I’ve accomplished the unthinkable: I’ve learned to sleep soundly through the night without my phone next to my bed. Please hold your applause. If it wasn’t for the Dreamie alarm clock, I’m not sure this Herculean feat would be possible.
If I feel like bragging about brushing my teeth this morning, then you’re not Dreamie’s target audience. But I sure am, and I’m not alone in feeling so attached to my phone that I’m basically a cyborg.
I know that using my phone in bed interferes with my sleep, and poor sleep affects basically everything else about my mental and physical health. However, before Dreamie, I went over a decade with my phone by my bed every night – that’s tens of thousands of nights spent so glued to my glowing rectangle that I couldn’t imagine the horror of waking up in the middle of the night without it.
I am not completely helpless. Over the past few years, I’ve developed a habit of reading before bed, which makes me feel much more relaxed when it’s finally time to close my eyes. However, I have never slept well (just ask my parents, who suffered endlessly for taking me to see a Titanic museum when I was a child, which made me think I was going to die on the Titanic). Sometimes, when I can’t drown out my noisy brain, the only thing that can get me to sleep is closing my eyes and listening to podcasts or audiobooks (as long as they aren’t about the Titanic).
Whoever designed the Dreamie seems to share my misery, because what sets the Dreamie apart from all the other fancy alarm clocks is ridiculously simple: It can play podcasts.
Before we get to the podcasts though, we need to zoom out. See how Dreamie works.
In “ambience” mode, it’s just a normal watch – but it has another set of functions that make up your sleep routine.
“Down” starts your routine, signaling that it’s almost time for bed. I’ve set mine to sound like a crackling fireplace with a soft, orange light that fades in and out to mimic real fire. I have the fireplace running for about 25 minutes, during which I usually read. Then it goes into “noise mask” mode, which I set to sound like a storm — but if I’m sleepy earlier, I can turn it on. Whatever sound you choose will play until your wake-up routine begins, with the sunrise light gradually getting brighter until it’s time for your alarm to go off. (You can also choose no sound if you prefer.)
Dreamie’s best feature is the “return to sleep mode”. If you wake up in the middle of the night, you can turn on “back to sleep,” which plays whatever media you choose, whether it’s a breathing routine loaded onto the device, another soundscape, or whatever podcast you want to listen to. You can select the episode or show ahead of time so you’re not scrolling through the interface in the middle of the night, making you feel even more awake. You can choose to use the Dreamie with Bluetooth headphones, so if you’re sharing a bed with someone else, you won’t disturb them… but you have to wear headphones to sleep.
Dreamie is Wi-Fi enabled, which means it can download whatever podcasts you want from the internet. For that, you have the podcast architecture to thank – since podcasts are distributed by RSS feedsany developer can create their own custom RSS app that Dreamie can play with. (Let’s take a moment to appreciate RSSone of the last relics of the open internet, which Spotify actively tried to cancel in favor of his own walled garden.)
It’s a shame that this feature is so useful to me. Usually, if I wake up and can’t go back to sleep, I have to pick up my actual phone to turn on a podcast. But you see, I’m a millennial, which means if I’ve got a notification after falling asleep, I’ll reflexively open that notification before turning on my podcast or audiobook. From there, it’s a cascade of bad decisions that lead to me being up for two hours in the middle of the night.
My own actions are to blame here, but I know my bad habits are not unique – one overview of 2,000 American adults found that 87% of us sleep with our phones in our bedrooms. I don’t need scientific studies to tell me that I sleep worse when I spend too much time looking at my phone, but there is data to support my experience. With Dreamie, I can just swipe down to turn on “back to sleep” and listen nerds talk about baseball stats.
My bad phone habits in bed extend into the morning. When I wake up, I usually spend about half an hour scrolling through my phone before getting out of bed. But if I’m not distracted by my phone, I can get out of bed much faster and start my day feeling like a person, rather than a starving, caffeine-deprived zombie who needs to pee.
The Dreamie costs $250, which is steep for an alarm clock. At least there’s no subscription or companion app to download. Although it is quite feature dense, the user interface is quite simple, similar to the iPhone Clock app.
At times while testing the Dreamie, I “cheated” and used my phone in bed to listen to audiobooks (sometimes, you just really want to listen to something specific that isn’t a podcast). At first, I kept the Dreamie spirit alive and prevented myself from using my phone for any other reason. But that just wasn’t realistic. Inevitably, I used my phone in the middle of the night.
I don’t know if Dreamie can ever realistically support apps like Libby or Libro.fm as there are technical limitations. Maybe in the future, Dreamie can give us a way to upload our own media, including downloaded audiobooks.
Towards the end of my review period with the Dreamie, I also started testing it Brickwhich I used to block every app on my phone at night except the podcast and audiobook apps. At $59, it’s more affordable than the Dreamie, so if I were to actually buy one of these devices, I think I could get most of the same benefits from the Brick. However, there is something nice about being able to leave my phone in a completely separate room. Even if your phone is bricked, it’s still your phone. And do you really want your phone to be the last thing you see every day?
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