The art
Every dream deserves something beautiful to sit under.
In Unsomnia each dream carries a detail of a real painting from the open collections of the world’s museums. Hand-picked, credited, and never generated.
Why paintings, and why not AI
A dream journal fills with grey cards fast. We wanted each night to look like a collection worth keeping, without pretending to show what you saw.
Generated “dream images” do exactly that: they make the most vivid, sometimes the worst, part of a dream literal, they send your dream to another company, and they look like every other app. Old paint has a texture and an authority that nothing generated has.
How the library is chosen
Hundreds of works from the open-access collections of The Met, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rijksmuseum, the Finnish National Gallery, the Smithsonian and others. Every crop follows the same rules.
- Places and weather: skies, water, mountains, gardens, textiles. People are never the subject.
- No violence, death or battle, even stylised.
- No devotional figures or objects, and never a depiction of the Prophet.
- No legible script or seals, so nothing on your dream can be misread.
- No Orientalist or colonial scenes.
- A dream that looks like a recurring nightmare gets a soft colour wash instead of a painting.
A few from the collection
Public domain (CC0)
How it works in the app
- The painting is chosen once, when the dream is analysed, and stays the same on every device.
- Don’t like it? Swipe the header for the next one. Swipe back to return to the original.
- Tap the painting to see its title and artist; one more tap for the museum label.
- Late at night the art is dimmed, so it never glares in a dark room.