Case study to help people saving, sharing and understanding their dreams (pt 2/2).
Mr Sandman, bring us a dream!
Read the part 1 if you didn’t.
Once upon a time, I, Zhuāngzǐ, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuāngzǐ. Soon I awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.
Dream of the Butterfly, Zhuāngzǐ.
To die, to sleep — to sleep, perchance to dream
Ay, there’s the rub, for in this sleep of death what dreams may come…
Shakespear, Hamlet
This project has been very intense for me, as I suffered the loss of both my grandparents while I was working on it.
Carlo Rizzo and Bruna Betteghella died age 92 and 89, with three days of distance, after 71 years of life together and sincere love.
I moved back to Italy to give them the last goodbye. My mother told me he was telling them about dreams he was having in his last days in the hospital. He couldn’t even move from the bed, but in his dreams he walked in a forest, he also saw his mother and some of his daughters again.
I was very impressed by the meaning dreams were taking in my mind in the right moment, and their extreme power. A paralysed could walk, a blind could see, an old person could be young again and play. Dreams were, in his last days, my grandad’s escape from his situation, there he could run the golden fields and dance down a pale moon, with no worries at all.
Back to the project and out of time
I went back to Barcelona after a devastating week, when all the other projects were almost finished and I had no more time to ideate, prototype and test mine, but I wanted at least to come to a general conclusion after my research.
Naming — Sandman
I remembered a book I had when I was a child, it was called L’Omino della Sabbia, which is the translation of The Sandman.
The Sandman is a famous character of nordic folklore who comes to people’s bedroom at night and throw magic sand in their eyes to give them dreams. I decided that Sandman would’ve been the name of my app, in memory of that book I really loved, and because I wanted to create a sort of “dream helper”, so the character would’ve fit pretty good.
As the idea was to generate a Voice User Interface, it seemed also appropriated to use a name like “Sandman” to activate the voice and talk with the chatbot.
Also, according to the iconic old song, I thought that user would’ve used “Mr Sandman, bring me a dream!” to activate one of the most important features of the app, the Dreamscape, which would permit you generate an audio that will play during your sleep to guide you into specific dream. It is proven by different tests with users that playing a soundscape to tested people while dreaming helped them dream with things related with those sounds.
Logo and aesthetic
I made a pretty rapid logo which represents a closed eye that receives the magic sand of the Sandman. Actually, the eye is represented by the moon, that specifically recalls night and sleep.
I also established that purple, dark grey and beige would be the best colours for my purpose of app.
- purple is the best colour to represent dreams in my opinion, because it represents mystery, unknown, inner self, spiritual things;
- dark grey, almost black, is the dark and the night, but it is also a smart colour that would add simplicity to the general look;
- beige, in a variant closer to old papers, is inspired by the images Iworked with during the research, and makes me think about old paper dream journals that people used to keep secret in their bedrooms. It also gives the idea of vintage, of memories and nostalgia.
I also decided to use the work of Hollie Chastain, an artist working and living in Chattanooga, Tenessee, because I used to get inspired by her work and it always gave me that typical dreamy feeling, since she mixes old photos and colourful images in amazing collages of people in surreal situations. The app would have her art in it to improve the general feeling and generate a coherent look & feel.
A bit of screens of Sandman with explication
I couldn’t really call this my prototype, I didn’t have the time to make wireframes and so I directly tried to put together my ideas in a general vision of an app.
The first page would allow you to log in with Facebook, Google or with your own account, or create one.
I put together the main imagine. The moon is a continuous element in the app, and the sand in the eye is center to create a brand identity.
The Dream Journal
The dream journal is the place where the user would keep saved and recollected all his dreams. It would also have a public wall,, like a Dream Newspaper.
By clicking on “My journal” the user would be linked directly to his personal diary, and could add or modify any story, a part of searching for a specific dream in any moment.
By clicking on “Public dreams”, he would be linked to the social part of the dream experience, where he could read other user’s dreams.
In the journal people can write, record voice and tell, sing a melody they dreamed about, draw things they couldn’t describe, add songs and images, video and links to things they consider related to their dreams. Also, they can search from the dream to the most similar public dream in the system, and discover if someone dreamt with something related, but also search for the most similar news on the internet, and try to see if something similar ever happened in the world.
Another possibility of the diary is represented by the identikit. The identikit permits the user to generate the face of people he dreamed about but he couldn’t say who they are. He can publish the identikit in the dream and share the dream. When a dream has an identikit in it, people will see it with a different colour. If the user want to find the person he dreamed with, this is a pretty nice and funny way to try out.
This splash screen would explain the user how to use the dream journal the first they would use it.
The Dreamscape
The dreamscape gives the user the possibility to generate soundscapes that he would use while sleeping to enter in specific dreams. He could choose between all his files, apps soundscapes and all the web links, so he could mix a specific song with the sound, for example, a solitary beach, and the voice of his mother from Whatsapp audios. He could keep pressed the moon to register his voice, so he could use the voice command “Mr Sandman, bring me a dream”
to start talking with a voicebot.
As the system recognise the command, Sandman asks the user what does he want to dream whit, so he would use keywords related to soundscapes, apps from which Sandman should search an audio or a song, and then Sandman would casually mix it together.
At night, Sandman would control body’s movement with sensors so he would notice when the user has fallen in deep sleep and it would play the audio. Also, user could decide to switch off the sensors and just use a timer to play it while sleeping. If the sensor is on, it can register voices if the user speak, so he would discover if he talked while sleeping.
When the user turn off the alarm, Sandman asks him if he had any dream, and register in the diary if the user says “yes”.
This splash screen shows the user how the Dreamscape works.
Statistics
The third section is completely dedicated to statistics.
When a user saves a dream he also tag emotions that he felt in his dreams. In this part of the app the user will find all graphics of his monthly emotional changes in dreams, will see with images if his dream have patrons that repeat themselves, will also see what does he dream more often about, and will be able to compare all his personal dream data with the rest of users.
The system will show them at any time who is the most similar dreamer using the app, so the user will be able to contact people with similar dream profile and connect with new people thanks to his way to dream. This could also help people to talk about their dreams with others, and try to understand their way something about their dreams.
Statistics will also help people receive scientific answers. In the general statistics there will be scientific articles people will be able to read, and shared dreams will be studied and used by science to help understand people dreaming activity.
Conclusion and considerations
I couldn’t have the time to do more than this, and I couldn’t test this because it was too incomplete to be shown to users. But It was incredible how people got interested in the survey, and they showed through all the process the will to know more. It seems pretty evident that people need to know more about their dreams.
Maybe, as I take a bit of relax from the Bootcamp I will use some of my time to prototype and test Sandman. Meanwhile I can say I would’ve loved my grandparents to have used this app in time, to be able to go back all the time to their shared dreams, and search “Marcello” to see if they ever dreamt about me. But they surely did, as I dreamt a lot about them in time.
Dreams are and will always be a huge opportunity to all humankind to know more about ourselves, to get deeper inside our mind, and to see how incredible our brain works. Once Borges said:
All art is perhaps a form of dream.
and well, I think we all can see what did he mean. Dreams are a space of connexion between us and our deepest nature, and beyond it, we can be liquid like water, solid like a rock, light as a feather, and still, beyond it all, out of time, in dreams we can see things as they never were, as they will never be, we can see the unseen, and we can talk the unspoken words of a miserable lifetime.
This last song at the end of the article, composed by Franz Listz, is called Liebestraum, which means Dream of Love. I dedicate it to the life and dreams of nonno Carlo Rizzo and nonna Bruna Betteghella, with love.
