To dream feed or not to dream feed?

[TeaOperated]

I have an ebf'd four and a half month old who was sleeping 7.30-4 or 5, once or twice through the night. Now, though, the 4 month sleep regression has kicked in, and she's waking at 1 and 4 every night. I try settling her back down without feeding, but generally she starts crying so I feed her - and she tanks it, she's clearly hungry.

I know two wakings a night is nothing but it's a lot if you're used to one or none! I was wondering if dream feeding at 10 ish would perhaps make the 1am feed go away?

I'm worried that it might not, though, and might wake her up more thoroughly/just add another feed in!

Does anyone have any experience of this? If it helps, she's pretty good at self settling after feeds generally - I put her down, give her a comforter, kiss her on the forehead and say goodnight and she starts to self settle.

Hopeful bump?

I've Wondered this a lot in the past - my DD is the same age (ff) and was going 7-4.30/5 for weeks and I wondered if the DF would help push her to 6/7 but when ever I tried it it made no difference, if anything made it worse. She ended up going 7-7 a few weeks later anyway. We also had a sleep regression at 16 weeks, but it only lasted 4/5 days, so it will get better and you'll get your sleeping baby back!

Thank you Actually - crossing fingers... She woke herself up at 11, and then again at 2.40 and at 5.30 last night so think she did the experiment for us!

A 10:30/11pm dreamfeed has worked for us. DD has slept through (apart from the odd bad patch) from about 4months.

Arguments for the dream feed:
They've not had to wake and cry to wake you up, so their sleep isn't really too disturbed, and so they should settle well afterwards.
It's a very calm feed which is great for babies like my dd who are normally very distractable.
They get their longest stretch of sleep when you do too.

Arguments against the dreamfeed:
It can make things worse.
You never know when to drop it - dd is 9 1/2 months and we're still doing it too scared to stop.

Thanks Happy. After another bad night last night I think she's genuinely hungry at 11 ish, and at 3 and 5 ish she's just awake, not unhappy, but making such a racket I'm feeding to sleep so we can all get some sleep. Going to try putting her in the nursery tonight so we disturb each other less, will perhaps try dream feed if that doesn't help! (Trying to change just one thing at a time!)

We are going through this too! DD woke and fed at 11.30pm but still woke at 1.30 and 4.30! I have contemplated dream feeding but it doesn't seem to make much difference to her wakings. I've always worried it would wake her too much and take ages to get her back down. I've always done on demand feeding, taking her lead. Tempting as it is to feed her to see if she goes longer, I think it might be more trouble than its worth?!

When DS was a similar age he'd feed at around 12, 3am, 5am and then up for the day at 7am.
It was driving me mad to go to bed at 10pm and then be woken a couple of hours later for a feed, so I started doing a dreamfeed at around 10pm.

After that, he'd usually go through til around 3am, and pretty soon after that he dropped the 5am feed, so we'd do a dreamfeed, then one feed in the night, then up at 7am.

He barely woke for the dreamfeed and would settle back down without a murmur. I'm convinced it helped us, as it meant I got a good block of uninterrupted sleep at the start of the night.

We dropped the dreamfeed with no problems at all at around 8.5mo.