Frequently asked questions

Your questions, answered

Everything about journaling your dreams, training for lucid dreams, understanding what they mean, pricing, and privacy. Still stuck? Get in touch.

General

Yes. Oniri is free to download on iOS and Android, and you can journal your dreams every night at no cost. An optional Premium plan adds deeper AI interpretation and advanced lucid-dreaming tools, but the core dream journal stays free.

No. Recall is the first thing Oniri improves. By capturing whatever fragments you wake with, even a single image or feeling, most people remember roughly three times as many dreams within two weeks.

Yes. Capture was Oniri's original name, and the app was renamed Oniri in 2022. It's the same app from the same team, with the same App Store listing, and nothing was lost in the change: if you journaled with Capture, your dreams are still there. We picked a new name because Capture kept getting mistaken for a photo app.

Oniri is a dream journal and interpretation app built to help you understand what you dream. Once you log a dream it surfaces the key symbols, emotions and themes, then offers a thoughtful AI interpretation that ties that night to the patterns forming across your journal. Think of it as a mirror for self-reflection rather than a fixed dictionary of meanings.

AI can interpret dreams surprisingly well when it works from your own words and your own associations. Oniri reads the dream you record, highlights the recurring symbols and feelings, and suggests interpretations you can question or refine. It works best as a prompt for reflection, because the meaning that matters most is the one that resonates with your waking life.

The best dream journal app is the one you will actually open at 3am, which is exactly what Oniri is designed for. One tap from your lock screen starts recording before you even open your eyes, and Oniri transcribes, tags and files the dream for you. It also layers in lucid-dream training and AI interpretation, so your journal grows more useful the longer you keep it.

Start by capturing the dream while it is fresh, ideally the moment you wake, since the detail fades within minutes. From there Oniri breaks the dream into its symbols and emotions and offers an interpretation grounded in what those elements mean to you and how they recur over time. The clearest meaning usually comes from noticing patterns across many dreams, not from decoding a single night.

Yes, and the payoff arrives faster than most people expect. Keeping a dream journal sharply improves how much you remember, gives lucid dreaming a foundation to build on, and reveals the emotional threads running through your nights. With Oniri the habit takes seconds a day, which is what makes it stick.

Roughly, yes. Most dreams start slipping away within the first few minutes of waking, and a large share are gone before you are fully alert. That is why capturing something right away matters so much, even a single image or feeling. Oniri is built for those first seconds, and most people remember several times more dreams within a couple of weeks of journaling.

Support

The core dream journal is free forever. Premium unlocks deeper AI dream interpretation, advanced lucid-dreaming training, richer statistics and unlimited history. Pricing is shown in the app and varies by region and billing period, and you can try Premium before committing.

Yes. You can try Premium before you pay, so you can feel what deeper interpretation and lucid training add before committing. The trial length and terms are shown in the app when you subscribe.

Subscriptions are managed through your App Store or Google Play account, so you can cancel any time from your device's subscription settings. Cancelling stops future renewals and keeps Premium active until the end of the current billing period. If you need a hand, reach us through the contact page.

Oniri runs on iPhone and iPad on iOS, and on Android phones and tablets. Your journal syncs securely across every device you sign in on, so you can capture a dream on your phone at night and revisit it on a tablet later.

Oniri is a mobile app, available on iOS and Android, with no separate web or desktop version. That is deliberate: the app is built around capturing dreams the moment you wake, when your phone is what is within reach.

Yes. You can record and write dreams with no connection, which matters most in the first seconds after waking. Transcription, AI interpretation and sync run once you are back online.

Oniri's app is available in seven languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Czech and Russian. You can also write your dreams in whatever language feels most natural to you.

Your dreams are deeply personal, and we treat them that way. Your journal is private to you and encrypted. You can export or permanently delete your data at any time.

Dream journal

Start tonight, with one small habit: keep Oniri within reach and capture whatever you wake up with before you move or check your phone. Even a single image, a face, or a feeling counts. The first mornings might feel thin, but recall builds fast once your mind learns that dreams are worth holding onto, and within a couple of weeks most people are logging full dreams.

Write whatever you remember, in whatever order it comes, without polishing it. The people, places, actions, emotions and any odd details matter more than tidy sentences, and the feeling a dream left you with is often the most telling part. In Oniri you can speak it all out loud instead of typing, and it tags the symbols and emotions for you as you go.

Yes. Oniri is free to download on iOS and Android, and you can journal every dream, every night, at no cost. An optional Premium plan adds deeper AI interpretation and advanced lucid-dreaming tools, but the core journal stays free for good.

The first thing you notice is that you remember more, often several times more dreams within two weeks. After that the patterns start to show: the recurring people, places and feelings that a single night can't reveal. Many people find dream journaling calming and clarifying, a quiet way to notice what's really on their mind.

As detailed as you can manage in the moment, and no more. A few honest fragments captured right away beat a polished entry you write an hour later, because the detail fades within minutes of waking. Oniri lets you dump the raw memory fast, then add tags, context and drawings later if you want to flesh it out.

For dreams specifically, a general note-taking app rarely cuts it: you need something you can use with your eyes closed, that captures voice and then fades back out of the way. Oniri is designed for exactly that moment, with one-tap recording, automatic transcription, symbol tagging and reflective AI interpretation built in. It's a journal made for the way dreams actually arrive.

You can paste a dream into ChatGPT and get a reasonable, general reading, but it starts fresh every time and knows nothing about your other dreams. Oniri interprets the dream in the context of your own journal, so it can weigh the symbols and themes that keep returning for you. It's the difference between a one-off guess and a reading that actually knows your patterns.

The 3-3-3 method is a simple grounding exercise, usually naming three things you can see, three you can hear, and moving three parts of your body, used to calm a busy mind. It's handy for settling before sleep, though it isn't a dream-journaling method as such. For remembering dreams, the thing that actually moves the needle is capturing them the instant you wake, which is what Oniri is built around.

Some research links ADHD with more vivid, emotionally intense dreaming and a bit more recall, though the findings aren't settled and it varies a lot from person to person. What's clear is that recall is trainable for everyone: a consistent journal builds it from wherever you're starting. Oniri's one-tap capture is especially forgiving on mornings when focus is hard to summon.

Yes, including people who are sure they never dream. Almost everyone dreams every night; the memory just fades before it's caught. Start by writing down whatever fragment you wake with, even a mood or a color, and recall grows from there. Oniri makes that first capture take seconds, so the habit is easy to keep.

Lucid dreams

The best lucid dreaming app is the one that trains the habit night after night, not just the one with the longest feature list. Oniri combines well-timed reality-check reminders, guided audio for techniques like MILD and WILD, night alarms tuned to your sleep cycles, and a journal that builds the dream recall lucidity depends on. It's a full training system rather than a single trick.

There's no honest shortcut to lucidity tonight, but you can stack the odds fast. The quickest route is Wake Back to Bed: set an alarm for about five hours in, stay up briefly, then fall back asleep holding the intention to notice you're dreaming. Oniri guides you through the timing and pairs it with reality checks so the habit forms as quickly as it can.

For most people lucid dreaming is safe and simply a richer way to experience sleep. The main thing to watch is your rest: techniques that repeatedly break up your night can leave you tired, so Oniri leans on gentle, sustainable methods and healthy sleep habits. If you live with a serious sleep or mental-health condition, it's worth checking with a professional first.

Yes. Lucidity is a learnable skill, and most people who practice consistently get there without any special talent. It comes down to strong dream recall, a habit of questioning whether you're awake, and a technique or two practiced night after night. Oniri packages all three so you're not piecing it together alone.

Lucid dreams usually start with a dream sign: a recurring person, place or impossibility that tips you off that you're dreaming. Reality checks train you to catch those cues, while techniques like MILD and WILD set the intention deliberately. Oniri learns your personal dream signs from your journal and reminds you to check reality so the trigger fires when it counts.

Often strikingly so. In a lucid dream you can feel textures, read emotions, hear sound and see color, sometimes more vividly than waking life, because your brain is generating the whole scene. That vividness is part of what makes lucid dreams so memorable, and it's why they're some of the richest material for interpretation later.

Give yourself the best possible shot: keep your dream journal current so recall is sharp, set a clear intention as you fall asleep, and try Wake Back to Bed in the early hours when dreams run longest. None of it guarantees a lucid dream on the first night, but it's how the fastest results happen. Oniri walks you through the timing and technique step by step.

For most people there are none worth worrying about. The most common downside is tiredness, when techniques that wake you in the night eat into your rest, and occasionally a lucid dream can blur into sleep paralysis, which is harmless but can feel unsettling. Oniri favors approaches that protect your sleep, so training doesn't come at the cost of feeling rested.

Yes, that's the whole premise of lucid dream training. Proven techniques like reality checks, MILD, WILD and Wake Back to Bed deliberately raise your odds of becoming aware inside a dream. Oniri turns them into a guided routine with reminders, audio and timing, so you're practicing on purpose instead of waiting for lucidity to happen by chance.

Recall is the foundation: you can't become lucid in a dream you don't remember, and you can't spot your dream signs without a record of them. A journal builds both, night by night, until the cues that give a dream away start jumping out at you. Oniri's one-tap journal feeds directly into your lucid training, so the two grow together.

Gentle, repeating audio cues played during the lighter stages of sleep work best: soft spoken prompts or a recurring sound your mind can carry into the dream and recognize. Harsh noise just wakes you up, which defeats the purpose. Oniri includes guided audio tracks and repeatable sound cues timed to when lucid dreams are most likely.

Try not to get so excited that you snap awake, which is the most common way a first lucid dream ends, and don't force the dream too hard: staying calm and grounding yourself in the scene keeps it stable. Beyond that, the dream is yours to explore. Oniri's techniques include simple tricks for steadying a lucid dream and stretching it out.

Lucid dreaming is fine for most people, but if you live with a condition where the line between dreams and reality already feels thin, it's worth speaking to a professional first. The same goes if you're dealing with a serious sleep disorder, since some techniques interrupt your rest. When in doubt, gentle methods and good sleep come first.

Sleep paralysis is actually a doorway: your body is asleep while your mind is awake, which is the exact state the WILD technique aims for. Instead of fighting it, stay calm, keep your attention steady, and let a dream scene form around you. It takes practice and a cool head, and Oniri's guided WILD sessions talk you through it.

Some supplements are said to boost dream vividness and recall, but the evidence is thin, effects vary a lot, and anything that alters your sleep chemistry deserves caution and ideally a doctor's input. The reliable path to lucidity is skill, not a pill: recall, reality checks and consistent practice. Oniri is built around that training rather than any shortcut.

There's promising evidence that lucid dreaming can help with recurring nightmares: becoming aware inside the dream lets some people change how it unfolds, a technique studied as part of nightmare therapy. It isn't a substitute for professional care, especially with PTSD, but it can be a meaningful tool alongside it. Oniri's gentle techniques are a safe place to start exploring that.

Dream meanings

Being chased tops most lists, closely followed by falling. Both are classic anxiety dreams, the mind rehearsing a sense of threat or loss of control, though what they mean for you depends on the details and how they felt. Oniri's symbol library covers these common themes and shows how they actually show up across your own dreams.

The usual suspects are being chased, falling, losing teeth, flying, being naked in public, failing a test, being late or unprepared, cheating or being cheated on, death, and being back at school. Most tie back to everyday worries: control, exposure, change, performance. Oniri recognizes these themes when they appear and tracks how often they return for you.

Dreams are often grouped into standard dreams, daydreams, lucid dreams, nightmares, recurring dreams, vivid dreams, and false awakenings (the dream where you're convinced you've already woken up). The lines between them blur, and a single dream can be more than one at once. Oniri lets you tag and track these so you can see which kinds fill your nights.

It's a lovely idea, but there's no evidence for it: a dream about someone reflects your own mind, not theirs. Usually that person stands for something you associate with them, a feeling, a memory, a part of yourself, rather than a signal they're thinking of you. Oniri helps you explore what a recurring person in your dreams might actually represent.

Not in a mystical sense, but they do reflect what's on your mind: your emotions, unresolved worries and the things you're quietly processing. Read that way, dreams are genuinely informative, a nightly readout of your inner life rather than a message or a prediction. Oniri is built to help you notice those signals and reflect on them, not to tell your fortune.

Recurring dreams and repeated nightmares are the ones worth paying attention to, because they often point at something unresolved that keeps resurfacing. A dream that leaves a strong emotional residue in the morning is usually flagging something too. Oniri surfaces your recurring themes and emotional patterns so the dreams that matter don't slip past unnoticed.

Lucid dreams, where you know you're dreaming while it's happening, are among the rarest for most people, at least until you train for them. Fully vivid, story-like dreams you remember in detail are uncommon too. Oniri can help you have more of both, with lucid-dream training on one side and better recall on the other.

Falling and being chased come closest to universal: nearly everyone has had one or both, across cultures and ages. They seem to tap into shared human wiring around threat and control. What sets your version apart is the detail and the feeling, which is exactly what Oniri helps you unpack rather than flattening it into a one-size answer.

Vivid and distressing dreams are associated with conditions like anxiety, depression and PTSD, and frequent nightmares can be one signal among many. That said, vivid dreaming on its own is common and not a disorder, so it's not something to diagnose from a dream alone. Oniri can help you track nightmares and emotional trends over time, which is useful context, not a diagnosis.

Nightmares are the hardest, especially recurring ones that leave real dread behind: dreams of being trapped, chased, falling, or losing someone. They're unpleasant, but they're also some of the most revealing, because they tend to point straight at a fear or stress you're carrying. Understanding a nightmare is the first step to taking its power away, and Oniri is built to help you do exactly that.

Dreams can flag things worth noticing, like rising stress, grief or a worry you've been avoiding, but as reflections of your current state, not predictions of the future. A run of anxious dreams might be a nudge to check in with yourself. Oniri helps you spot those shifts by tracking your emotions and themes over time, so a meaningful change doesn't go unseen.

Very much so: emotion is often the most vivid part of a dream, and it can linger for hours after you wake. Fear, joy, grief and love all register as real feelings while you're in it, which is a big part of why dreams stay with us. Oniri maps the emotions in your dreams across seven families, so you can see the feeling of your nights, not just the events.

The Bible treats dreams as meaningful and features several famous interpreters, Joseph and Daniel among them, where dreams carry guidance or warning. Different faith traditions read dreams in their own ways, and that framework is yours to bring. Oniri offers a reflective, secular reading of your dreams and sits comfortably alongside whatever spiritual lens you hold.

Many faith traditions hold that dreams can carry meaning or guidance, and whether a dream feels like a message from God is a deeply personal question Oniri won't answer for you. What Oniri does is help you sit with a dream, understand its symbols and emotions, and reflect on it honestly. How you read that, spiritually or otherwise, stays entirely with you.

AI dream interpretation

ChatGPT can give a thoughtful general reading if you describe a dream to it, but it treats each dream in isolation and remembers nothing about your other nights. Oniri is built specifically for dreams: it keeps your journal in context, weighs your recurring symbols, and reads a single dream against the bigger picture. The result feels personal rather than generic.

Yes, and it's one of the fastest ways to get a personal reading the moment you wake. Describe your dream by voice or text and Oniri's AI weighs its symbols, emotions and story, then offers an interpretation you can dig into with follow-up questions. It's meant as a mirror for reflection, not a verdict handed down from on high.

The best one reads your actual dream rather than looking symbols up in a fixed dictionary, and gets more personal the more you use it. Oniri does both: instant AI interpretation of the dream you just had, grounded in the patterns across your own journal, with classical Jungian and Freudian lenses on tap. It's free to start on iOS and Android.

Interpretations are prompts for self-reflection, not clinical diagnoses, so accuracy isn't quite the right measure. Because Oniri's AI reads your dream's real context, and your recurring patterns if you journal, its readings tend to resonate far more than a generic symbol lookup. The most accurate meaning is still the one that rings true for you.

A general chatbot can hold a good conversation about a dream, but it starts from scratch each time and has no memory of your dream life. A purpose-built tool like Oniri does better, because it interprets each dream in the context of your journal and the symbols that keep returning for you. Specialized beats general when the whole point is knowing your patterns.

Yes, you can start interpreting your dreams for free on iOS and Android. An optional Premium plan unlocks deeper, longer analyses and unlimited readings, but you can feel how it works without paying anything first.

Most dream-interpretation websites are static symbol dictionaries: the same entry for everyone, no memory of your dreams. Oniri takes a different approach as an app built around your journal, reading each dream in your own context instead of handing out one-size-fits-all meanings. It captures dreams the moment you wake, which a website you have to sit down and visit rarely does.

You describe your dream in your own words, and the AI reads it the way a thoughtful listener would: weighing the symbols, the emotions, the setting and how the story unfolds, rather than matching keywords to a dictionary. Oniri also folds in your dream history, so tonight's reading reflects the themes that keep recurring for you. Then you can ask follow-up questions to go deeper on any detail.

In the end, you are: no one else knows what a symbol means to you or what's going on in your waking life. A good tool's job is to hand you the raw material and the right questions, not to declare a single answer. Oniri does that, surfacing your symbols and emotions and offering readings you can push back on until the meaning clicks for you.

With Oniri, yes: your dreams and their interpretations are encrypted, private to you, and never sold. You can export or permanently delete everything whenever you want. Dreams are deeply personal, and Oniri is built to treat them that way, so you can be honest with it without a second thought.

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