Best Handheld Fans and Wearable Fans (2026)

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. 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. 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. Image Credits: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.) 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 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.) Image Credits: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 decisi