I’ve accomplished the unthinkable: I’ve learned to sleep soundly through the night without my phone next to my bed. Please hold the applause. If it weren’t for him dreamer alarm clock, I’m not sure this herculean feat would have been possible.
If I feel like I’m bragging about brushing my teeth this morning, then you’re not Dreamie’s target audience. But I certainly am, and I’m not the only one who feels 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 basically everything else related to my physical and mental health. However, before Dreamie, I spent over a decade with my phone next to my bed every night; That’s tens of thousands of nights I 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’m not totally helpless. Over the past few years, I’ve gotten into the habit of reading before bed, which makes me feel much more relaxed when it’s finally time to close my eyes. Still, I’ve never slept well (just ask my parents, who suffered endlessly for taking me to see a museum exhibit about the Titanic when I was a kid, 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 put me to sleep is closing my eyes and listening to podcasts or audiobooks (as long as they’re not about the Titanic).
Whoever designed the Dreamie seems to share my woe, because what sets the Dreamie apart from all the other fancy alarm clocks is ridiculously simple: It can play podcasts.
Before we move on to podcasts, though, we need to zoom out. This is how Dreamie works.
In “ambient” mode, it’s just a normal watch, but it has another series of modes that make up your sleep routine.
“Relaxation” begins its routine, indicating that it is almost time to go to bed. I have mine set to sound like the crackling of a fireplace with a soft orange light, which fades in and out to mimic a real fire. I have the fireplace on for about 25 minutes, during which I usually read. Then it goes into “noise mask” mode, which I set to sound like a thunderstorm, but if I get sleepy beforehand, I can turn it on then. Whatever sound you choose will play until your wake-up routine begins, and the “sunrise” light will slowly get brighter until it’s time for your alarm to go off. (You can also choose without sound, if you prefer.)
Dreamie’s best feature is its “return to sleep mode.” If you wake up in the middle of the night, you can activate “go back to sleep,” which plays any media you choose, whether it’s a breathing routine that comes loaded on your device, another soundscape, or any podcast you want to listen to. You can choose the episode or show in advance so you don’t have to scroll through the interface in the middle of the night, which will make you feel even more awake. You can choose to use Dreamie with Bluetooth headphones, so if you share a bed with someone else, you won’t disturb them… but you will have to use headphones to sleep.
Dreamie is Wi-Fi enabled, which means you can download any podcast you want from the Internet. For this, we must thank the architecture of podcasts, since podcasts are distributed by RSS FeedsAny developer can create their own custom RSS app, which is how Dreamie can play them. (Let’s take a moment to appreciate RSSone of the last relics of the open Internet, which Spotify has actively attempted to override in favor of his own walled garden.)
It’s embarrassing 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 phone to turn on a podcast. But you see, I’m a millennial, which means if I get any notifications after falling asleep, I’ll reflexively open them before turning on my podcast or audiobook. From there, it’s a cascade of bad decisions that lead to me staying awake for two hours in the middle of the night.
My own actions are to blame, but I know that my bad habits are not unique: one survey 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 are data to support my experience. With Dreamie, I can simply swipe down to activate back sleep mode and listen to Nerds talk about baseball statistics..
My bad habits when talking on the phone in bed extend into the morning. When I wake up, I usually spend about half an hour browsing on 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 the day feeling like a person, rather than a hungry, caffeine-deprived zombie who has to pee.
Dreamie costs $250, which is expensive for an alarm clock. At least there’s no subscription or add-on app you need to download. Although feature-rich, the user interface is quite simple and resembles the Clock app on the iPhone.
Sometimes while testing Dreamie, I would “cheat” and use my phone in bed to listen to audiobooks (sometimes you 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 will ever be able to realistically support apps like Libby or Libro.fm, as there are technical limitations at play. Perhaps 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 Dreamie, I also started testing the Brickwhich I’ve been using to lock all the apps on my phone at night except the podcast and audiobook apps. At $59, it’s more affordable than the Dreamie, so if you were to buy one of these devices for real, I think you could get most 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 “locked”: 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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