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

I have achieved the unexpected: I have learned to sleep well through the night without my phone next to my bed. Please, hold hands. If it wasn’t for Dreamie alarm clock, I’m not sure how Herculean this would be.

If I feel like I’m bragging about brushing my teeth this morning, then you’re not a Dreamie audience. But I really am, and I’m not the only one who is so obsessed with my phone that I’m a cyborg.

I know that using my phone in bed interferes with my sleep, and good sleep interferes with everything about my health and well-being. But before Dreamie, I spent more than ten years with my phone by my bed every night – that’s thousands of nights spent so connected to my shiny rectangle that I didn’t even think about waking up in the middle of the night without it.

I am not helpless at all. Over the past few years, I’ve developed a habit of reading before bed, which makes me feel more relaxed when it’s time to close my eyes. However, I have never been a good sleeper (just ask my parents, who suffered endlessly from taking me to a Titanic museum as a child, which made me think I was going to die on the Titanic). Sometimes, when I can’t turn 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 don’t have anything to do with Titanic).

The creator of the Dreamie seems to share my pain, because what sets the Dreamie apart from the other best watches is simple: It can play podcasts.

Before we get to the podcasts, we need to preview. This is how Dreamie works.

In “ambience” mode, it’s a normal clock – but it has other colors that create your own sleep routine.

“Pulling down” begins your routine, indicating that it is about to fall asleep. I have my equipment that sounds like a bonfire with a soft, orange light that fades and glows to mimic real fire. I stay by the fireplace for about 25 minutes, and most of the time I read. Then, it switches to a “noise mask”, which I set to sound like a thunderstorm – but if I go to bed early, I can turn it on. Whatever sound you choose will play until it’s time to wake up, the “sun” light will flash slowly until it’s time for your alarm to go off. (You can also choose any word, if you want.)

Dreamie’s best feature is “back to sleep”. When you wake up in the middle of the night, you can turn on “go back to sleep,” which plays whatever you choose, whether it’s a pause that comes on the device, another sound feature, or whatever podcast you want to listen to. You can choose the session or show it in advance so that you don’t run the feature in the middle of the night, making you more awake. You can choose to use the Dreamie with Bluetooth headphones, so if you’re sharing a bed with someone, you won’t disturb them… but you’ll have to wear the headphones to sleep.

Dreamie has Wi-Fi, which means it can download any podcast you want from the Internet. So, you have podcasts to thank – since podcasts are shared by RSS feedsany developer can create their own RSS feed, in which Dreamie can play. (Let’s take a moment to say thank you RSSone of the last remnants of the open internet, which Spotify tried to block it in favor of his walled garden.)

It’s a shame that this feature is so useful to me. Often, when I wake up and can’t 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 a notification while I’m asleep, I’ll open the notification before turning on my podcast or audiobook. From there, there are a lot of people who have been trying to clean the kitchen sinks, and the water has run out like it’s two hours past midnight.

My actions are correct here, but I know that my bad habits are not different – one research of 2,000 American adults found that 87% of us sleep with our phones in our bedrooms. I don’t need a scientific study to tell me that I sleep better when I spend too much time looking at my phone, but there it is data support my experience. With Dreamie, I can just look down to turn on “back to sleep” and listen Nerds talk about baseball statistics.

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

The Dreamie costs $250, which is steep for an alarm clock. At least there are no subscriptions or other software you need to download. Although it is very dense with features, the user interface is straightforward, similar to the iPhone Clock app.

Sometimes while trying Dreamie, I “cheat” and use my phone in bed to listen to audiobooks (sometimes, you just want to listen to something that isn’t a podcast). At first, I kept the Dreamie spirit alive and refrained 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 support apps like Libby or Libro.fm, since there are restrictions on the game. Maybe in the future, Dreamie will give us a way to upload our own media, including downloadable audiobooks.

Towards the end of my review period with the Dreamie, I started testing it again Brickswhich I’ve been using to block every app on my phone at night except for podcasts and audiobooks. At $59, it’s cheaper than the Dreamie, so if I were to buy one of these devices for real, I think I’d get a lot more out of the Brick. However, there is something nice about being able to leave my phone in a 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?