Review of DreamUp

First impressions

The part of DreamUp where you will spend most of the time is a window with four tabblades. The window can't be resized, which won't bother when you use a 640x480 resolution because DreamUp will be using your entire screen and there isn't much sense in making it smaller. The tabblades go from the description of your dream to the analysis and interpretation and finally the conclusions. It's very clear how this program will work and getting started is easy.

Entering a dream

After you launched DreamUp the first thing you need to do is to enter your name and password. Luckily, the use of a password is not required so users who don't need the password protection can save themselfs the trouble. Entering your first dream is easy. You fill in the date, time, title and continue with the first of four tabblades. The first tabblade called Dream has a field for the description of the dream, a field for the feelings and emotions in or about the dream and a field for recent concerns that might have influenced the dream. I like this approach, this quides you in an unobtrusive manner to a better understanding of the dream.

Analysis and interpretation

Analysis and interpretation are also the names of the two tab blades in the middle. I found the Analysis page to be the most interesting page by far, and worth some discussion. The Analysis page, like the Dream page, has several fields. The first two fields are labeled Setting and Statements/ Questions/ Written Text. I don't know what to do with them, but perhaps you do. The interesting part concerns the symbols. You'll see a third field that's filled in automatically with certain symbols DreamUp recognized in your description of the dream. See the screencapture for an impression of how it looks.

Let DreamUp find symbols, then drag and drop them on one of the icons on the right to learn more about them. I added Nail myself as a new symbol.

DreamUp isn't very intuitive when it comes to what you have to do after you pressed the Find Symbols button. Well, you can drag any found symbol to either the wizard or the dictionary icon.

Screencapture of the Symbol Analysis Wizard

This part of DreamUp had me thinking about how far you could take such a wizard. This wizard only functions at the symbol level. What about having interpretation wizards at the level of the whole dream?

The Symbol Analysis Wizard is a very nice touch. In the current incarnation its usefulness is however limited because only a few words in the dictionary contain branches that specify the meaning depending on the answer to certain questions. Still, I like it and as this wizard is also used in helping you to add new symbols, it's much more than a gimmick.

DreamUp comes with its own dream dictionary with what it calls universal symbols. Universal symbols are supposed to have the same meaning for everyone, although it is possible that someone has developed his or her personal meaning on top of that. The amount of already available entries is much less than you can get with a good book on dream interpretation, but for software you can't probably get much better than this. However, DreamUp has a facility to add your personal symbols to the dictionary. Interpretation of dreams is of course a very personal affair and most dreamers will implicitly or explicitly develop their own dictionary anyway. So it's only logical to enable users to add new symbols to a dictionary and DreamUp makes you wonder why other programs don't have this facility.

Missing

There's one feature that you might expect, but isn't supplied by DreamUp: you can't search your dreams for a keyword. Just that you won't say I didn't tell you.

Evaluation

Pro: Good interface, somewhat helpful in coming to a better understanding of dreams, nice features that raise the standard for other dream software, namely the Symbol Analysis Wizard and the ability to add to the dream dictionary.

Contra: No search facility, limited dream library.

For more information visit the DreamUp homepage.

Back to the entrance page

Email to webmaster@mythwell.com