Hi, I’m Roman.
For a long time, my wife woke up from a nightmare almost every night. Often the same dream, often at the same hour. I woke up too, and lay next to her in the dark, not knowing how to help.
The nights didn’t stay in the night. They followed her into the day: tired mornings, a heaviness that sat on everything, and a quiet dread as bedtime came closer.
I went looking for something that would actually help. I found sleep trackers that gave the night a score, dream dictionaries that made dreams sound like warnings, and meditation apps that were lovely in the evening and had nothing to say at 3 a.m.
Then I found imagery rehearsal. It isn’t new and it isn’t mine. Sleep medicine has recommended it for years: choose a nightmare, change the story while you are awake, and rehearse the new version for a few minutes a day. It is simple and gentle, and almost nobody gets to use it, because it has never been made for real life. For a tired person. In the dark. At 3 a.m.
The more I read, the more I noticed something else. People have done a version of this for thousands of years. Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions and the healing temples of ancient Greece all had rituals for the evening, words for the night and ways to set a bad dream down in the morning. Old wisdom and new science were pointing the same way.
So I built Baku for her. A home screen that follows the sky. Nightlight, a warm one-tap mode for the hour you need it, free forever. A rewrite studio that never asks you to relive the whole dream. The voice of someone who loves you, recorded in daylight for the night.
I named it after the baku, the gentle creature from Japanese folklore that people asked to take their bad dreams away. Ours keeps watch.
Everything in Baku is based on methods that research shows can reduce nightmares. Where the evidence is thin, we say so. We will never tell you what your dreams predict, never show you an ad, and never sell your nights.
It started as something for one person. Now it is for anyone who dreads the night. I hope yours get quieter. Ours are starting to.
