Some may say that dreams are simply epiphenomena of no use or consequence, merely an unintended by-product of the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep. That is, however, NOT the assumption we stand by at DreamApp. On the contrary, we support the view of
Theodosius Dobzhanskywho famously said that
nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.If evolution has gone to great lengths to construct the neural circuits in the brain that produce dreams, there is a good reason for that, even if humans have not figured it out fully as of today. That’s why our approach is to stay humble and keep learning.
At DreamApp we first and foremost treat dreams as data. And we use these data in the form of dream and user conversation patterns - for early detection of mental health deviations.
We believe it is of paramount importance to find ways of getting ahead of the rising tide of mental health crisis. According to
Mental Health America,in 2022 19.86% of adults in the US were experiencing a mental illness which is equivalent to nearly 50 million Americans.
At that,
Advances Psychiatry Associatesreports that anxiety, depression, PTSD are among the most common mental illnesses in the country:
Approximately 17.3 million adults in the United States suffer from major depressive disorder, while about 1.9 million children struggle with diagnosed depression.
Things started to shift around the 1950s and 1960s, when first recordings from electrodes placed on the scalp (an electroencephalogram, or EEG as people most commonly referred to) gave scientists a general sense of the type of brainwave activity underpinning the dreaming portion of the sleep. And it was only after the advent of fMRI machines in the early 2000s that scientists started to receive three-dimensional visualizations of brain activity during dreaming in real-time.
And in 2013, a research team in Japan, led by Dr. Yukiyasu Kamitani at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, essentially cracked the code of an individual’s dream for the very first time. The scientists had turned the fMRI machine into a very expensive version of the beautiful handmade dream-catchers that some Native American cultures will hang above their beds in the hopes of ensnaring the dream — and they had succeeded.
From decades of scientific literature on dream research, we know that dreams are closely related to mental well-being. As we delve deeper into the structure of dreams, this knowledge could aid in addressing disorders where dreams pose significant challenges, such as trauma-induced nightmares in PTSD patients and issues faced by individuals with anxiety and depression.
We've dedicated significant effort to understanding this relationship through a rigorous
in-house study.Furthermore, keeping in line with our effort to give everyone the chance to get familiar with the current scientific literature on the subject, we have put together a curated library of peer-reviewed dream research articles that we invite you to explore.
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