Whether you want to remember more dreams, understand your weird dreams, or have lucid dreams, there are many reasons why you may want to start keeping a dream journal. It's a very powerful practice that can help with well-being, emotion management, creativity, and much more.
There are many apps out there that can help with dream journaling, dream interpretation, or lucid dreaming. It can be hard to know which one is best for you, so let’s cover a few popular ones!
There are many apps that help people do more with their dreams, and they're divided into a few categories.
A dream journaling app focuses on helping you record your dreams. Those kinds of apps will offer various features to keep a dream journal, from simple text writing to special fields, voice recording, and more.
The cool thing about using a dream journaling app versus a paper journal is that you can classify your dreams, organize the elements (the people for instance), and search back in your dreams later on. This allows you to have much more precise analytics from your dreams, find patterns, and gain insights from them.
Lucid dreaming apps focus on helping you have lucid dreams, and they may come in different flavors. Often, those apps will include famous lucid dreaming techniques such as Reality Checks, Wake Back to Bed, WILD, etc…
To help with such techniques, those apps will often include tools such as night alarms, reminders, audio tracks, and more. In addition, since dream journaling is an important practice for lucid dreaming, those apps will also include some kind of dream journal, although it may not be as advanced as the apps dedicated to that.
A third type of app that’s also quite important, is the dream analysis apps. Those apps aim at helping you interpret or analyze your dreams. While this really depends on your beliefs regarding dreams, we generally advise to stay away from dream dictionaries, and instead go towards apps that help you take your context into account, for a more personal and precise analysis.
Now that we defined those categories, let's dive in and see some cool dream apps!
Oniri is one of the oldest apps related to dreams, the first version dating back to 2015. While the app was exclusively on iOS for a long time, it was recently released on Android as well. It is developed by a small team based in Switzerland.
Oniri is one of the very few apps that is all of the above categories, at the same time. While the app is, at its core, a dream journaling app, it expanded to include many more features related to dream analysis or lucid dreaming. The app takes a scientific approach to dream practices, as it's been developed in collaboration with neuroscience labs.
Oniri’s design is beautiful and the experience of using it just feels magical. It has one of the most advanced dream journaling interface, with everything you would expect and more: voice recording, emotions classification, elements database, and many other fields. You can even generate an image from your dream using AI, which takes the experience to a whole new level.
Oniri also features a good amount of lucid dreaming techniques, tools for dream analysis, PDF journal export, code protection, and more. Overall, it's probably the most complete dream app on the market.
The Android version is still in beta and is missing some key features, like voice recording. The app also doesn't have a social panel for people to share and exchange about their dreams.
Oniri comes with a free plan that lets you write down as many dreams as you want, and a premium plan ($48 per year with a free trial) that gives you access to lucid dreaming features, dream analysis, and more.
Dreambook is a dream journaling app that also features dream interpretation with a large database of objects, themes and places. You can use this diary to write down your dreams, and interpret them using the app's large repository of interpretations.
This dream journal app allows you to add hashtags to your dreams, allowing you to use them like tags and filter your dreams. You could for example find all the dreams that contain a #Mountain, if that is a hashtag you used.
There is a character limit on dreams, that can prevent you from writing down your full dream, if there are a lot of details you'd like to remember. Additionally, at least one hashtag per dream is required, which can be annoying for people who don't want to use that feature.
Dreambook comes with a one-month free trial, followed by either a $2/month subscription or $10/year to get access to the full dream database.
Awoken is the most downloaded lucid dreaming app on Android, with over 500'000 downloads. Is it developed by a single developer, Andreas Rudolph. This is most likely the oldest lucid dreaming app on Android, having been released nearly ten years ago.
Awoken's power really comes from the many lucid dreaming techniques included in the app: totem sounds, dream clues, reality checks, and more. It's an easy way to get closer to having lucid dreams.
Awoken's design is really frustrating at times. It's very practical and lacks the roundness and kindness you'd want to have in an app right after waking up. It takes a while to understand where to click and what is what.
The app comes with a free trial of three days, followed by either a free plan with ads, or a paid plan with a low price of $1.99 for a lifetime premium account, that contains no ads, and offers a Speech-to-text capability.
This iOS app is also one of the oldest and more popular dream journaling apps. While the design is also very basic, it's still maintained and offer some cool features.
The dream journal is basic but straightforward and easy to use. The statistics are detailed and show you many key numbers. The app supports many languages, including German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, and more.
The app doesn’t offer lucid dreaming or dream analysis features, it’s only a dream journal. While the Pro version is cheaper than other apps, the Free version quickly show its limits and you’ll have to upgrade if you really want to keep a proper dream journal.
The app is free, but comes with a Pro version which is a one-time purchase of $14. The Pro version is required to access features such as code protection, journal export, or some dream journaling fields.
As the name suggests, this app focuses on dream journaling and dream interpretation. It's one of the most downloaded app on Android, with over 500K downloads.
This app supports many languages, including Polish, Turkish, Russian, and Spanish. It also contains a large dream dictionary, that can simply be searched through by using specific keywords, one is interested in.
As said above, dream dictionaries are quite limited and they should be taken with caution; many dream scientists advocate against them, due to their generic nature. The interpretations offered by the app can be quite esoteric, which may or may not be what you're looking for.
Also, cloud synchronization is a paid feature, which makes the free version quite risky, because you may lose all your data if you lose your device.
The app comes with a free trial of three days, followed by either a free plan with ads, or a paid plan with a low price of $1.99 for a lifetime premium account, that contains no ads, and offers a Speech-to-text capability.
There are many dream apps for you to explore! Feel free to try a few ones out and go with the one you like best. We wish you a good dream exploration journey! If you're interested, here's a list of the best dream interpretation apps and the best health records apps.
