HypnicFOR RESEARCHERS
Dream data for research, shared with permission.
Hypnic users can choose to share their dreams for research with a separate, explicit permission. Once identifying details are removed, this data will be made available to research institutions.
Data access is being prepared. We are already talking with institutions that want to discuss it.
Illustration, not real data: short dream notes arrive from different cities. Notes without consent are removed and names are hidden. Words become symbol, place, emotion and theme tags. The tags add up to a weekly trend chart that rises after a major event.
What can you study with this data?
Dreams can now be studied as thousands of structured records instead of one account at a time. A few examples:
- Collective dream trends
- Which themes and emotions stand out across cities or countries in a given period.
- Dreams after major events
- How dream content and emotion shift after events that affect a whole society, such as earthquakes, elections or pandemics.
- Seasons and the calendar
- Whether dreams change with the seasons, holidays, or weekdays versus weekends.
- Demographic differences
- How dream themes and emotions differ by age range, gender and city.
- Across languages and cultures
- How the same themes are told in different languages and cultures.
- Recurring dreams and nightmares
- How recurring dreams and nightmares develop over time, in aggregate.
Findings are studied in aggregate only; no single person’s dreams can be accessed.
What data?
The planned data dictionary is below. Fields will be built from the records of users who give permission, with identifying details removed.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Dream text | What the user spoke or wrote, with identifying details removed. |
| Entry date | At day or month level. No time of day. |
| Emotion | The emotion the user chose for the dream. |
| Tags | Person, place, symbol and action tags from the dream, and the user’s role in an action (did it, watched, did it together, and so on). |
| Language | The language the dream was recorded in. |
| Profile (optional) | Age range, gender, country and city, at a coarse level and only if the user shared them. |
Out of scope. Voice recordings, email addresses, names and account IDs are never included.
How consent works
- Separate and explicit
- Research permission is requested in its own step in the app and is off by default.
- The app does not depend on it
- A user who declines uses every Hypnic feature in the same way.
- Can be withdrawn
- Once a user withdraws, their dreams are no longer added to research data.
Anonymization
To reduce the risk of re-identification, these steps are planned before data is delivered:
- Names of people and places are removed from the text or generalized, based on what entity recognition finds.
- Date and location details are made coarser.
- Very small groups are not shared.
- A sample is reviewed before delivery.
These steps reduce the risk; they do not remove it. Hypnic does not claim the data is fully anonymous or that it cannot be re-identified.
Access model
Access will be for institutions and on the record. Planned conditions:
- Institution verification
- The applying institution is verified.
- Data use agreement
- Purpose, duration and retention are written into the agreement.
- Ethics review
- Ethics board approval is expected.
- No re-identification
- Trying to re-identify people in the data is prohibited.
- Access interface
- Data will be reached through a dedicated, logged access interface for institutions. No bulk data files will be handed over.
Data about a single user cannot be requested; the data is made of pooled records from users who give permission. Dream text can contain special-category personal data, so a GDPR and Turkish KVKK assessment will be carried out and its outcome reflected on this page.
Contact
Tell us your institution, your research question and the kind of data you need. Furkan Mersinli, who builds Hypnic, reads the messages.
Address: [email protected]
Write to [email protected]Frequently asked questions
Does Hypnic charge users?
No. Hypnic is free for users, with no subscription or premium plan. The optional “Support Hypnic” tip in the app unlocks nothing. We plan to sustain it by making dreams from users who give permission available to research institutions once identifying details are removed.
Is the data ready now?
No. Data access is being prepared. We will announce it on this page when it is ready; for now we are talking with institutions that want to discuss it.
Can I request one user’s data?
No. The data is made of pooled records from users who give permission. Data about a single person is not provided.
Do users have to take part in research?
No. Research permission is separate and off by default. Hypnic works the same without it, and users can withdraw it any time.
Which languages is the data in?
Dream text is kept in the language the user wrote or spoke it in. The app is available in seven languages: Turkish, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German.