Imagoria is a quiet place for the dreams a person has for their life. One dream a day comes forward, and the practice has three ways in: imagine it, using your own photographs; reflect on it, with one honest question; explore it, by joining two of your own words. A session takes a few minutes and always ends on what stands in the way, which is the part most imagination exercises leave out. Imagoria is made for iPhone, iPad and Android, in English, Dutch, French and Spanish, and it has no account and no server, so nothing you write is ever sent anywhere. It is made by Thomas Laureyssens (Toyfoo BV, Antwerp, Belgium).
A session runs for a few minutes with the dream's name held between two arcs and a countdown under it. Six of your own photographs come by one at a time, each with a word for what it is: the place, the detail, the path, the feeling, the moment, and what stands in the way. You can close your eyes at any point. The sixth photograph is not an afterthought; every session ends there on purpose, and the research section below says why.
One question, never required, always a tap away. The questions come in four lenses, which are the four things worth asking of a dream: does it draw you, can you carry it, who is it for, and can you sustain it. You can answer about the dream itself or about where you stand today. There are no right answers, and the answer is written in your own words, in a field that stays on your device.
For a dream that is still vague. A few quiet questions produce a field of your own words, spread across the paper. You bring two of them together and notice what arises between them. Nothing in that field is borrowed or suggested by the app: every word in it came from something you wrote.
Imagoria does not rank dreams and does not score them. It does not write your reflection for you, and there is no language model anywhere in it. It has no streaks, no badges and no daily target, and a dream you leave alone simply goes quiet rather than turning into a debt. These are design decisions rather than features; they are listed here because what an app refuses is usually the fastest way to understand it.
Imagoria rests on five findings from cognitive and motivational science. A dream, throughout, is something a person wants for their life, not what they see in their sleep. Each one is set out below in plain words, with what the app does about it and where the finding comes from. Quotations are verbatim and sourced; where a source is summarised rather than quoted, it is summarised outside quotation marks.
Imagining an action is not a pale copy of doing it. Brain imaging finds a large overlap between performing an action, imagining it, watching someone else do it, and describing it in words. That is what makes a few minutes of imagining worth anything at all: something real happens while you do it, and a reaction that keeps coming back when you picture a particular dream is a signal worth noticing.
What the app does with it. The session is built as a rehearsal rather than a daydream: your own photographs, held one at a time, long enough for a reaction to arrive.
There is a large body of psychological and neuroimaging experiments that have interpreted their findings in favor of a functional equivalence between action generation, action simulation, action verbalization, and perception of action.
Grèzes & Decety, 2001
Functional equivalence is the technical way of saying that the brain does not keep imagining and doing in separate rooms. A great deal of the machinery that runs when you walk into a studio also runs when you picture yourself walking into one. That is why what you notice during a session counts as information about you rather than as a mood: the reaction is produced by much the same equipment that the real thing would use.
Grèzes, J., & Decety, J. (2001). Functional anatomy of execution, mental simulation, observation, and verb generation of actions: A meta-analysis. Human Brain Mapping, 12(1), 1–19. doi:10.1002/1097-0193(200101)12:1<1::AID-HBM10>3.0.CO;2-V
Holmes, P. S., & Collins, D. J. (2001). The PETTLEP approach to motor imagery: A functional equivalence model for sport psychologists. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 13(1), 60–83. doi:10.1080/10413200109339004
Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617–645. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639
A good many of the goals people carry are partly inherited: from expectation, from status, from comparison with others. They can feel entirely like one's own and still produce no lasting pull. Goals pursued for one's own reasons draw more sustained effort, are reached more often, and pay back more in well-being than goals driven by pressure. How a dream feels when you imagine it is a different kind of evidence from reasoning about it, and it goes around the stories we tell ourselves about what we ought to want.
What the app does with it. It never ranks dreams by ambition or likelihood. What it keeps is your own words for how a session felt, so the question of whether a dream is really yours stays yours to answer.
First, those pursuing self-concordant goals put more sustained effort into achieving those goals and thus are more likely to attain them. Second, those who attain self-concordant goals reap greater well-being benefits from their attainment.
Sheldon & Elliot, 1999
Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. (1999). Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: The self-concordance model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), 482–497. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.76.3.482
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. Plenum Press. doi:10.1007/978-1-4899-2271-7
This is the finding that shapes the app most, and the one that is least intuitive. Picturing a wished-for future without also facing what stands in the way tends to reduce the drive to pursue it: the mind takes some of the satisfaction in advance, and the person acts less. Setting the wish against the obstacle is what turns a fantasy into something binding. The effect also depends on expectation: where success looks likely, contrasting strengthens commitment, and where it looks unlikely, it lets people disengage and spend their energy elsewhere, which is a healthy outcome rather than a failure.
What the app does with it. Every session ends on what stands in the way, and reflection is always one tap away. Imagoria never asks you to simply visualise success.
The solution isn't to do away with dreaming and positive thinking. Rather, it's making the most of our fantasies by brushing them up against the very thing most of us are taught to ignore or diminish: the obstacles that stand in our way.
Oettingen, 2014
Mentally contrasting a desired future with present reality is a self-regulation strategy that leads to goal commitment in line with a person's expectations of success.
Oettingen, Mayer, Sevincer, Stephens, Pak & Hagenah, 2009
Oettingen, G. (2014). Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. Current. ISBN 978-1-59184-687-1
Oettingen, G., Pak, H., & Schnetter, K. (2001). Self-regulation of goal setting: Turning free fantasies about the future into binding goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(5), 736–753. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.80.5.736
Oettingen, G., Mayer, D., Sevincer, A. T., Stephens, E. J., Pak, H., & Hagenah, M. (2009). Mental contrasting and goal commitment: The mediating role of energization. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35(5), 608–622. doi:10.1177/0146167208330856
Sevincer, A. T., Plakides, A., & Oettingen, G. (2023). Mental contrasting and energization transfer to low-expectancy tasks. Motivation and Emotion, 47(1), 85–99. doi:10.1007/s11031-022-09963-0
How much a simulation resembles the real thing depends on how much of the situation it carries. Who is there, what you are holding, the time of day, how your body is placed: each detail brings another circuit into it. Vague thinking about the future does not reliably engage the network that handles remembered episodes and their emotional weight, while specific, situated imagining does. A richer simulation gives a clearer reading, because there is simply more of you in it.
What the app does with it. The six pieces of a dream are named rather than left open, and they are your own photographs rather than stock images, because a picture you took is already situated.
Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617–645. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639
Szpunar, K. K. (2010). Episodic future thought: An emerging concept. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(2), 142–162. doi:10.1177/1745691610363981
A dream rarely arrives whole. More often it is a combination: two things a person already carries, held in mind at once until a third appears between them. The further apart the two, the more surprising the result. The same move has been described as bisociation, the act of seeing something in two normally incompatible frames at the same time, which is the pattern behind jokes, discoveries and art alike.
What the app does with it. The exploration pairs two words drawn from the person's own answers, so what surfaces is a combination of their own material and not a suggestion from the app.
The more mutually remote the elements of the new combination, the more creative the process or solution.
Mednick, 1962
Koestler set the pattern down in a chapter about jokes, having just told two of them, and the argument of the book is that the same pattern runs under a joke, a discovery and a work of art alike. The ellipsis below stands for his own shorthand for the idea and the two frames.
The pattern underlying both stories is the perceiving of a situation or idea … in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference
Koestler, 1964, p. 35
Mednick, S. A. (1962). The associative basis of the creative process. Psychological Review, 69(3), 220–232. doi:10.1037/h0048850
Koestler, A. (1964). The Act of Creation. Hutchinson of London, p. 35 (Part One, "The Logic of Laughter").
None of this tells anyone what they truly want. Imagoria identifies nothing on a person's behalf and computes nothing from what they write; naming a dream stays the reader's own conclusion to draw. Nor does any of it promise that a dream will be reached. The third finding above is the reason for that restraint rather than an exception to it: an app that told you a dream was yours, or that you were on your way to it, would be doing the very thing the research warns against. What Imagoria offers is three activities that hold up, imagining, thinking through and exploring, and a place to do them in.
Thomas Laureyssens made Imagoria for himself first, around one question: what do I actually want, and how do I bring a vague hunch into focus. Nothing he tried fitted. Todo apps treated dreams as tasks to be completed. Journalling can turn analytical, and it asks a good deal of effort: being unstructured is its strength and also its difficulty, since a blank page is boundless and for some people that is a high threshold. Timers quieted the mind without inviting him to contemplate anything. He used all three and wanted one place that did what none of them could alone.
He is an artist and interaction designer, and the app draws on years of that work, including projects in which he helped people imagine possible futures. It draws as much on coaching: being coached himself, and guiding others in group reflection. His own account of it is that we rarely give our dreams undivided attention, and that something happens when we finally do.
What he is after, in his own words as reported here, is for imagination to become accessible again. Children have it without being taught. Adults have mostly forgotten it. Teenagers are triggered constantly, and increasingly defined, by what social media algorithms put in front of them. What is missing is a space to step back in, and to reconnect with oneself.
Bernard De Koven was a game designer who spent his life on a question most of the field skips: not how to win, but how to play well together. His book The Well-Played Game argues that play is something done for the playing, in the company of others, and that a score which matters is usually the thing that ruins it. That is why Imagoria stays light and refuses to keep count. A practice that scored you would become a performance, and a performance is the opposite of what a few quiet minutes with your own dream is for.
The app's two playful prompts come from the same place. What if is a note you unfold that lets something from outside into your dream, and a trace is one thing to notice in the day that belongs to it. Neither asks anything of you and neither is scored. Thomas calls them bubbles of delight and discovery, put where someone might find them in an ordinary day.
The things we imagine can become the world.
Bernard De Koven, 2020
specXcraft (speculative crafting for un/common futures) was a co-creative artistic research trajectory in Brussels, 2022 to 2024, funded by Innoviris Co-create and run with Urban Species, Constant, Natagora and Centre Vidéo Bruxelles. It started from the hypothesis that the capacity to imagine futures is a pivotal citizen's skill, and it trained that capacity with people's hands: participants worked with real materials and with science fiction texts, so that a future became something to hold rather than only something to discuss. A 148-page collective publication came out of it in 2024.
It matters here because Imagoria carries the same conviction into a daily, personal practice. What specXcraft did with a group, in a room, over two years, the app does with one person, for a few minutes, with their own photographs.
Download the press kit (ZIP, 6.1 MB). Everything below in one file. Free to use in coverage of Imagoria. Please do not alter the mark: no recolouring, no stretching, no effects, and nothing set inside its sheet. Screenshots may be cropped to a device frame but not otherwise edited.
The wordmark is set in Faune, by Alice Savoie for the Centre national des arts plastiques, licensed CC BY-ND 4.0. The kit carries the wordmark as PNG rather than as vector: type set in a font is what a font is for, while an SVG of its outlines would be passing the letterforms themselves on, which that licence does not allow us to do. The mark is the site's own drawing and is vector in the kit.
Verbatim from the note that ships inside the app. Free to quote, with attribution to Thomas Laureyssens.
Todo apps treated my dreams like tasks to be completed. Journals let me write endlessly without ever getting quieter.
Thomas Laureyssens
Meanwhile most apps compete for your attention, and the newer ones reflect for you, with AI that summarizes your feelings back at you. I believe the opposite is needed: silence, and your own attention.
Thomas Laureyssens
For a long time, one sentence has sat at the center of my own dreaming: creating tools for people to transform themselves. This app is that dream, practiced.
Thomas Laureyssens
The tragedy is that for many people dreams only exist as the sleeping kind.
Thomas Laureyssens, 2026
Thomas answers press mail himself. Review copies, questions and interview requests: hello@imagoria.app, or +32 3 332 06 17.
imagoria.app
Imagoria on the App Store
Imagoria on Google Play
support · privacy & terms
Toyfoo BV · Lange van Ruusbroecstraat 139 · 2018 Antwerpen · Belgium
VAT: BE0898234549
