built for humans, in the age of machines
A playground for your imagination. Strange prompts, drifting words, and daydreams on demand — to get you out of the box.
the problem
Feeds sort us. Algorithms finish our sentences. Machines answer before we’ve finished asking.
It’s efficient — and it’s quietly flattening the part of you that wanders.
Dreamstorm is the opposite of an answer engine. It doesn’t solve anything. It knocks things loose.
try one
Don’t solve it. Look at it. Notice what shows up.
click any piece to hold it, then roll again
thirteen ways out
For art, stories, and the half-dream state.
Back in the box — on purpose. For founders and business brains.
what this is
Dreamstorm is a set of quick, free games for anyone who’s stuck — on a painting, a script, a song, a business, or a name. Each game hands you something you’d never have come up with on your own: a strange scene, two words that paint a picture, a business idea pulled from a slot machine, a question nobody has asked you. You don’t have to use it. You just have to look at it. That’s usually enough to knock something loose.
Painters, illustrators, photographers, and filmmakers use the dream games as art prompts and visual prompts: a place, an object, and a feeling to picture before you solve anything; two-word images like “a velvet lighthouse”; two worlds collided; real pictures from open archives, from museum pieces to strangers’ old snapshots. Good for a sketchbook warm-up, a mood board, or finding the image at the center of a project.
When you have writer’s block, a blank page is the hardest prompt there is. Use Scene and Figments as creative writing prompts and story ideas, Undertow’s river of almost-sentences for found lines, and Unasked to question a story you’re already in the middle of. Novelists, poets, songwriters, and screenwriters all get something different from the same few words.
The build games are idea generators for founders and side projects. Venture pulls a business idea from a format, an audience, a business model, and a way in. Niche finds a product for an audience nobody is serving yet. Names invents company names and checks whether the web address is free. Angles deals strategy cards for the thing you’re already building.
Put one on a screen to open a meeting, a workshop, or a writing class. They work as icebreakers and creative warm-up exercises: everyone looks at the same strange prompt and says the first idea it gives them. Nothing to install, no sign-up, free.
Most brainstorming techniques come down to one move: put something unexpected next to your problem and see what connects. Random words, forced connections, mind mapping, “what if” questions, daydreaming on purpose — they all break the groove your thinking has worn. These games make that move for you, fast, without a whiteboard or a facilitator. A few go further: Drift is a three-minute guided daydream that catches the half-asleep images most people lose, and Unasked asks you the questions about your project that nobody else will.
Short creative exercises that give your brain something unexpected to react to — a random prompt, a strange pairing of words, an idea from a slot machine — so new ideas show up faster than they would staring at a blank page.
Yes. Every game is free to play, with no account. Signing in is optional; it keeps your notebook of saved ideas on every device.
Pick a game, don’t try to be clever, and notice the first thing a prompt makes you think of. Save anything that glows with the ↓ button — it goes to your notebook, sorted by day. Three minutes is often enough to get moving again.
Yes. Share your screen, flip to a game, and have everyone respond to the same prompt. Scene, Figments, and Provocation make good warm-ups; Venture and Names are fun in a business or entrepreneurship workshop.
They arrive at random from open archives: the open-access collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Met, and the Cleveland Museum of Art; NASA; Wikimedia Commons; and Creative Commons photos on Flickr (found through Openverse). We don’t choose them, and filters can’t catch everything, so now and then one may be odd or offensive — just flip to the next. Each picture is credited, and its rights stay with its owner.
No. Almost everything here is hand-written word lists and chance — the ideas are yours. One game, Unasked, uses a language model to ask you questions about your project. It never gives you answers.
No account needed to play. Sign in to keep your ideas on every device.