How to Import Your Dream Journal From Another App
To move a dream journal into Somnary, export it from the old app as CSV or plain text, open the file on your phone, copy everything, and paste it into Settings › Import from another app. Somnary reads the dates, titles, text, tags, lucidity and mood it can find, shows how many dreams it recognised, and files them in your vault. The whole thing happens on the phone; nothing is uploaded.
Why switchers lose their history
The most common one-star review of the big dream journals is the same story: a phone change, a failed sync, or a backup that turned out to be behind a paywall, and years of dreams gone. Somnary cannot stop another app from losing your data, but it can take a copy of what you still have. Export now, while the old app still opens.
Step 1: export from the old app
Look for Export, Backup or Share journal in the app's settings and choose CSV or text. What we could confirm from the apps' own listings and published comparisons:
| App | Export it offers | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Lucidity: Lucid Dream Journal | CSV, TXT, PDF | Free. Pick CSV first; it keeps tags and flags as columns. |
| Dream Journal Ultimate | CSV, TXT | Behind the app's one-time unlock. Either format works. |
| Awoken | Text file (reported by users) | Unmaintained since 2024; its cloud backup is reported unreliable. Export while it still runs. |
| DreamApp | Not documented | We could not confirm an export. If you find one, CSV or text will paste in; otherwise copy entries by hand. |
| Anything else, including a notes app | CSV, TXT or JSON | One dream per block, headed by a date, is enough. |
Step 2: copy the file
Open the exported file on your phone (the Files app, a mail attachment to yourself, or the old app's share sheet into a notes app), tap Select all, then Copy. A few thousand dreams is fine; the clipboard can hold it.
Step 3: paste into Somnary
- Open Somnary, tap the gear for Settings, and under Vault choose Import from another app.
- Paste into the field. Under it, Somnary shows N dreams recognised as soon as it has read the text. If it says nothing looked like a journal, check that you copied the whole file including the header row.
- Tap Import. The dreams land in your vault under their original dates.
What comes across
- Date and time, in the usual formats: 2026-06-01, 01.06.2026, 6/1/2026, "June 1, 2026", or a timestamp. A dream with no readable date is filed under today.
- Title, or the first line of the dream when there is none.
- Text, including line breaks inside quoted CSV cells.
- Tags, split on commas or semicolons.
- Lucid, nightmare, mood, vividness and sleep quality when the export has a column or key by one of those names.
- Anything else is kept as a line at the end of the dream, so a column Somnary does not have a field for is not lost.
Once imported, the Dream Decoder reads your old dreams like any other, and Patterns starts counting your recurring symbols across the whole history.
Keep reading
- Dream symbol dictionary — the 30 symbols the Decoder recognises, A to Z.
- What to write in a dream journal — the fields worth logging for every dream.
- About Somnary — the private, local-first dream journal behind these guides.
A journal that cannot lose your dreams to a server
Somnary stores every dream only on your phone, with free encrypted export and import, a free Dream Decoder reading on each entry and no subscription required for the basics.
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