Shadow is an alarm clock app for your phone that gently wakes you up and asks you to describe your dreams. Using speech-to-text technology, the software then catalogs the places, people and things you’ve dreamt about and adds them to its database. Think of it like a Fitbit for your subconscious, tracking the steps you take through the darkest corners of your mind.
The endgame, according to Shadow creator Hunter Lee Soik, is to build a data set that will do for our collective psyche what Google Maps has done for terra firma. “It’s something that people often don’t even look at themselves,” says Soik. “We’re interested in turning the quantified self towards the understood self.”
