Your dreams are yours
The whole promise, in plain words.
Private means private
A dream you keep private is for your eyes only. No other traveler can read it. No administrator can read it. Gene cannot read it — the app gives him no way to, the same way it gives no way to anyone else.
How that is true
It isn’t a promise resting on trust alone — it’s built into the ground the app stands on:
- The database itself refuses. Your dreams live behind a rule called Row-Level Security. When any request asks for a private dream, the database hands it back only to the one account that wrote it — and turns everyone else away, at the data layer, before a single word is read. It is not a setting in the app that could be flipped; it is the database enforcing the law on every request.
- Gene’s tools are blind to it. The Guide’s room is built so it can only ever touch what you’ve chosen to share, and simple counts — never the text of a private dream. Even Gene’s own account, opening the app, is turned away from your private dreams by the very same rule that turns away every other traveler.
- Locked in transit and at rest. Your words travel over an encrypted connection, and are stored on encrypted disks. Nothing is left lying in the open.
Not fuel for big tech
Your journal is not a product. It is never sold, never mined for advertising, and never handed to the data machines of the large tech companies. It rests in a private, well-guarded home (a dedicated database, on respected infrastructure), kept for this circle alone.
When — and only when — you press an AI button on a dream, or offer a dream to the shore, those particular words are handled by Anthropic’s Claude (and, for pictures and voice, OpenAI) under a business agreement that does not keep your words and does not use them to train anything. A dream you keep private never travels anywhere, to any AI, unless you ask it to, dream by dream.
The one gentle exception
If a dream you make public — on the shore, or in a question — ever seems to signal that you might be in real danger in waking life, a quiet, caring note may reach Gene so he can check in. This never touches your private dreams, and never reads them. It exists only so that no one in the circle is ever left alone with something heavy.
Private stays private. Shared is shared with care.