Liminal

a dream exploration

Liminal is a UX concept for exploring, investigating and engaging with the dream world. Rather than interpreting dreams for us, it asks a simple question:

What might happen if we simply stayed with the images?

Type

Self-initiated concept

My role

UX Designer

&

Concept Development

Duration

2 months

focus

Dreams, symbolism & self-reflection

project overview

Problem

Dream apps often focus on recording, analysing or interpreting dreams. But what if the goal isn't to find out what a dream means — but to allow for time to investigate it?

solution

Instead of having a psychotherapist or AI prematurely interpret a dream, Liminal creates space to experience it.

Inspired by James Hillman’s idea of “sticking to the image”, the experience encourages users to stay with the dream, ask questions and explore what emerges.

outcome

The result is Liminal — a UX concept that invites users to slow down, stay with a dream and explore it before trying to conceptually explain what it means.

Introduction over. Now let’s get into:

why dreams?

Very good question - thanks for asking.

My interest in dreams comes from a longer-standing fascination with psychology and mythology, particularly the way Carl Jung and James Hillman connect our traditions of myths, stories and images to our inner, subjective lives.

One of the things that I still ponder after years of reading Hillman is his idea of “sticking to the image”: resisting the urge to immediately explain a dream (fantasies included btw) and instead staying with its imagery, exploring what is there on its own terms.

That became the starting point for Liminal.

So,

what’s liminal?

Liminal is an attempt to create a space for recording, investigating and exploring dreams on it’s own terms, through your own images and experiences.

Instead of giving you an answer or interpretation, it creates a context in which you’re encouraged to slow down, look closer, and explore recurring symbols, narratives and themes.

Where did you start?

Before opening Figma, I wanted to understand what kind of experience I was actually trying to create.

I looked at existing dream apps and explored how they approached journaling, interpretation, gamification and reflection. I also read books by Carl Jung, James Hillman and Robert A. Johnson to get a better understanding of different ways of working with dreams — particularly the idea that a dream doesn’t necessarily need to be clearly conceptually explained or decoded.

This made me question the role of the app itself. Rather than telling the user what a dream means, could it simply create the conditions to slow down, look at the dream more closely, and explore what stands out to them?

the structure

Then I had to ask myself: what would that experience actually look like?

I mapped the experience around one simple idea: capture first, explore later. The initial flow needed to make recording a dream quick and effortless, while leaving the deeper exploration for later.

From there, I mapped how dreams, symbols and recurring themes could connect over time, shaping the information architecture and user flow around these relationships.

And then what?

Wireframes!

Before worrying about colours, typography or polished interactions, I started with low-fidelity wireframes to explore the structure and flow.

One of the main challenges was designing for something as abstract as “lingering”. The interface needed to clearly and helpfully provide the user what it needed to do with without unnecessarily asking them to do something.

A hard nut to crack, that one — designing something that is useful and appealing, butwithout making it so appealing that it becomes useless…

Et enfin,

le hi-fi prototype

After having wrestled with the wirefames I moved into the first draft of the high-fidelity prototype, exploring how visual language, vibe, typography, copy and interaction could support a less conceptual and more exploratory way of engaging with dreams.

Et voilà.

but,

What was the point?

Another very good question!

I mean — what do I know? Why spend time designing an interface for something as subjective and difficult to define as a dream?

But for me, this is where some of the most interesting UX questions begin: what happens when we design not to give people an answer, but to help them find their own way through an experience?

Next steps

Probably none.

Unless someone wants to sponsor me to keep exploring this which would be lovely.

But if not, the process was interesting enough.

Last updated: 23.9.26