Metamorpheus: Interactive, Affective, and Creative Dream Narration Through Metaphorical Visual Storytelling

Emotions are shaped by personal experiences, and making meaning from those experiences is used in psychotherapy to support well-being. However, technology to help people recall and recount everyday emotional experiences is underexplored. This paper introduces Metamorpheus, an affective interface that guides users in creative visual storytelling about dreams. The system arranges a story based on a dream's emotional arc and prompts self-reflection by generating metaphorical images and text using generative AI. Users can recolor and rearrange the interface. An experience-centered evaluation showed that interacting with Metamorpheus helped users recall dreams vividly, allowing them to relive and reflect on their experiences meaningfully.

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Abstract

Human emotions are essentially molded by lived experiences, from which we construct personalised meaning. The engagement in such meaning-making process has been practiced as an intervention in various psychotherapies to promote wellness. Nevertheless, to support recollecting and recounting lived experiences in everyday life remains under explored in HCI. It also remains unknown how technologies such as generative AI models can facilitate the meaning making process, and ultimately support affective mindfulness. In this paper we present Metamorpheus, an affective interface that engages users in a creative visual storytelling of emotional experiences during dreams. Metamorpheus arranges the storyline based on a dream's emotional arc, and provokes self-reflection through the creation of metaphorical images and text depictions. The system provides metaphor suggestions, and generates visual metaphors and text depictions using generative AI models, while users can apply generations to recolour and re-arrange the interface to be visually affective. Our experience-centred evaluation manifests that, by interacting with Metamorpheus, users can recall their dreams in vivid detail, through which they relive and reflect upon their experiences in a meaningful way.