Finally, Get a Good Nights Sleep When You Dream Feed Your Infant

Looking for ways to get your baby to sleep through the night? You can finally get a good Nights Sleep when you Dream Feed Your Infant.

Does Dream Feeding Work?

Ask any mom what they miss the most about their life before they had a baby. The majority of the time, their answer will involve SLEEP.  So finding ways to get your baby to sleep through the night becomes priority number one for new moms! 

Having an infant wake up through the night is normal behavior. But that doesn’t make it any easier for you. So anything you can do to get them to sleep until morning is worth a try! 

Related Read: How Not to Lose Your Mind with a Crying Baby

The practice of dream feeding is starting to gain popularity as parents realize it may actually be possible to get a small infant to sleep past 3am. 

What is Dream Feeding?

The term “dream feeding” is coined because it’s a dream to be a new mom who gets to sleep through the night. It does not mean that you feed your baby while you or they are sleeping. I just wanted to clarify that. 

What age is good for dream feeding?

To be honest, any age is good for dream feeding. Maybe not the very first week or two when infants need to be fed every 3 hours. But definitely from very early on to whatever age they just simply stop needing it. 

Even infants just a few weeks old can benefit from dream feeding. They may still not be able to go beyond 3 hours between feeding, but it allows you to control the timing of the feeds so you can rest when they are. 

How do you dream feed an infant?

Most parents feed their baby for the last time of the night, right before the infant’s bedtime. Usually around 7 pm. Assuming most infants sleep between 5-6 hours at a time, this means your infant is waking up again right around 1 am to be fed again. 

And that’s probably only a few hours after you fell asleep yourself.  

So think of it this way. You feed your baby one last time for the night around 7 pm. Cahcnes are, you are not ready to go to bed at that time. So you finsih up your nightly tasks and maybe hit the pillow around 10 pm. 

If your infant sleeps 6 hours, that puts them to wake up around 1 am… only 3 short hours after you just fell asleep yourself. Wouldn’t it be great if you get to go to bed around 10 pm and not have to wake up to feed your baby until around 4 or 5 am? 

Feed Your Baby While they sleep

Ok, not literally. Like don’t stuff a bottle in their mouth and make them choke or anyting. But the concept of dream feeding is that you wake your infant up around 10pm and feed them one last time before you head to bed yourself. 

This can be done by picking the infant up to breastfeed, or just letting them drink from a bottle in their bed. You do’t need to fully wake them up. Infants have a natrual sucking instinct so if you slightly rub a nipple around their lips, they will instinctively start to suck. 

This may or may not fully wake your infant. If it does, thats ok. Chances are they will fall right back to sleep when they are done eating. If they don’t fully wake up, thats ok too. They will wake up just enough to drink the milk and fall right back into a deep sleep. 

And when your infant gets a good feeding in around that time, you put them back down and head off to bed yourself… eliminating the chance of that 1 am dreaded feed and giving you a longer stretch of sleep.

Benefits of dream feeding

Besides the obvious fact that you get to enjoy more sleep, there are also some other benfits that dream feddig allows. 

By feeding your infant when they are not hungry and crying, you are teaching them that they don’t need to cry in order to get their bellies filled. You are training them that they don’t get fed solely in response to crying. 

This will allow infants to be awake and self soothe a lot easier, knowing they will get fed and that they dont need to scream their heads off to do so. 

A Sample of a Dream Feeding Schedule

Here is what an example of a typical night of dream feeding looks like.

• 7 pm bath time, diaper change, jammies
• 7:15 pm feeding
• 7:45 pm, swaddle baby and put to bed
• 10:00 – 11:00 pm wake infant up to dream feed… leave swaddled!

Will Dream feeding help your infant sleep through the night?

Dream feeding may or may not work for every infant. It’s important to give it a chance for at least a week or two to see how your infant responds to it. There may be some babies that won’t go back to sleep peacefully after dream feeding. 

Related Read: I Didn’t Love My Baby at First and That’s Ok. 

But if you are a mom looking for ways to sleep through the night… dream feeding is definitely worth a try! 

Have you tried dream feeding? I’d love to hear how it works for you!