—and this app might just be the best way to get a collective answer.
Contributors to Kickstarter get advanced access to the application. For those donating $100 or more, SHADOW is delivering a unique incentive: If you dictate one of your dreams, they will create a custom 3D audio-print—a spindle of your subconscious imagination.
Images courtesy of SHADOW
