App gives dream insight, but it’s no Freud

AppMania’s DreamBook is far from the app of your dreams.

This iPhone application allows users to type in things they’ve seen in dreams – terms such as “spider,” “girlfriend” or “teeth” – and then generates a list of the five most popular dream analysis books that address those items. Further along it provides you with a little information about what your dream might mean. This includes a mix of Freudian psychology and Nostradamus pseudo science. 

The problem with DreamBook is that it doesn’t have as much information as you might hope. Many terms yield no results. My most recent dream featured hordes of undead zombies taking over my town. But “zombie” and “undead” brought up nothing. Neither did related terms such as “vampire.” The more generic “monster” had only two results, but with very little information in either.

DreamBook also isn’t very smart. Pop in “spiders” and only one result comes up. But change it to “spider” and the results double. The inclusion of an ‘s’ on a word often will cause DreamBook to fail to recognize it at all.

And while it can be fun to get some on-the-spot dream analysis, DreamBook only has info on the most general and common of dream imagery. And the app can’t handle anything more complex than a word or two, so forget about getting useful Freudian dream analyses about your relationship with your mother.

A $1.99 price tag is a little high for this rather dreamless application. 

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