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

I have achieved the unthinkable: I have learned to sleep soundly through the night without my phone by my bed. Please hold your applause. If it wasn’t for the Dreamie alarm clock, I’m not sure this Herculean feat would have been possible.

If it feels like I’m bragging that I brushed my teeth this morning, then 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 cyborg.

I know that using my phone in bed disrupts my sleep, and poor sleep disrupts pretty much everything else about my mental and physical health. Yet before Dreamie, I spent more than a decade with my phone by my bedside every single night—those are 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’m not completely helpless. Over the past few years, I’ve established a habit of reading before bed, which makes me feel significantly 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 get me to sleep is closing my eyes and listening to podcasts or audiobooks (as long as they’re not about Titanic).

Whoever designed the Dreamie seems to share my affliction, because what separates the Dreamie from all the other smart alarm clocks is ridiculously simple: it can play podcasts.

Before we get to podcasts, though, we need to zoom out. This is how Dreamie works.

In “atmosphere” mode, it’s just a normal watch – but it has another set of modes that make up your sleep routine.

“Relax” starts your routine and signals that it’s almost time for bed. I set mine to sound like a fireplace crackling with a soft orange light that fades and glows to mimic the actual fire. I have the fireplace running for about 25 minutes, which is when I usually read. Then it switches to “noise mask” mode, which I set to sound like a thunderstorm – but if I get sleepy earlier, I can turn it on after that. Whatever sound you choose will play until your wake-up routine begins, where the “sunrise” light will slowly brighten until it’s time for your alarm to go off. (You can also choose no sound if you prefer.)

Dreamie’s best feature is its “back to sleep mode.” If you wake up in the middle of the night, you can hit “back to sleep” which plays whatever media you choose, whether it’s a breathing routine that comes loaded on the device, another soundscape, or whatever podcast you want to listen to. You can select the episode or show in advance so that you are not scrolling around the interface in the middle of the night, making you feel even more awake. You can choose to use the Dreamie with Bluetooth headphones, so if you’re sharing a bed with someone else, you won’t disturb them… but you’ll need to wear headphones to sleep.

Dreamie is Wi-Fi enabled, which means it can download any podcast you want from the Internet. You have podcast architecture to thank for that – since podcasts are distributed by RSS feeds, any developer can create their own custom RSS app, which is how Dreamie can play them. (Let’s take a moment to appreciate RSS, one of the last vestiges of the open internet that Spotify has been actively trying to destroy 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 get back to sleep, I have to grab my actual phone to turn on a podcast. But you see, I’m a millennial, which means if I’ve got a notification after I’ve fallen asleep, I’ll reflexively open that notification before turning on my podcast or audiobook. From there, it’s a cascade 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—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 too much time looking at my phone, but there is data to support my experience. With Dreamie, I can simply swipe down to hit “back to sleep” mode and listen to nerds talk about baseball stats.

My bad phone-in-bed habits extend into the morning. When I wake up, I usually spend about half an hour scrolling on my phone before I get out of bed. But if I’m not distracted by my phone, I can get out of bed a lot faster and start my day feeling like a person instead of a hungry, caffeinated zombie who needs to pee.

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

At times while testing the Dreamie, I “cheated” and used my phone in bed to listen to audiobooks (sometimes you just 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 other reasons. 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 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 the Dreamie, I also started testing the brick, which I’ve been using to block all apps on my phone at night except podcast 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’d be able to 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 “Bricked: it’s still your phone. And do you really want your phone to be the last thing you see every day?