INTRODUCTION
dreamNodes is an online dream journal which allows users to store their dreams, and discover common themes both individually as well as across all users’ dreams.
GOALS
- Setup an online application for storage of user accounts, dream text, and a dream dictionary
- Allow users to add terms and definitions to the dictionary
- Visualize dream themes using a “dreamCloud”
- Provide resources such as links to useful sites, books on dream research and interpretation, and allow users to add on to this
CHALLENGES
- Learning PHP, MySQL and working with a database
- Conceptually approaching ways to connect users and dreams, body of dreams as a whole
- Allowing users to help develop the site by adding content, dream themes, etc.
PROCESS
Research - After doing some online research, it doesn’t appear that there exists an online application that aims to connect people through dreams at the level we intended. There is a field of research known as social dreaming, but this is a bit more complicated than what we had in mind.
Setup – We started by building a basic application where users could create an account, login, record their dreams, and attach the date they had the dream.
Tags vs. Themes – Initially, we were playing with the notion of tagging dreams, but this approach seems to detract from the inherent value of the dreams themselves – themes were already discoverable within them. We took a list of dream terms from an existing online dream dictionary and inserted only the terms into a table. This list was then run against the table of dreams in another table (Journals) to find the matching occurences.
Redesign – The main purpose was to improve readability. The former version had a black background, white text and purple links, which proved difficult to read. We also needed to simplify the layout so users could more easily make sense of how to use the site – login/register, find dream themes, find connections, see common themes across all users and within their own journals.
Visualization – Currently having trouble implementing the dreamCloud. We want two types – one for the entire database of dreams and one for individual users. Work-In-Progress
For more detailed documentation on our development process, see our project blog.
SOURCE CODE
The bulk of the action happens in these two files:
journals.php
tags.php
Our references & resources:
majordomo.com (site’s now funky, but code samples are commented by Byrne Reese)
http://php.net
http://dev.mysql.com
and of course, Dan Shiffman
FUTURE PLANS
We plan to continue improving dreamNodes and exploring what else could be done with the text here. After discussing ideas with Dan about the interface and allowing the user more involvement in developing the app, an AJAX interface might work best. Users could select any word from their dream text on the fly, add it to the list of themes and optionally add a personal definition or possible interpretation for it.
We’re also interested in Noah’s suggestion about being able to leave messages for other dreamers, since dreamNodes is about exploring possible connections between people and dreams.
Also, experiment with running dream journal text against dream interpretation/analysis content available online. Could be interesting to see, for example, Freud’s Dream Psychology Psychoanalysis for Beginners (on Project Gutenberg) and other works centered around dreams.
