A dream journal and sleep log for iPhone
A dream is gone a few minutes after you open your eyes, so SleepMind puts the dream note on the very first screen. Tap the feeling that fits, write it down while it is still there, and deal with the hours afterwards — the sleep log is folded away one tap below. Free.
iPhone · free · no sign-up wall · five languages
Open the app and the dream is already asking. The text field comes before anything else — before the hours, before the rating, before the timeline — because the window you are writing in is about ninety seconds long and every tap between you and the keyboard costs part of it. You tap how it felt, you type what happened, and you are done. The sleep log is still there, one tap below, folded away until you want it.
Six feelings to tag — fear, anxiety, sadness, joy, wonder, calm — plus a word of your own if none of them is right. Then exactly one question about the dream itself: have you had this one before. There used to be a whole taxonomy here, chased and falling and flying, and it was taken out on purpose. Writing "I was chased down a corridor" and then tapping a "chased" chip is answering the same question twice in the thirty seconds where the dream is evaporating. Recurrence is different: the text almost never states it, and you are the only one who knows.
Sleep gets logged the way it actually happened. An afternoon nap. A night that broke in two at four in the morning. A late shift that started at eight in the evening. As many stretches in a day as you need, dragged straight onto a 24-hour bar, in half-hour steps. A night that runs past midnight is kept as two stretches on two days — 23:00 to 24:00 on one, midnight to 07:00 on the next — which is the only way a calendar can hold a night honestly, and the app says so as you enter it rather than quietly reshaping what you typed.
Every stretch gets its own score out of five, because a nap and a night are not the same night and rating them together throws away the thing you would want to look at later. When a stretch scored badly you can tag what did it: noise, heat, cold, stress, the phone, stuffy air, light in the room, or simply going to bed too late. Eight tags, all of them things you can act on, none of them a diagnosis.
Plans for weekdays, for weekends and for naps, each with its own days of the week and its own bedtime and wake-up reminders. When a plan matches the day, it pre-fills the timeline — dashed, badged, clearly provisional, never pretending to be something you confirmed. Most mornings the record is therefore already half written and you only add how it went. The reminders are ordinary local notifications built from your plans; nothing is scheduled until you say yes to the permission prompt, and the whole schedule is rebuilt from scratch every time you edit a plan.
A weekly score out of 100, built from two things only: how long you slept, against a seven-hour night, for 55 of the points, and how you rated it, for the other 45. Every chart on the page is the last seven days rather than your whole history, so the number still moves once you have a month of data behind it. Underneath: duration and quality trends, how many nights carried a dream, and which feelings keep coming back — counted one night per feeling, from the tags you chose yourself.
Ask for a reading and the app reflects your entry back at you: the feeling you tagged, whether you marked the dream as one you have had before, how the last few nights compare to the ones before them, and two or three things worth trying that are drawn from tags you actually used. It is computed on the phone, from your rows, by ordinary arithmetic — the same night always reads the same way, because the wording is chosen by a hash of the record rather than at random. No request goes anywhere. It is a mirror for reflection, and every reading says so in its own last line.
The journal keeps every entry, filterable down to the nights that carried a dream or the ones that did not. Export the lot as JSON, or as a CSV with one row per stretch so a split night stays split in the spreadsheet — both go out through the standard iOS share sheet, to wherever you send them and nowhere else. And if you want it gone, erasing every record on this device takes two taps and two confirmations.
There is no plan to sign up for and no streak to start. This is the shape of the thing itself, so you can tell before installing whether it suits you.
One honest limit, stated plainly. SleepMind does not measure anything. It has no access to a microphone, a motion sensor or a wearable, and it never claims to have detected a sleep stage, a disorder or a cause. Everything on the charts is something you typed. That is a feature for a journal and a disqualification for a medical instrument — if your sleep genuinely worries you, that belongs with a doctor, and nothing here is a substitute for one.
On your phone, in a local database, by default. Every save lands in local storage first and the interface reads from there — nothing waits on a network for your entry to appear, and the app is fully usable having never been signed in to anything.
There is no sign-up wall. You are never asked for an email address to get in, and the account screen is somewhere you go looking for, not something that stands between you and the app.
There is no analytics SDK and no advertising SDK in the app. Nothing counts your opens on a server, nothing reports which feelings you tag, and nothing is sold to anybody. There are no banners, no interstitials and nothing locked behind a purchase.
If you want your nights on a second device you can sign in, with an email address or with Apple. Sync then carries your own rows and only your own rows, reconciled one row at a time with the newer edit winning, so a night written on one phone can never quietly wipe one written on the other. It is reversible: deleting your account, and everything stored with it, is done from inside the app.
Erasing everything locally takes two taps and two confirmations, and exporting it all to JSON or CSV takes one. Your dream text is yours, and both doors — out and away — are in the app rather than in an email to support.
Free. There is no in-app purchase, no subscription and no paywall in version 1.0.0 — no feature in this app is behind a purchase screen, because there is no purchase screen.
There is also no advertising anywhere in it. An advert between a person and the dream they just woke out of would be a genuinely ugly thing, and the app carries no ad SDK to serve one with.
No, and it is important to be clear about it. The app has no microphone, motion or wearable access of any kind, and it never claims to have detected a stage, a disorder or a cause. Every hour and every score in it is something you entered. It is a journal, not an instrument.
No. The app is fully usable signed out, and the sign-in screen is reached only from your own account page — it never stands in the way on first launch. Signing in exists for one reason: putting your nights on more than one device. If you never want that, you never need it.
Yes, and that is much of the point. The timeline covers all twenty-four hours and takes as many stretches in a day as you need — an afternoon nap, a night that split at four, a shift that started in the evening. A stretch that runs past midnight is kept as two, one on each calendar day, and the app tells you that as you enter it.
From your own records, computed on the phone. It reads back the feeling you tagged, whether you marked the dream as recurring, how the last few nights compare with the ones before them, and a couple of suggestions drawn from tags you actually used. There is no request to any server and no language model involved — the same night always reads the same way, because the phrasing is picked by hashing the record rather than at random. Every reading ends by saying it is a reflection, not medical advice.
It stays in a local database on your phone unless you sign in, and if you do, it syncs only under your own account. You can export everything as JSON or CSV at any time through the standard iOS share sheet, and you can erase every record on the device in two taps. Deleting the account deletes what was stored with it, from inside the app.
It will tell you what you told it, arranged so you can see it — which feeling you tagged, whether this one has come before, and what your recent nights have looked like. It will not tell you that falling means anxiety or that water means change, because nobody can honestly tell you that. It is a mirror for reflection, and it says so on every reading.
iPhone on iOS 16.4 or later, about 26 MB. The interface is in English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean, with four themes — one dark and three light.