Dream feed - does it work?

[Tapster]

My 11 week old daughter is currently asleep. She often sleeps 11pm to 6/6.30am which is wonderful. She is exclusively BF and I don't want to introduce a bottle. Recently she has sometimes fallen asleep as early as 8.30pm and then woken up at 2-4am for another feed then waking again at around 7am. This routine is much more tiring, I don't know whether to wake her up at 11pm to keep her sleeping til later. She is a slow BF takes often an hour to get her back down to sleep. I hate waking her when she is sound asleep - does dreamfeeding a BF baby really work?
Lizx

Hi. I did the dream feed with my ds (now 16mo), it was brilliant, i am utterly useless though and can't remember how long we did it for but just wanted to give you a positve 'bump' for someone else wth a better memory. You're right, waking up in the small hours is hell - i watched endless episodes of '2 pints of lager'... Enjoy the breastfeeding cuddles, it really is true iit goes by v v quickly, my ds is now happiest when he's running round rather than snuggling with his mum. On the upside he does scream less/sleep more than he did last year!

it did help with our dd now 7 months - although we used expressed milk as she would just fall asleep on me but would guzzle milk given by dh - it also means you can go to bed early (if you've already expressed earlier in the day). however our dd was poor sleeper - didn't mean she would sleep through but gave us an extra couple of hours. some people say it doesn't work for their dd/ds as it interferes with their sleep patterns.

It worked with DS .

It didn't with DD .

Both breastfed.

It worked for me
I found it very strange though, the way you don't have to wake them up properly but they just feed

it did work for my ds ( 9 months ) up until now but we didnt dream feed last night as he has started waking up much earlier than normal and he slept from 6.45pm until 6am so we are dropping it to see if it does make a difference to how he sleeps.
But in answer to your question it did definatly work for us when ds was younger

Hi,

my DD is 12 weeks and she has 2 dream feeds, she goes down to sleep at 6 and i give a dream feed at 9 and half 11ish (or whenever i'm going to bed). when i first tried to do a dream feed i didn't work as her previous 'awake' feed was only and hour or 2 before and she just wasn't hungry. I introduced it for the same reason you did cos she was falling asleep earlier which meant 2am feeds!

she stays asleep for both though rouses (sp?) a little for the 2nd if we make too much noise going to bed. she sometimes sleeps through till 6am though usually around 4 or 5.

give it a try.

it worked for my dts, but it did take a long time to get them back out of the habit - they were past a year before they dropped it.

Have you tried it yet Tapster? My 5 mo does exactly the same as yours overnight and I'm planning to dream feed at 11 tonight. Feel like you do about waking her up though! And I suspect that if I don't wake her up quite properly, she just won't take enough milk for it to help.