The Baku waitlist is open

Today the Baku waitlist opens. Leave your email on baku.care and we will write once, when Baku is ready. If you have nightmares often and would like to help shape it, tick the box for the private beta as well.

Why a beta first

Nightmares are common. In a 2021 survey of almost 16,000 adults in 16 countries, about one in nine said they had them every week.^[1] Many of those people have never been offered anything for them, although sleep medicine has a recommended approach: imagery rehearsal, where you change a recurring nightmare while awake and rehearse the new version for a few minutes a day.^[2]

Baku is built around that method, together with a warm Nightlight for 3 a.m., a moon calendar of your nights and a gentle evening ritual. A method that works in research still has to work on a phone, at the end of a long day, for someone who is tired and a little scared of sleep. Before Baku opens to everyone, we want to learn from the people it is for.

What beta testers do

The beta is small, and places open gradually. If you join, you will use Baku on your own nights, in your own way:

• Mornings. Tell Baku how the night went, out loud or in a few typed words, in under a minute.
• Rewrites. Choose a dream that keeps coming back, change where it goes, and rehearse the new ending for seven days.
• Nights. Keep Nightlight one tap away for when you wake.
• Honesty. Tell us what is confusing, too much or missing. That is the most useful thing a beta tester can do.

You can stop at any time, and export or delete everything you recorded. Baku is a wellness app, not a medical treatment. If your nightmares are tied to something that happened to you, please also talk to a professional, and if they come with thoughts of harming yourself, reach out to a crisis line or your local emergency number today.

What we will measure

We have one main question, and we chose it before we had any answers. When you start, Baku asks how many nights last week a bad dream woke you. That is your baseline. Four weeks later, we look at the nights you labelled as nightmares. Our north star is the share of people who have fewer nightmares in week four than their own baseline.

Comparing you with yourself, not with anyone else, follows the way imagery rehearsal has been studied: by counting nightmares before and after.^[3] We will also watch simpler things, such as whether Nightlight opens fast enough when you have just woken from a bad dream.

We will share the north star only once we have measured it, and only when enough people have reached week four for the number to mean something and for everyone to stay anonymous. A beta is not a clinical trial: without a comparison group, it cannot show that Baku caused a change, and nightmares can ease on their own. We will say so when we publish, and label the evidence the way we always do (here is how we label evidence).

Your privacy

Dreams are health data, and we treat them that way. They are private by default, stored in Switzerland, encrypted, and can be locked behind Face ID, a fingerprint or a passcode. Our team cannot read your journal. We never sell your data and never use it for advertising. Entries you mark “keep private from AI” never reach Baku’s AI Guide.

For the waitlist we keep only what we need: your email, your language, whether you would like the beta, and where you joined from. We use it to tell you when Baku opens and, if you asked, to invite you to the beta. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Nightlight stays free

Whatever happens with the beta, and whatever you choose later, the 3 a.m. Nightlight will always be free. It works offline and never asks you to sign in. We explained why in why Nightlight will always be free.

Thank you for being here early. We will keep watch over the nights with you.