Dreamie’s alarm clock made me stop using my phone in bed

I accomplished the unthinkable: I learned to sleep through the night without my phone next to my bed. Please hold your shoulder. If it weren’t for Dreamie’s alarm clock, I’m not sure this Herculean feat would have been possible.

If it sounds like I’m bragging about brushing my teeth this morning, then you’re not Dreamie’s audience. But of course I am, and I’m not the only one who feels so attached to my phone that I’m essentially a cyborg.

I know that using my phone in bed disrupts my sleep, and lack of sleep disrupts basically everything else about my mental and physical health. But before Dreamie, I spent more than ten years with my phone next to my bed every night – those 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 have no help at all. Over the past few years, I’ve started a habit of reading before bed, which makes me feel noticeably more relaxed when it’s time to close my eyes. Still, I’ve never been a good sleeper (just ask my parents, who suffered endlessly by taking me to the Titanic museum exhibit as a child, which made me think I was going to die on the Titanic). Sometimes, when I can’t shut off my noisy brain, the only thing that can get me to sleep is to close my eyes and listen to podcasts or audiobooks (as long as they aren’t about the Titanic).

Whoever designed the Dreamie seems to share my plight, 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. Here’s how Dreamie works.

In “ambience” mode, it’s just a regular clock – but with a series of other modes that shape your sleep routine.

“Pulling down” starts your routine, signaling that it’s time to sleep. Mine is set to sound like a soft firelight, with an orange light, which dims and glows to simulate a real fire. I have the stove running for about 25 minutes, when I usually study. Then, it switches to “sound mask” mode, which I set to sound like thunder – but if I start to fall asleep, I can turn it on at that time. Any sound you choose will play until your wake-up call starts, and the “sunrise” light will dim 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 “rewind to sleep,” which plays whatever media you choose, whether it’s a breath that comes loaded on the device, another soundscape, or whatever podcast you want to listen to. You can choose an episode or show in advance so you don’t have to scroll through the interface in the middle of the night, making 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 have to wear headphones to sleep.

The Dreamie is Wi-Fi enabled, which means it can download any podcast you want from the Internet. For that, you have the podcasting structure to thank – since podcasts are distributed in an RSS feed, any developer can create their own custom RSS app, which is how Dremie can play. (Let’s take a moment to appreciate RSS, one of the last vestiges of an open Internet, which Spotify tried to eliminate in favor of its own walled garden.)

It’s a shame that this feature is so useful to me. Usually, when 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 get any notification after I go to sleep, I’ll open that notification before I open my podcast or audiobook. Since then, it’s been a series of bad decisions that lead to me being awake for two hours in the middle of the night.

My own actions are to blame here, but I know my bad habits aren’t unique — another 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 if I spend too much time looking at my phone, but there is data to back up my experience. With Dreamie, I can just swipe down to turn on “go back to sleep” mode and listen to nerds talk about baseball stats.

My bad habits in bed carry over into the morning. When I wake up, I usually spend about half an hour scrolling through my phone before I get out of bed. But if I’m not distracted by my phone, I can quickly get out of bed and start my day feeling like a human, rather than a hungry, caffeine-deprived zombie who needs to pee.

The Dreamie costs $250, which is steep for an alarm clock. At least there is no subscription or companion app you need to download. Although it’s pretty packed with features, the user interface is straightforward, similar to the iPhone’s watch app.

Sometimes while testing Dreamie, I “cheated” and used my phone in bed to listen to audiobooks (sometimes, you just really want to listen to something 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 was not true. Inevitably, I used my phone in the middle of the night.

I don’t know if Dreamie can truly support apps like Libby or Libro.fm, as there are technical limitations at play. 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 Dreamie, I also started testing Brick, which I’ve been using to block every app on my phone at night except for the podcast and audiobook apps. At $59, it’s more affordable than the Dremie, so if I were to actually buy one of these devices, I think I’d be able to get many of the same benefits from the Brick. Still, there’s something nice about being able to leave my phone in a completely different 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?