What a Dream App Does for Your Mental Wellbeing: Real User Stories After One Year

My Human Code is celebrating one year in, and we've decided to ask harder questions than “do people like the app?”

My name is Camila Figueroa. I'm a psychologist by training, and I've spent my career at the intersection of global mental health research and the clinical practice of working with dreams. When I joined My Human Code as Head of Science and Innovation, the first thing I wanted to hear was what real users had to say.

My Human Code is a dream-forward app. It helps people make sense of their internal world by working with what they already experience: thoughts, emotions, and especially dreams. It connects them across time to form a clearer picture of who they are.

We reached out to My Human Code's first users, those who chose to try it and stayed, and asked whether it genuinely helped them understand themselves better, what brought them back, and when My Human Code's reflections felt genuinely useful in their real lives. This is the first public account of what we heard.

How Users Experienced My Human Code Across Time

My Human Code's first users have watched the app grow and change alongside them. It began as a dream app and only a dream app. But the founding team quickly realized it was falling short for people who didn't remember their dreams, so a space for thoughts was added: the kind that surfaces during the day on your way to work, after a conversation or call, or before going to bed. Recognizing that modern lifestyles are driving unprecedented levels of sleep deprivation, a sleep mode was also built to help users wind down and fall asleep more easily. Over time, the underlying technology has also grown more sophisticated, allowing My Human Code to get to know each user more deeply and offer insights, reflections, and exercises that respond to people's actual needs.

Over twelve months, users logged thousands of dreams, thoughts, and reflections inside the app, giving us a rare longitudinal view of how a wellness tool integrates into daily life.

My Human Code's first users have lived through all of this evolution and this is why we started listening to them. They told us something that's hard to fake: what actually becomes part of someone's life, and what doesn't. We asked about daily habits and what surprised them. But one question kept coming back as the most revealing of all: if My Human Code disappeared tomorrow, what would you lose?

A note on language & confidentiality: these conversations were conducted in English & Spanish. Every participant shared their story voluntarily, with full knowledge it might one day be read by you. We're grateful for their time and their trust.

Why Users Return: Dream Journaling as a Daily Ritual

My Human Code is dream-forward by design, and all users confirmed what we hoped was true: the dream feature is not a secondary offering. It's the reason they want to open the app in the morning. Dreams are what makes My Human Code different. The ability to capture and archive a dream and then see patterns emerge across weeks and months is at the core of what we're building.

Unlike generic journaling, My Human Code's dream library surfaces recurring symbols and emotional patterns across weeks, helping users connect their nocturnal experiences to waking-life stressors or events. Dreams became the consistent ritual that brought people back into the app, not because it felt therapeutic in a clinical sense, but because it felt intimate and helped users gain emotional clarity every morning around what sometimes feels confusing and contradictory.

Using My Human Code Between Therapy Sessions: An Unexpected Use Case

My Human Code is not a therapy replacement. It is a between-session support tool: a private space where users process thoughts and dreams, arrive at sessions better prepared, and bring into session richer material to work with. This positions it as a complementary tool to professional mental health care.

My Human Code exists in the space between professional care and daily life. It makes the time between sessions count. That's part of our commitment, and it turned out to be exactly how users were already describing their experience, without us prompting them.

Users aren't positioning My Human Code as an alternative to professional support. They're using it as a bridge: debriefing their therapists in advance, arriving at their sessions more prepared, more self-aware, and with richer material to work with, and as a post-session debrief to share the insights and recommendations that were discussed during the session.

Aging, Grief, and People Who Have Had Very Few Options

Some of the most striking feedback came from older participants, a population rarely centered in wellness technology, but one carrying real, unmet emotional support needs. For many of them, therapy was never part of the picture: the stigma around mental health in their generation made it inaccessible, and the tools that exist today were never designed with them in mind.

For older adults who grew up in an era when seeking mental health support carried deep stigma, a private, on-demand tool like My Human Code offers a first-ever safe space for emotional processing.

My Human Code can be used in moments of acute emotional load: grief, anxiety, or major life transitions. Not as a daily habit so much as an on-demand companion for the inner life. This is a reminder of how many people have spent a lifetime without a space like this and what it means that one now exists.

What Users Would Lose Without Their Dream Journaling App

In behavioral research, one of the strongest early indicators that something works isn't what people say about it at the moment. It's how they describe the world without it. We asked everyone the same question: if My Human Code disappeared tomorrow, what would you lose?

These responses reflect a finding consistent across behavioral research: when a tool becomes part of someone's emotional infrastructure, its absence is felt as a real loss, not just an inconvenience.

Key Findings: What My Human Code Can Do for Your Mental Wellbeing

This is still early-stage work, but a few things are becoming clear:

• Dreams are what everyone comes back to, and the users who anchor their experience there report the deepest value.
• My Human Code lands when it feels specific and connected. The moments users describe most vividly are the ones where a reflection felt unexpected and personal, not generic.
• The therapy-bridge isn't a concept we're pitching; users are already living it, which gives us a strong foundation to build a genuine connection between My Human Code and clinical care.
• We're reaching people who have had very few other options. Older adults who never had a space like this, people on the fence about starting therapy, people who need something in the space between sessions.

This article is based on qualitative interviews conducted with voluntary participants. All quotes in Spanish were translated by a native speaker and shared with participant consent. Written by Camila Figueroa, Head of Science and Innovation at My Human Code.