The stance, not the feature list
Zero cloud by default
Every journaling app defaults to cloud sync — it's their business model. We don't have one. Nothing lands on a server, no account, nothing to leak. Your dreams never leave the room they were dreamt in.
Every reading knows your story so far
A dream about water means something different for you than for a stranger — so AnimaVault reads tonight's against your own months of dreams, never a one-size dictionary. The longer you keep it, the more it's about you.
Never a verdict — always a question back
It won't tell you what your dream "means." It hands you better questions, and shows its working: what it drew on, and what it can't know. The reading stays yours to make.
Catch it before it's gone
A dream is half-gone a minute after you wake. Speak it the moment you surface — on your phone or at your desk — transcribed on your own device, never sent anywhere, waiting in your vault when you're ready.
BYO API key
Local by default. Bring your own — it goes straight to the provider, under their privacy policy, not ours.
Why this exists
"Self-knowledge shouldn't come with a privacy policy." Ask your mum which she'd rather have: her dreams interpreted by a server she's never seen, or kept entirely her own. That's the whole pitch, in one sentence.
The pattern you can't see from inside it
The insight was never in one night's dream. It's in what returns — the figure that keeps surfacing the weeks you're stretched thin, the symbol you haven't seen since autumn, suddenly back. AnimaVault reads your dreams as a series, not a string of one-offs, and quietly points to the threads when they appear.
A paper journal can't do this — it just holds the pages. A chatbot can't — it forgets you by morning. Only a record that's wholly your own, kept over months, can show you the shape no single night reveals.
Symbols, explored — never defined
A snake in your dream has shown up in Egyptian, Jungian, Vedic, and Norse material for thousands of years — as transformation, as shadow, as the body's own wisdom, as warning. None of these is "the" meaning. AnimaVault surfaces that cross-cultural material as a prompt for your own reading, not a substitute for it — the dreamer's own words always outrank the corpus, every time.
Aboriginal Dreamtime material is deliberately held out — it needs a community-consulted decision before it's added, not just a copyright check.
Built to run entirely on-device — tuned and improving, not a finished system.
How it's built
In active development
AnimaVault is being built in the open with a hard rule: no fake features, ever. If it's shown here, it works.