The Dreamie alarm clock has made me stop using my phone in bed

I’ve accomplished the unthinkable: I’ve learned to sleep soundly through the night without my phone by my bed. Please, keep the applause. If it weren’t for the Dreamie Alarm Clock, I’m not sure this feat would have been possible.

If you feel like I’m bragging that I brushed my teeth this morning, you’re not Dreamie’s target audience. But I certainly am, and I’m not alone in feeling so attached to my phone that I’m basically a robot.

I know that using my phone in bed interferes with my sleep, and lack of sleep interferes with basically everything else about my mental and physical health. However, before Dreamie, I spent more than a decade with my phone at my bedside every night — 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’m not completely helpless. Over the past few years, I’ve developed a habit of reading before bed, which makes me feel noticeably more relaxed when it’s time to close my eyes. However, I never slept well (just ask my parents, who suffered to no end because they took me to see a museum exhibit about the Titanic when I was a child, which made me think I was going to die on the Titanic). Sometimes, when I can’t get rid of the noise of my mind, the only thing that can put me to sleep is to close my eyes and listen to podcasts or audiobooks (as long as they’re not related to the Titanic).

It seems whoever designed the Dreamie shares my struggles, because what sets the Dreamie apart from all the other fancy alarm clocks is a laughably simple thing: it can play podcasts.

Before we get to the podcast, we need to zoom out. Here’s how Dreamie works.

In Atmosphere mode, it’s just a regular watch – but it has another series of modes that make up your sleep routine.

“Relax” begins your routine, signaling that bedtime is approaching. I set up my sound to sound like a blaring fireplace with a soft orange light that fades and glows to mimic an actual fire. I turn on the heater for about 25 minutes, during which time I usually read. After that, it goes into Noise Mask mode, which I set to sound like a thunderstorm — but if I get sleepy early on, I can turn it on afterward. Any sound you choose will play until your wake-up routine begins, with the “sunrise” light slowly increasing in brightness until it is time for the alarm to go off. (You can also choose to have no sound, if you prefer.)

The best feature of Dreamie is “Return to Sleep”. If you wake up in the middle of the night, you can turn on “Back to Sleep,” which plays any media you choose, whether it’s a breathing routine loaded on the device, another audio clip, or any podcast you want to listen to. You can pre-select the episode or show so you don’t wander through the interface in the middle of the night, making you feel more alert. You can choose to use the Dreamie with Bluetooth headphones, so if you’re sharing the bed with someone else, you won’t disturb them…but you will 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. And for that, you have podcast architecture to thank — since podcasts are distributed via RSS feeds, any developer can create their own custom RSS app, and that’s how Dreamie can run it. (Let’s take a moment to appreciate RSS, one of the last vestiges of the open Internet, which Spotify has tried to squash in favor of its own walled garden.)

It’s embarrassing that this feature is so useful to me. Usually, if I wake up and can’t fall back asleep, I have to pick up my actual phone to play the podcast. But you see, I’m a millennial, which means if I get any notification after I fall asleep, I’ll automatically open that notification before playing my podcast or audiobook. From there, comes a series of bad decisions that lead to me waking up for two hours in the middle of the night.

My actions are to blame here, but I know my bad habits aren’t unique — a 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 a lot of time looking at my phone, but there is data to back up my experience. With Dreamie, I can simply scroll down to turn on “Back to Sleep” mode and listen to nerds talk about baseball statistics.

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 I get 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, not a hungry, caffeine-deprived zombie who has to pee.

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

Sometimes, while testing the Dreamie, I “cheated” and used my phone in bed to listen to audiobooks (sometimes, you might just want to listen to something specific and not a podcast). At first, I kept the Dreamie spirit alive and prevented myself from using my phone for any other reason. But this was not realistic. Sure enough, I used my phone in the middle of the night.

I don’t know if Dreamie can realistically support apps like Libby or Libro.fm, since there are technical limitations in play. Maybe in the future, Dreamie could give us a way to upload our own media, including downloaded audiobooks.

Near the end of my review period with Dreamie, I also started testing Brick, which I’ve been using to block all the apps on my phone at night except for podcasts and audiobooks. At $59, it’s less expensive than the Dreamie, so if I were to buy one of these for real, I think I’d be able to 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 “broken: it’s still your phone. And do you really want your phone to be the last thing you see every day?”