FOUNDER OF YOUDREAMING
Making lucid dreaming a part of a healthy, balanced life.

My Roles: Founder & COO

Brand Partner: Luc Chaissac

Artist Partner: Wenyi Geng

A screenshot of the waitlist page for You Dreaming while we were building the company.
TL;DR

People are in a crisis of poor sleep. Let's fix that!

Along with two co-founders, I helped start YouDreaming, a CPG company offering a natural, evidence-based solution to usher great sleep hygiene and open your mind to awesome dreams through lucid dreaming. We created an education and training program based in cognitive behavioral therapy designed to help teach your mind to lucid dream and, in the process, enjoy healthier and more fulfilling sleep.

Studies show that proper sleep health is associated with countless positive health effects, like promoting cardiovascular health, reducing the risk of Alzheimer's disease, and psychological wellness. We believe that dreaming should be a core part of a healthy life and offered a traditional organic supplement combined with an evidence based dream journal to track your adventures. Through dreaming, we can live a more healthy, exciting and widening world of endless possibility.
BRAND

Make lucid dreaming more interesting and exciting than binging a tv show.

There are already a plethora of companies aimed at solving the crisis of poor sleep, whether through tedious bio tracking or medical sleep aids, but none effectively solve the underlying problem: sleep is often seen as just another thing to be optimized. We saw this as an opportunity to take a different approach. Instead, we focused YouDreaming's brand on making healthy sleep a byproduct of success.

By teaching people how to access the infinite possibilities of their imagination and create wondrous dream worlds of their own, sleep could be something that people will actually look forward to at night.
The dreamer is given the journal by the Star, the dreamer's wise teacher.
Over time, the journal becomes a source of dream inspiration, allowing the dreamer to access their dreams easily.
The journal transforms into a glorious phoenix, a dream sign that indicates when the dreamer is in a lucid dream.
Frightening shadows sometimes appear in dreams, but with practice, the dreamer can notice them and cast them away.
Now the dreamer is truly an oneironaut, one who travels the dream world freely.

Bedtime Story: As part of YouDreaming's launch strategy, we wrote an adult bedtime story to illustrate and narrate how lucid dream training works. Here are some of my favorite pieces of artwork from the inimitable artist we partnered with, Wenyi Geng.

PRODUCT

Training program & herbal supplement to promote restful sleep and vivid dreaming.

The bottle label for the YouDreaming supplement.The YouDreaming herbal supplement product.

Supplement Label: I designed this brand label featuring the Star, the protagonist's teacher in the bedtime story, as our primary brand asset. Here it is in real life!

AFTERMATH

Learning good lessons the hard way.

There were a lot of lessons in founding a company through this experience. One of the hardest lessons learned was how much pressure creating a company and bringing a product to market put on one's mental health. In this case, for one of our co-founders, it proved to be too much and they reached a breaking point. Long story short, we were forced to close the company just months before we were going to open the online store and start selling. It was an unfortunate and difficult turn of events that has reinforced just how important co-founder relationships are and one's mental health when trying to start a business.