The Dreamcatcher: Interactive Storytelling of Dreams

Sleep scientists have extensively validated the continuity hypothesis, according to which our dreams reflect what happens during our waking life. Yet, only a few attempts have been made to increase the general public’s awareness about the benefits of dream analysis in better understanding and improving our daily life. We designed “The Dreamcatcher,” an interactive visual tool that explores the link between dreams and waking life through a collection of dream reports. We conducted a user study with 154 participants and found a 25% increase in the number of people believing that dream analysis can improve our daily lives after interacting with our tool. The visualization informed people about the potential of the continuity hypothesis to a surprising extent, to the point that it increased their concerns about sharing their own dream reports, thus opening new questions on how to design privacy-aware tools for dream collection.