Strand

Strand · Android · In beta

Sleep is yours.
The knowing is ours.

Strand will not tell you when to sleep, how long to sleep, or whether you slept well. It has no opinion about any of it. What it does is smaller and harder: it lets the people you love quietly know how you are — so that being apart stops being a reason not to ask.

  • Sleep and only sleep, via Health Connect
  • Your dreams never leave your phone
  • Made in India, by one person
No bells. Nothing wakes you, because nothing about your night is the app's business.
No scores. No rating, no streak, no goal, no number to beat and nothing to improve.
No averages. No trend, no best night, and no “12% more than last week.”
No estimates. No figure Strand did not read off a night your phone actually recorded.
No verdicts. Strand has nothing to say about whether a night was a good one.
No upload. A strand stays in the app's storage on your phone. Not synced, not shared, not in the cloud.

Somebody you love is asleep right now.

You don't have to ask. Neither do they. Once two people have agreed to share, the night simply appears — the hours, the stages, the times each one happened. Not a report on anybody. Just the fact of it.

01
Sleep, and only sleep. Strand asks Health Connect for sleep records and nothing else — no steps, no heart rate, no activity. What the permission screen says is exactly what the app asks for, because that is all it asks for.
02
Stages as they were recorded. Deep, REM, Light and Awake, with the times they happened, for the last fourteen nights. If a source gave no breakdown, Strand says so.
03
A handshake, not a feed. You find someone by email and send a request. They accept it. That acceptance is the permission — there is no other way in.
04
Yours to stop. Nothing is sent until you turn sharing on. Ending a friendship stops it immediately, on both sides.
One night, as it is shared The chart from the screen above, to scale. Four stages, the hours they happened, and no verdict.

A night is a record, not a result. Strand has nothing to say about whether it was a good one.

The Strand Friends screen. A connected person, User, with a night of 5h 54m from 12:48 AM to 7:21 AM, drawn as a coloured ribbon: Deep 1h 8m, REM 1h 38m, Light 3h 7m, Awake 38m. Below it, an Add a friend button and a 'What you share' panel reading 'Nothing shared yet'.
Friends — the real screen
02 Strand

Most of a dream is gone before you are properly awake.

So Strand asks for one sentence. Whatever is still there when you open your eyes, you write it down — eighty characters, about as much as a thought actually weighs.

It stays on your phone, exactly as you wrote it. There is no title, no tag, no category and no mood to pick, and nothing to edit afterwards. Strand stores the sentence and the moment you wrote it, and leaves it alone. Week after week that becomes a collection: the sea, the corridor, the window that was open all night, the person who said one thing and left. Nothing is filed away or made sense of, because the trouble with a dream is never that it was badly remembered — it is that there was anything to remember at all.

The Strand write sheet: 'What's on your mind before it fades?' above a text field holding “the window was open all night”, a character counter at 29 of 80, and a gold Save strand button.
Writing one
The Strand gallery: 'The 23 strands you left', above a list of saved strands such as “blue water going down and down” and “the sea was cold, I could not swim home”.
Keeping them

One more thing.

Timefall.

Something is about to be here

How it works

Strand keeps the strands.
Timefall finds what joins them.

Twenty-three strands, and the links between them.

Move across the field to read one.

Hover a point
  • Direct
  • Related
  • Unexpected
Scored in your browser

This is not interpretation.

Strand does not tell you what a dream means and does not claim to. What it does is narrower, and we think more useful: it shows you which of your own sentences have something in common, and names the thing they have in common. All of it runs on the phone, from your own words — no model, no cloud, no account upload. Dream research is real and still young; this is a way of looking at yours that you can check line by line.

Direct They say the same thing. A word in common, or two words for one thing. “both mention cold and water”
Related The same subject in different words. The themes overlap even when the vocabulary does not. “both about memory and time”
Unexpected No shared subject at all — and yet a shared feeling, or a bridge between two ideas. “both carry a calm feeling, about different things”

Every pair is put side by side and scored against a small, hand-written lexicon of ordinary things — colour, water, night, home, silence, weather — and the ones that touch are joined, carrying the words that joined them. Directly, two strands meet because they say the same thing. Indirectly, two strands meet because they carry the same feeling or the same shape of story while talking about entirely different things, and that is where the surprising lines come from. Every link tells you which words it was made of, because a connection you have to take on trust is not a connection.

Set enough of them side by side and the ones that keep recurring stop being coincidences. The sea, the corridor, the window, the leaving — they were always there, in your own words, and this is what makes them countable. Connections between single strands give you a field; the field gives you a picture of a person, assembled out of the nights they actually had. None of it exists on the first morning. It is worth something once there is enough of it, and that is the only reason to keep writing.

Nothing is connected unless it clears the bar, and the bar is high on purpose: a sky that connects generously stops being a universe and becomes a hairball. Hover any point in the picture to read it and the reasons it was joined to anything else.

Beta

Still becoming.
Already worth exploring.

Strand is in beta. It is built, it runs against a real backend, and it is not finished — so we would rather say that plainly than dress it up. Leave an address to ask for the next build.

  • Android 8.0 and later
  • Needs Health Connect
  • Version 105
  • Install about 61 MB