How it works
What happens to a dream after you stop recording, which ideas each kind of analysis comes from, and where Unsomnia deliberately stops.
The recording is saved the moment you stop, even with no signal. Nothing about recording depends on the internet.
When you’ve agreed to it and you’re online, the audio goes to Whisper (run by Groq, with Cloudflare as a backup). Your words come back within seconds, before the analysis.
Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, reads the transcript with what it already knows about your journal: your recurring people, your symbols, your check-ins. It writes a title, a short summary, the scenes, and each lens’s observations.
The dream arrives with its painting and joins the patterns. Recordings made in the dead of night wait quietly until you open the app in the morning.
Before any lens says anything, every analysed dream gets the same plain groundwork.
They come from research programmes that make different, sometimes incompatible claims about what dreams are. We don’t pretend they agree. You choose how deep to go after your first dream, and can change it any time.
Empirical content analysis: Hall & Van de Castle (1966), G. William Domhoff.
Always onWhat recurs and what’s trending: your recurring people and places, emotional arc, dream signs. Pure observation.
“Water has come up in three dreams this week, above your usual one.”
Domhoff’s continuity tradition and your own associative work.
On unless you choose “Just patterns”When something keeps appearing, Unsomnia asks what it means to you. From then on, your words ground every analysis. It compounds: the longer you use it, the more it’s about you.
“You’ve said water is ‘the fear of drowning, age seven’. It appears here, calmer than before.”
Ernest Hartmann, Boundaries in the Mind (1991) and Dreams and Nightmares (1998).
On with “Show all lenses”How sharply the dream keeps things apart: do characters blend, settings jump, feelings run high? A thick-to-thin score, framed as texture, never as a deficiency.
“Your boundary score has thinned over four weeks, from 0.42 to 0.61. This is sometimes seen in emotionally intense periods.”
C. G. Jung, Collected Works 9i, and post-Jungian revisions (Rowland, Samuels, Young-Eisendrath).
On with “Show all lenses”, after the gateRecurring figures read through Jung’s vocabulary: shadow, persona, mentor, trickster, the vulnerable child, the self, the complementary figure. A starting vocabulary, not a closed list. Gated behind your own associations (see below).
“Because you’ve said the man in grey is ‘who I’m afraid of becoming’, Jung’s idea of the shadow may fit. Does it?”
Domhoff’s continuity hypothesis; Hartmann’s emotional-concern variant.
On with “Show all lenses”An optional weekly check-in (three short, skippable questions) lets Unsomnia notice when the emotional tone of your dreams echoes what’s on your mind. Feelings, not surface coincidences.
“You mentioned changing jobs two months ago. The ‘wrong meeting, unprepared’ dreams started that week.”
The methodological gate
Pop psychology tends to start with “water means emotion”. Jung did the reverse: the dreamer’s own associations first, the universal amplifications after. Unsomnia follows his order, and enforces it.
The pattern lens notices that a stranger in grey has turned up in six dreams.
Unsomnia asks, once: “Anything come to mind?” You answer in your own words, or don’t.
With your association in hand, the Jungian lens may offer a reading, always as a question you can reject. Reject it often enough and the lens switches itself off.
The Insights “Numbers” section shows Hall–Van de Castle measures across your own journal: familiar characters, friendliness and aggression per character, how often you’re on the receiving end, misfortunes, indoor settings. There’s also an optional threat-simulation view, after Antti Revonsuo’s theory that dreams rehearse responses to danger.
Published norms differ by age, gender, culture and decade, and we don’t ask for any of those. So Unsomnia never tells you that you’re above or below “average”.
Safety
Some dreams replay something painful. Interpreting them can do harm, so Unsomnia is designed to do less, not more.
If you need to talk to someone now, findahelpline.com lists free services in your country.
Unsomnia is a journaling tool, not a medical device, therapy or a diagnostic instrument. It does not assess, diagnose or treat any condition.