A quiet room at 3 AM, and the same room with the curtains open.

Everything else in the app can be clever. The thirty seconds after you wake can’t. Recording must work in under five seconds, half asleep, offline, with nothing to decide.

So the recorder opens first, stays dim, saves on stop and has no save button. Its controls fade so a fumbled tap can’t end the recording, and discarding takes a slide, not a tap.

Nobody can tell you what a single dream means, and we won’t try. What we can do is count honestly across hundreds of them: who returns, where, with what feeling, and how that changes.

A count is something you can check. An interpretation is something you have to take on trust. We lead with the first.

Water means what you say it means. When something keeps appearing, the app asks once what it means to you, and from then on your words shape every analysis.

Archetypes come last, only after that work, and only as a question. That isn’t a cautious product decision; it’s Jung’s own order, which most pop-Jung reverses.

Every observation carries its lens: Hall–Van de Castle, Hartmann, Jung, Domhoff. They come from traditions that disagree about what dreams even are. We say so rather than blending them into one confident voice.

Use what’s useful. Switch off what isn’t. A plain journal with only patterns is a perfectly good way to use Unsomnia.

The app has two skies. Recording happens under a night sky: dim plum, warm cream text, one glowing microphone, never pure white. Browsing happens under a day sky that follows your phone, and stays dark late at night.

Between them is a dawn that plays once, after you record, outside the night. At 3 AM it waits until you ask.

“A blue staircase. That’s all I remember.” That is a dream worth keeping. Recall grows with practice, and the half-images are where it starts.

The app says so out loud, on the recorder and in the journal, so nobody stops recording because they think they didn’t remember enough.

Dreams aren’t a habit to gamify. There are no streaks, no badges, no “you missed a day”. Notifications are off by default; we can’t think of a time that’s a good moment to wake someone.

When there’s something real to show you, like a figure that has returned for the third time, we show it in the journal. When there isn’t, we say nothing.

Some people come to a dream journal because of recurring nightmares. Reading archetypes into trauma can re-open it, so on those dreams the interpretive lenses step aside on their own.

What stays is what helps: honest patterns you can take to a therapist, and a quiet path to help that is always there and never pushy.

No feed, no likes, no sharing. A dream journal is the most private thing on your phone, and building it that way is a design decision, not a setting.

We name the companies that process your dreams, what they’re contractually not allowed to do, and how to delete everything.

An AI picture of your nightmare makes the worst image literal and claims to know what you saw. Instead, each dream gets a quiet detail from a real painting: a sky, a river, a garden.

Chosen for colour and mood, credited to its artist and museum, and never pretending to explain anything.