I achieved the unthinkable: I learned to sleep soundly through the night without a phone next to my bed. Please hold your applause. If it wasn’t for that A dreamer Alarm clock, I’m not sure that this Herculean feat would be possible.
If I’m bragging about brushing my teeth this morning, then you’re not Dreamie’s target audience. But I certainly have, 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 interferes with everything related to my mental and physical health. Even before Dreamie, I had my phone by my bed every night for more than a decade – that’s tens of thousands of nights spent so attached 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 more relaxed when it’s finally time to close my eyes. Still, I’ve never been a good sleeper (just ask my parents, who tormented me endlessly for taking me to see a Titanic museum exhibit as a kid that 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 to close my eyes and listen to podcasts or audiobooks (unless it’s about Titanic).
Whoever designed the Dreamie shares my pain, 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, we need to zoom in. How does Dreamie work?
In ‘Ambience’ mode, it’s just a regular clock – but it has a range of other modes that organize your sleep patterns.
“Pulling down the tower” starts your routine and signals that it’s almost bedtime. Mine will sound like a fireplace crackling with a soft, orange light that fades and glows to mimic a real fire. The fireplace runs for about 25 minutes, during which time I usually read. Then it goes into “sound mask” mode, which I set to sound like a thunderstorm – but if I’m fast asleep, I can turn it on. Regardless of the sound you choose, your wake-up call will sound until it starts, and the sunrise light will slowly brighten until it’s time for your alarm to go off. (You can choose silent if you want.)
Dreamie’s best feature is that it “goes back to sleep”. If you wake up in the middle of the night, you can turn on the “fall back to sleep” function, which plays the media of your choice, whether it’s a breathing app loaded on the device, another soundscape, or whatever podcast you want to listen to. You can select an episode or show ahead of time so you don’t have to scroll through the interface in the middle of the night and feel even more awake. You can choose to use the Dreamie with Bluetooth headphones, so if you share a bed with someone else you won’t disturb them… but you have to wear the headphones to sleep.
The Dreamie is Wi-Fi enabled, which means it can download any podcast you want from the internet. You have the architecture of podcasts to thank for that – because it’s distributed by podcasters RSS feedsany developer can create their own custom RSS app so Dreamie can play them. (Let’s evaluate for a moment RSSwhich is one of the last vestiges of the open internet 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 grab my actual phone to turn on the podcast. But you see, I’m a millennial, which means if I get 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 keep me awake for two hours in the middle of the night.
My own actions are to blame here, but I know that my bad habits are not unique – one request 2000 found that 87% of American adults sleep with their phones in their bedrooms. I don’t need scientific studies to tell you that I sleep worse when I look at my phone too much, but data to support my experience. With Dreamie, I can just swipe down to turn on “go back to sleep” mode and listen nerds talk about baseball stats.
My bad phone habits in bed extend into the morning. When I wake up, I usually scroll on my phone for about half an hour before getting out of bed. But if I’m not distracted by my phone, I can get out of bed a lot sooner and start the day feeling like a human instead of a hungry, caffeine-deprived zombie who has to pee.
The Dreamie costs $250, which is quite high for an alarm clock. At least there are no subscriptions or utilities to download. Although quite feature-packed, the user interface is quite simple, similar to the iPhone Clock app.
Sometimes while testing the Dreamie, I “cheated” and used my phone to listen to audiobooks in bed (sometimes you want to listen to something special that isn’t just a podcast). First, I kept the spirit of the Dreamer alive and prevented myself from using my phone for any other reason. But it 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 because there are technical limitations in the game. Maybe in the future Dreamie will give us a way to upload our own media, including downloaded audiobooks.
Towards the end of the review period with Dreamie, I also started experimenting BrickI use to block every app on my phone at night except podcasts and audiobook apps. At $59, it’s more affordable than the Dreamie, so if I were to buy one of these devices for real, I think I could get many of the same benefits from the Brick. Still, there’s 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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