Thread: I've almost finished my lucid dreaming iPhone App. What do you think?

I'm making a really simple dream journal for iPhone that does a couple of things (apart from letting you journal, of course):

-It's the only journal I've seen that lets you track your lucid dreams. It shows you how many dreams you've recorded, how many were lucid and what % of your dreams have been lucid, to give you a goal to work towards.

-Instead of entering dream signs for each dream you have, just search for a word and it tells you how often it shows up in your dreams.

-Customizable reality check timer. This is my favourite because I never remember to do my checks.

-Passcode lock.

-Free!

I used to lucid dream a lot, and I wanted to get back into it. Unfortunately, when I was looking for an iPhone app for journalling, I realised they all sucked. So I started making my own, and I thought I should get back on to this forum (it's been probably 4 years since I used to post here) and see what the community thinks.

I wanted to avoid the gimmicky stuff like sleep charts and WILD aids, and just stick to what I'm good at, which is in-it-for-the-long-haul, reality-checks-and-DILDing lucid dreaming. If you think you'd enjoy my app, let me know what you think and how I could improve it.

Should be on the App Store after Christmas.

(If you want to know when it's ready, I'm on Twitter. Search nathantesler)

This would be AWESOME. I forget to do reality checks as well. Does this have an audio recording function? That would be helpful if i'm waking up after a LD and am tired. My dream recalling is fairly poor, so I would forget most of the dream if i were to type it.

Yeah, my typing is pretty shady in the mornings. The iPhone 4S has a dictate button on the keyboard, so you can just talk instead of type. Unfortunately I don't have one, but if you do you can use it in the app.

Ooh, sounds very nice. Good luck making it, and keep us posted. Have you thought of a name for the app yet?

I like to keep the names pretty simple. At the moment I'm calling it "Dreamer". It's not brilliant but it gets the point across.

If you've got any ideas I'd love to hear them!

This is a similar app for inducing lucid dreaming but works using the accelerometer and timers to figure out whether you are in REM sleep or not -

itunes.apple.com/us/app/dream-alarm/id486371176?ls=1&mt=8

I would say our apps are quite unrelated.

I think you should call it "dream journal+" or "DJ PRO", I think the first one is better, I would totally buy this app, I use my notes on iPhone to make a dream journal, but I think this would be so much cooler

What about calling it "DreamBuddy" since it helps you keep track of your dreams.

Call it dream journal, this would get you a lot more customers. Especially if there are indeed no other dream journals out there.

As for dream journaling on a mobile phone, it's a major pain. I would expect that people are still going to be writing on paper for the next foreseeable future. The less text entry you will require, the more participation you will get. Maybe you can provide a list of common tags and then let the user select a tag from a slot machine like picker.

Originally Posted by Ev

Call it dream journal, this would get you a lot more customers. Especially if there are indeed no other dream journals out there.

As for dream journaling on a mobile phone, it's a major pain. I would expect that people are still going to be writing on paper for the next foreseeable future. The less text entry you will require, the more participation you will get. Maybe you can provide a list of common tags and then let the user select a tag from a slot machine like picker.

I might be the minority, but I write my dreams in my iPod touch browser, straight into my DV dream journal. I agree with you on the tags thing though.

Ev, I disagree about paper. Now that the new iPhone has voice dictation, I think the majority of people will eventually be switching over to some sort of electronic way of recording their dreams. Apart from the fact that my handwriting is awful, the advantages of journalling electronically are huge. Just for starters, the app is passcode locked and really easily searchable. You can't really do that with paper.

I'm pretty confident it's going to be a much better experience. We'll see if I can convert you to digital once it's released...

I do have a lucid dreaming app for iPhone published, and it even has a dream journal. I just find it difficult to type there, the speed is really slow compared to the keyboard, and the eyes are on the keys rather than on the text. This is a completely different experience from typing on a computer. Voice dictation is lousy, especially for complicated multi- segment dreams where I might recall what was happening in a previous episode half way through writing the current one. It takes a single arrow to show how the sequence goes. If I'll try to dictate the same thing, it will create a mess.

I"m not against electronic dream journaling, there are indeed many benefits. What I'm saying is that the technology for this is not good enough yet to fully embrace it. there are still layers of hassle that a user has to go through.

Sounds pretty awesome, you should post some pictures for us.