5 Dreamy Apps for Lucid Dreaming and So Much More "Dreams – they feel real while we're in them, right? It's only when you wake up you realize you were actually dreaming". From lucid dreaming to helping you track and induce sleep, here's our favorite 5 picks
By Rustam Singh
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Dreams essentially have no meaning, and anyone who says otherwise is a con artist looking to nick you of your money. Spiritual, astrological or religious beliefs aside, dreams are a rejuvenating experience to replenish our brain's creative power, problem solving potential, mood and integrate thoughts in a fantasy safe place. Since dreams mainly occur in the rapid-eye movement (REM) stage of sleep—when brain activity is high and resembles that of being awake, several apps are tapping into the experience to make your experience better.
Whether you're looking for a more sound sleep or trying to enter a state of consciousness while dreaming (or lucid dreaming), here are top 5 apps that claim to work for a dreamy experience:
Theme for a dream
Dream:ON is exclusively available for iOS platform only, the app works to help you select what theme of a dream you desire to pursue, monitors your movement throughout the night and plays an ambient background soundtrack at the right moment in your sleep cycle. You can also cycle the lucid version to allow yourself be conscious while you're dreaming. An intelligent alarm which deciding on your sleep pattern will wake you in thirty minutes before your schedule alarm time, and the ability to record your dreams the moment you wake up with the memories still fresh make the app interesting to check out. Wow! That's really something!
Augmented Reality
The official Inception app (based on the movie) contains never-heard-before soundtracks from Hans Zimmer, and has praise from Christopher Nolan himself. Using augmented reality, the app requires you to wear headphones with an attached microphone, so it's perfect for when you're trying to sleep while travelling or if you have the odd habit of sleeping with earphones plugged in. It utilizes the ambient background sounds of your life to augment into the truly inception experience, where you'd feel like you've entered a reverb echo-inducing world. Try plugging it into a doc while sleeping and your sleep with never be the same again, dreams are amazingly vivid. The app has received critical acclaim is a must try for everyone.
Soothing raindrops
Rainy Mood is a very simple app that does exactly what the name suggests – includes a repetitive but realistic loop of rain in the background. Best experienced when you've plugged it in your speakers before sleeping, you can adjust the sound of rain pouring as well as thunder, so it adds a soothing background noise of a rainy day to your sleep. You can even run your favorite music alongside, which sounds even better with rain.
Insomniac friendly
Claiming to be the first actual app that actually helps you sleep, Sleep Genius is perfect for insomniacs. Key features include a gradual alarm that is decided within 30 minutes of your desired wake up time using gentle 5 wake up cycles, ad free, multiple alarm cycle tunes and the ability to log and share your sleep patterns weekly.
Urban noise to help you sleep
If you're spoilt by an urban upbringing and some static noise in the background is necessary for you to fall asleep, look no further. White Noise has perfectly looped sound samples include air conditioner sounds, airplane travel, jungle, fan, beach waves, rain on a tent, crickets chirping, grandfather clock, Tibetan singing bowl and several others to choose from. While it may sound silly if you've never fallen asleep using a similar app, they can get addictive very soon.
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