Review of Awaken

First impressions

Awaken follows the book analogy and each dream is treated as a book on its own. The default lay-out looks like an opened notebook. Both the left and the right page are accompanied with the same column of tabs.

Personally I don't like the idea of an opened notebook, but Awaken lets you customize the interface in almost every way. I got rid of the double page view and also removed various items from several pages. Then I started experimenting with the host of available toolbars. You can see the result in the picture below.

Entering a dream

Awaken offers so many options that I wondered if I would ever succeed in entering a dream. Fortunately each tab page comes with its own wizard. Most of these wizards let you first make a choice of topics you want help on and then continue with the selected topics. I like that. Awaken can also import images into the text of a dream, which is nice if you occasionally like to paint or draw parts of a dream.

One thing for European users to watch out for: US based software often isn't prepared for non-US date formats. Awaken does not save my Dutch dreams. Once you tried (but failed), other features stop working too.

Analysis and interpretation

Awaken's strongest point is that whatever way you want to work with dreams, Awaken will almost always support it. It comes with a symbol dictionary that can be customized and it knows various categories of questions that can also be customized.

Sometimes all the options seem to get in the way of getting things done. I have been fighting to add my own words to the dictionary. I couldn't get it done the way I would have liked it because I expect to simply enter a word and a description. Awaken only seems to allow you to enter associations, not a description. Why I don't know.

The top window is the main screen using a single page. Bottom left is the browse is the browse dialog showing two dreams and a third one that went wrong. Bottom right is the symbol wizard.

Researching dream series

Most of my insights arise when browsing through a few of my older dreams. Well, Awaken surely lets you browse through your dreams. The browse dialog has tabs for by date, category, concern, feeling, question and symbol.

Awaken can also search through all your dreams, as usually offering a dazzling array of settings. One minor annoyance is that Awaken forgets your preferences - and this is not the only place where it does that - so if you want to do a few searches you have to choose your settings every time.

Awaken has 10 different lists for refining your work with dreams. Some of them seem to be much alike like Questions, Reflections and Interpretations. But lists like Categories, Feelings, Personal Concerns and Honoring should be useful.

Symbol dictionary

The symbol dictionary was already mentioned earlier. The symbol dictionary of Awaken has the neat feature of showing images along with each symbol. Also nice is how easy you can add your own associations.

I won't say too much about the available symbols and descriptions. Like with DreamUp it's easy to say I would like to see more entries and longer descriptions, but no doubt the product would get a lot more expensive in that case.

Evaluation

Pro: Highly customizable, offers many ways for dreamers to work on their dreams.

Contra: Confusing interface, a few rough edges.

For more information visit the Awaken homepage.

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