Some pertinent background on a project called Shadow, which by means of a free app, available in December, intends to archive the dreams of people around the world: Hunter Lee Soik, the project’s founder, who is thirty-one, was born in Korea and adopted when he was two and a half by a couple in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. In 2000, after high school, he moved to California to try to be a professional skateboarder. Eventually, he enrolled at the Brooks Institute of Photography, in Santa Barbara, but left three days later, because, among other things, he didn’t like the curriculum. The school gave him back nearly all of his tuition in cash, and he bought camera equipment. In the meantime, he had been spotted by a casting agent in Santa Barbara, who took him to a larger agency in L.A., and within weeks he had a role in a Coke commercial. Before long, he had his own production company, whose main client was Vans. In 2009, he came to New York, where he worked with Stella McCartney’s company on iPad apps.
“How I got to Shadow is in 2011 I was working on the Watch the Throne tour for Jay-Z and Kanye West,” he said the other day over breakfast at the Maritime Hotel. “We came up with the idea of having the stage be very minimal. We wanted to keep it very Detroit, very rock and roll. Anyway, by then I had been working for thirteen years. I’m not sleeping, but I’m doing quite well. We wrap in Atlanta, and I go to Tulum, Mexico, and take my first real vacation. The first week, I slept more than I was awake. One day, from the clock I thought I had slept two hours, and I had actually slept twenty-six. Sleeping four and five hours a night, I hadn’t had dreams, but I started dreaming again. I assumed I would be going back to the grinding life I had been leading, so I wanted to save these dreams. I looked for an app, and there wasn’t one.”
Soik is small and slight. When he talks, he tends to hold his hands out parallel to each other, and the distance between them widens or narrows, as if sometimes they held a grapefruit and at other times a beach ball. He spent several months reading Freud and Jung and Allan Hobson on dreams, “just to figure out everyone’s position,” and learning about researchers in Japan who are mapping the neurological processes of dreams. “Last May, we put out a landing page, saying, if you like the idea, sign up, and two hundred and fifty thousand people visited within four weeks. Thirty thousand said they would take part.”
Soik took out his phone. “The application is an alarm clock,” he said. On the screen, a clock appeared against a dark ground. “Modern alarm clocks destroy dreams, because they rip you through your hypnopompic sleep state, the state between sleeping and waking. The idea is to come out slowly—we gradually increase the vibration and the volume. When you shut off the alarm, the app records. You can speak or text a dream. If you speak, it will transcribe the audio, then we’ll run an algorithm through the dream and pull out all the keywords. ‘Horses,’ ‘airplanes,’ ‘red cars,’ ‘running,’ ‘jumping.’ Then we’ll push the whole dream through a big data cloud, so that we can anonymously organize the global data. It will tell you the sex of the dreamer, and where he or she is. The Japanese sleep less, but do they dream less? What do women in Stockholm dream about in the wintertime?”
A waiter poured coffee. “What would happen if we created a space where dreams were organized?” Soik continued. “Show me every car dream. Show me every car dream in Moscow. Show me every red-car dream that involved men living in Las Vegas. Compare that to Tokyo or Paris. Do famous people dream differently? Do you have more positive dreams if you have more money in the bank? Can you quantify the dreams of successful people, and can you teach that? Could we run an algorithm against the news and find people who predict events in their dreams? They say that Einstein came up with the theory of relativity in a dream. What if you could go back and find that dream?”
Putting the phone down, Soik said, “If you don’t record the dream, you don’t remember it. When you record it, you can read a dream from a year ago and remember where you were and how you felt. But if I ask you what did you dream about a year ago, you don’t know. That’s invisible data, in our opinion, and what we like is the idea of making the invisible visible. We feel this is a huge data set that is literally forgotten every night if it’s not written out. What we’re trying to do is build a community of dreamers, and if we do this right it will be here for a very long time.” ♦
