Case study: how to help people saving, sharing and understanding their dreams (pt 1/2).

10 min readMar 3, 2019

I had a dream…but I forgot it.

Isle od the Dead, Arnold Böcklin, third version, 1883

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
(Kubla Khan or A vision in a dream: a fragment from the poem of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1797).

Why do we dream?

I remember with sort of emotion when I told my mother my first nightmare: a dark figure stole my games and took them far away, in an high tower, and I couldn’t go to take them back. But was it really my first nightmare ever? Scientists would answer that it wasn’t, ’cause we are supposed to start dreaming when we aren’t even born. Later I experimented many kinds of dream, in some of them I sleepwalked and talked and, when older, I started to experiment lucid dreams. When I was studying cinema, I red this sentence of Federico Fellini, the movie director:

Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.

For my first personal project, I decided to work on a way to improve the dreaming experience and help people all over the world to save, understand, share and also take inspiration from dreams, ’cause they are a free, rich, continuous yet mysterious activity that science didn’t understand completely yet. But more than this, because they can help us understanding the deep mystery of our inner self and our brain.

Into the deep research

Desk Research

My research started by looking for scientific datas on the internet, and here’s the result of my first look at the situation:

on average, we sleep around 24 years in a lifetime and we experience around 6 years of dream;
most of what we remember about our dreams happens in a phase called R.E.M. (Rapid Eye Movement) which occupies 20% of our sleep;
there are universal dreams, which consist in dreams that all people have in their life (like losing teeth);
dreams are responsible for many of the greatest inventions of humankind. Google is one of the most famous examples;
it seems like many times in history people dreamt with things that happened lately. For example, according to Abraham Lincoln’s friend, Ward Hill Lamon, the President dreamt with the assassination of a President some days before he was killed;
scientists say that keeping a dream diary help our creativity;
we all dream, but most of the time we don’t remember them;
we still can’t say scientifically why do we dream.

First recollection of concepts

So, when I recollected enough general information about dreams I decided to divide the object of my study in its most important parts to see how were I going to move on and which aspects of dreaming interested me the most.

My work was in Spanish, and so are the texts of most of my research. I made myself some questions and looked for the answers. I also started to focus on some concepts: dreams recording, dreams understanding, dreams sharing, dream controlling, and using dreams to increase our daily creativity.

The Benchmark

I did a Benchmark exploring informations and comments about the following apps: Dream:ON, DreamZ, The Ultimate Dream Journal and Lucid Dreamer.
I focused on apps that were supposed to be used mainly as a dream journal, which is in my opinion the most important part of the proposal, `cause it’s basic to remember and collect dreams to work on them, but these apps could also give you other opportunities like practicing lucid dream. The red spaces were opportunities to walk through new grounds of the use of people’s dreams.

The survey

I made a survey in Italian and shared it. In one day, I reached 260 persons all around and received their answers about their dreaming.

I discovered that:

more than 60% of people remember at least one dream per week as they wake up;
only half of people tell their dreams to someone, but everybody likes to hear other people’s dreams sometimes. It could mean they like the idea of sharing dream but they need a specific context to do it;

family and friends are the most common subject of their dreams;
80% of people said that something they dreamed about happened lately;
83% of them experienced lucid dreams;

80% of people would like to know about lucid dreams techniques, and 58,8% of them would like to try to use them to be able to control their dreams. 3,1% of them use them already (8 persons);

85,5% of people would like to know more about dreams and to receive help to understand them. 11,8% say maybe, so just a 3,7% of people are not really interested in knowing more about dreams;

when asked if they use some techniques to remember and save their dreams, 47% of people answer “I try but I’m not able to do it”. This answer goes straight to the paint point and reflects the need to create the best alternative of dream journal we can do with technologies.

Persona, Scenario and User Journey

With the answers, I also received a lot of private messages by people I know but also by people I don’t know, asking me for more informations about the research, the possibility to receive some help with their dreams understanding, an unknown woman told me she always dreams with unpleasant things she doesn’t understand, another woman said her husband doesn’t like to talk with her about her dreams but she loves to, a guy asked me if I could please explain him why does he dream so much with his father. I got inspiration in two of them to create two personas, and so I wrote a scenario for each and an user journey in which they first go to sleep, than they experience a dream and, waking up, think about their dream and try to keep a feeling, a meaning or a memory of it.

The first one is called Sara, and she dreams about love:

The climax of the journey is right in the dream, which is described with the colour yellow. Sara is an actress and writer, so she could use her strong dream activity to inspire herself, she just doesn’t know exactly how.

The other character is called Gino, and he dreams a lot with his dead father:

Gino wants to keep close his memories of his father, but he use no techniques to help or record his dreaming. He is kind of lazy, so he would need a very easy solution.

In both journeys I decided to think about opportunities not only when I detected pain points but also when they are happy. Since we tend to forget our dreams, the moment we reach the happiest dreams is when my product should work at its best to help keeping the memory.

Insights

Now, using scenarios a user journeys, I made some insights for both, and then some other insights I detected from the survey:

Insights prioritization

So many insights, but now what am I gonna do with this?
When you have too many post-it in front of you, or too many insights of users, you should make a prioritizing exercise.
In this case I decide to order the insights for satisfaction of the user and importance of the problem in relation to our case study. The more important and less satisfactory for the user were most likely the best insights. So, by this I selected some insights off the bunch.

I lately cleaned a little more, because some insights were a little similar so I could rewrite them and make one insight from two. I ended up with five final insights.

How Might We?

Turning insights to question, I got five how might we, questions that could make you solve the problem, and I could go on searching for an answer for each.

The green one is the centric one: how could we reduce the maximum the time you need to record your dream as you wake up?
Reducing that time means being able to remember more informations and creating a better dream journal.

I gave an answer to each HMW:

Another way of ideating: ideas explosion

I had so many ideas from the insights, the benchmark, the interviews, that I decided to write them down and make them pass to some process.
I will call this ideas explosion because I literally filled the screen with ideas about feelings of the users related to their dreams, needs and desires they expressed, and possible characteristics of the product that could give them a better experience. Down, in violet, I wrote some questions about the competition that helped me during the benchmark and that could have helped me formulating more ideas about my future product.

MoSCow

MoSCoW is a prioritization technique that helps classifying ideas. The name comes from the four different areas in which we will put our post-its: Must have, Should Have, Could Have and Won’t Have.

So, the blue will represent the ideas that have to be in the app, the green ideas that should really be part of it for me but that are not as fundamental as the blue, red represents interesting ideas that could find a place but should come later and yellow represents those ideas that could even work but are not ready yet for the prototype.

So now that I had the ideas divided in colours, I made another prioritization: down the green horizontal line, ideas are classified from less to more useful, and by the red vertical line ideas are classified from less to more innovator.

Connecting ideas between them

When you have many ideas all together for just one product, a part of prioritizing them to select the most important, you should even try to connect them and see if there is a link that can put many ideas in a unique concept. I did it right after the graphic on top.
This is my result: I didn’t select yellow post-it, and some ideas stayed outside.
The red line shows the most important connection of things, which is about how to record dreams. The blue one is about sharing dreams and scientific studies, which is also very important to develop my product.

Business Model Canvass

I made a semi-visual Business model canvass with the same style of the research. Here I recollected all the aspects of the product.

Value Proposition

The functional value propositions are two because I made one regarding the dream itself for the users, which is the main argument of the research, and another one for the scientific community and dreams’ study.
I suppose that collecting so many good quality datas of human dreams, dreams’ study would evolve naturally.