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  NIDRA - UX Prototype Overview

NIDRA

Mapping the storms of your mind.

Inspiration

Every dream is a private universe: fleeting, vivid, and almost always lost. We started by asking what it would mean to truly experience the dreams of others, and quickly realized the answer begins closer to home: understanding your own. What began as a philosophical discussion about the future of perception became a focused question about mental health and the untapped data stream that plays out every night behind closed eyes.

Sleep apps today track your rest and then go quiet. They tell you how long you slept, but not what happened. Nidra (named after the Hindu goddess of sleep) takes it further. It doesn't just monitor your sleep; it listens, learns, and meets you right as you wake up, in the brief window before the dream disappears. Because 95% of people forget what they dreamed within the first 10 minutes of waking, that window is everything.

What It Does

Nidra uses your phone's microphone as a baseline sensor, then layers in data from across your sleep environment: voice-activated speakers like Google Nest and Alexa for richer audio, smartwatch heart rate data, and even CPAP-type machines for breathing patterns. Together, these paint a picture of how restfully (or turbulently) you actually slept. The result is visualized as a Dream Weather map: a waveform of emotional turbulence across your night, with a long-term weather-like view of your sleep patterns over time.

The second layer is the dream journal. Nidra integrates with your smart home to wake you when your heart rate signals you're exiting REM sleep — the peak moment for dream recall. As you wake, it gently prompts you to record your dream by voice. Those recordings are transcribed to the cloud, where you have a short window to add details before AI takes over: analyzing the symbols in your dream against your personal history first, then a proprietary cloud-based database of dream symbolism.

The experience is organized across four tabs: Record, Decode, Journal, and Insights.

How We Built It

Nidra was designed entirely in Figma, built using Figma Make. We used Notion to manage our workflow and Claude to distill and sharpen our early ideas into a clear design direction. From there, we crafted our first prompt and iterated entirely within Figma Make, letting the tool and the team's instincts drive the design forward.

Challenges We Ran Into

Our biggest constraint was a limited AI credit allocation, and our first team member used nearly all of it across the first 21 versions. The real challenge became learning how to prompt efficiently — getting more from less, and being deliberate about every iteration rather than exploratory.

Accomplishments We're Proud Of

First and foremost: the team. None of us knew each other before this event. We came from different time zones, different schedules, and different backgrounds, and it worked. We communicated well, respected each other's constraints, and built something real over a single weekend.

Beyond the teamwork, we're proud of what this experience revealed: that great design instincts, when paired with the right AI tools, can produce something meaningful on a tight timeline. The app we built makes us genuinely excited about what's possible as these tools continue to mature.

What We Learned

We learned how to iterate with intention. Figma Make rewards thoughtful prompting, and working through constraints forced us to develop a sharper eye for what actually mattered in each revision. We also learned what it means to collaborate entirely remotely with people you've never met, and that it's more possible than it sounds.

What's Next for Nidra

Four features are on our roadmap:

1. Expanded hardware integration: Bringing in more sleep sensor data for a richer, more accurate turbulence map.
2. Lucid dreaming training with guided hypnosis: Using meditative music along with guided meditation before sleep to prime the user for the ability to control their dreams.
3. Mental health professional sharing: Allowing users to securely share their dream journal and insights directly with a therapist or counselor.
4. VR dream reconstruction: Generating immersive video experiences based on your dream logs, and optionally sharing them with other users.

Built With

• figma
• figmamake
• notion