The Dreamie alarm clock got me to stop using my phone in bed
The Dreamie alarm clock got me to stop using my phone in bed
Dreamie 闹钟让我戒掉了睡前玩手机的习惯
I have accomplished the unthinkable: I have learned to sleep soundly through the night without my phone at my bedside. Please, hold your applause. If it weren’t for the Dreamie alarm clock, I’m not sure that this Herculean feat would have been possible. If it feels as though I am bragging that I brushed my teeth this morning, then you are 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.
我完成了一项不可思议的壮举：我终于学会了在没有手机陪伴的情况下安稳入睡。请先别急着鼓掌。如果不是因为 Dreamie 闹钟，我不确定自己是否能完成这项“赫拉克勒斯式”的艰巨任务。如果你觉得我像是在炫耀自己今天早上刷了牙，那么你显然不是 Dreamie 的目标用户。但我绝对是，而且我并不孤单——很多人都像我一样，对手机产生了极强的依赖，简直活成了半机械人。
I know that using my phone in bed interferes with my sleep, and poor sleep interferes with basically everything else about my mental and physical health. Yet before Dreamie, I went more than a decade with my phone at my bedside every single night – that’s 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.
我知道睡前玩手机会干扰睡眠，而糟糕的睡眠会影响我身心健康的方方面面。然而在 Dreamie 出现之前，我连续十多年每晚都把手机放在床头——那可是成千上万个夜晚，我与那块发光的长方形屏幕形影不离，甚至无法想象半夜醒来时没有它会是多么可怕。
I’m not totally helpless. Over the last few years, I’ve established a habit of reading before bed, which makes me feel markedly more relaxed when it’s finally time to shut my eyes. Still, I’ve never been a good sleeper (just ask my parents, who suffered endlessly for taking 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 drown out 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’re not about the Titanic). Whoever designed the Dreamie seems to share my affliction, because what sets Dreamie apart from all of the other fancy alarm clocks is laughably simple: It can play podcasts.
我并非完全无药可救。过去几年里，我养成了睡前阅读的习惯，这让我在闭眼入睡时感到明显放松。不过，我一直是个睡眠质量很差的人（问问我父母就知道了，他们带我去看泰坦尼克号博物馆展览后，我一度以为自己会死在泰坦尼克号上，让他们操碎了心）。有时，当我的大脑无法安静下来时，唯一能让我入睡的方法就是闭上眼睛听播客或有声书（只要内容不是关于泰坦尼克号的就行）。Dreamie 的设计者似乎和我有着同样的困扰，因为 Dreamie 与其他花哨闹钟的区别简单得令人发笑：它能播放播客。
Image Credits: Dreamie 图片来源：Dreamie
Before we get to the podcasts, though, we need to zoom out. Here’s how Dreamie works. In “ambience” mode, it’s just a normal clock – but it has another series of modes that make up your sleep routine. The “wind down” starts your routine, signaling that it’s almost time for bed. I have mine set to sound like a fireplace crackle with a soft, orange light, which fades and glows to imitate actual fire. I have the fireplace running for about 25 minutes, during which I’m usually reading. Then, it transitions to the “noise mask” mode, which I set to sound like a thunderstorm — but if I get sleepy earlier, I can turn it on then. Whatever sound you pick will play until your wakeup routine begins, with the “sunrise” light slowly getting brighter until it’s time for your alarm to go off. (You can also choose no sound, if you prefer.)
在聊播客之前，我们先来看看 Dreamie 的工作原理。在“环境”模式下，它就是一个普通的时钟，但它还有一系列模式来构建你的睡眠流程。“放松”模式开启你的睡眠程序，提示你该睡觉了。我把它设置成壁炉燃烧的噼啪声，配上柔和的橙色灯光，灯光会忽明忽暗，模拟真实的火焰。我让壁炉声运行约 25 分钟，这段时间我通常在阅读。之后，它会切换到“噪音掩蔽”模式，我将其设置为雷雨声——如果我提前困了，也可以手动开启。无论你选择什么声音，它都会一直播放，直到唤醒程序开始，此时“日出”灯光会慢慢变亮，直到闹钟响起。（如果你愿意，也可以选择静音。）
Dreamie’s best feature is its “back to sleep mode.” If you wake up in the middle of the night, you can turn on “back to sleep,” which plays whatever media you choose, whether it’s a breathing routine that comes loaded onto the device, another soundscape, or any podcast you want to listen to. You can choose the episode or show ahead of time so that you’re not scrolling around the interface in the middle of the night, making you feel even more awake. You can opt 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.
Dreamie 最棒的功能是“重返睡眠模式”。如果你半夜醒来，可以开启此模式，它会播放你选择的媒体内容，无论是设备内置的呼吸练习、其他音景，还是你想听的任何播客。你可以提前选好剧集或节目，这样半夜就不必在界面上翻找，从而避免让自己变得更加清醒。你还可以选择通过蓝牙耳机使用 Dreamie，这样如果你和别人同床共枕，就不会打扰到对方……但前提是你得戴着耳机睡觉。
Dreamie is Wi-Fi enabled, which means it can download whatever podcast you want from the internet. For that, you have the architecture of podcasts to thank – 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 relics of the open internet, which Spotify has actively tried to quash in favor of its own walled garden.)
Dreamie 支持 Wi-Fi，这意味着它可以从互联网下载你想要的任何播客。这要归功于播客的底层架构——由于播客是通过 RSS 订阅源分发的，任何开发者都可以创建自己的自定义 RSS 应用，这也是 Dreamie 能够播放播客的原因。（让我们花点时间感谢一下 RSS，它是开放互联网最后的遗迹之一，而 Spotify 一直试图将其扼杀，以维护自己的“围墙花园”。）
Image Credits: Dreamie 图片来源：Dreamie
It’s embarrassing that this feature is so useful for me. Usually, if I wake up and can’t fall back asleep, I have to pick up my actual phone to turn on a podcast. But you see, I’m a millennial, which means that if I’ve gotten any notification after I’ve fallen asleep, I will reflexively open that notification before I turn 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 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’s data to support my experience. With Dreamie, I can simply just swipe down to turn on the “back to sleep” mode and listen to nerds talk about baseball statistics.
这个功能对我如此有用，实在令人尴尬。通常，如果我醒来后无法入睡，就必须拿起手机打开播客。但你要知道，我是一个千禧一代，这意味着如果我睡着后收到了任何通知，我会在打开播客或有声书之前，下意识地先去查看通知。随之而来的一连串错误决定，往往导致我在半夜清醒两个小时。这确实是我自己的错，但我知道这种坏习惯并非我独有——一项针对 2000 名美国成年人的调查显示，87% 的人睡觉时会将手机放在卧室里。我不需要科学研究来告诉我，花太多时间看手机会影响睡眠质量，但确实有数据支持我的经历。有了 Dreamie，我只需向下滑动开启“重返睡眠模式”，就能听着书呆子们讨论棒球统计数据了。
My bad phone-in-bed habits extend to 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 much faster and start my day feeling like a person, rather than a hungry, caffeine-deprived zombie who has to pee.
我睡前玩手机的坏习惯也延伸到了早晨。醒来后，我通常会花半小时刷手机才肯起床。但如果我没有被手机分散注意力，我就能更快地起床，开启新的一天，感觉自己像个正常人，而不是一个饥肠辘辘、急需咖啡因且憋着尿的僵尸。
Dreamie costs $250, which is steep for an alarm clock. At least there’s no subscription or companion app that you need to download. Even though it’s pretty dense with features, the user interface is pretty straightforward, resembling 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 spirit of the Dreamie 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 can ever realistically support apps like Libby or Libro.fm, since there are technical limitations at play. Maybe in the future, Dreamie can give us a way to upload our own media, including downloaded audiobooks. Toward the end of my review period with Dreamie, I also started testing the Brick, which I have been using to block every app on my phone at night except for podcast and audiobook apps. At $59, it’s more affordable than the Dreamie, so if I were to buy one of these devices for…
Dreamie 售价 250 美元，对于一个闹钟来说价格不菲。好在它不需要订阅，也不需要下载配套应用。尽管功能丰富，但用户界面非常直观，类似于 iPhone 的时钟应用。在测试 Dreamie 的过程中，我有时会“作弊”，在床上用手机听有声书（有时候你就是特别想听某样东西，而不是播客）。起初，我坚持 Dreamie 的初衷，禁止自己因其他原因使用手机。但这并不现实。我还是不可避免地在半夜用了手机。我不知道 Dreamie 是否真的能支持 Libby 或 Libro.fm 这类应用，因为存在技术限制。也许未来，Dreamie 能提供一种上传我们自己媒体文件（包括已下载的有声书）的方法。在测试 Dreamie 的尾声，我也开始测试 Brick，我用它在夜间屏蔽手机上除播客和有声书应用之外的所有程序。它的售价为 59 美元，比 Dreamie 更实惠，所以如果我要为……购买其中一款设备的话。