DD, almost 5 months, has always been a decent sleeper for her age really, apart from the odd blip. Since being about 8 weeks old she has had her last feed around 9/10pm and not fed again until she got up (which used to be around 8am but now is more like 6 or 7am). She has however always been a crier - like crying most of the time, most days, including huge screaming fits of 2hrs + (no medical reason that anyone can find). She doesn't usually tolerate being left anywhere, and she can't fall asleep herself. She still cries a lot, and the dummy is one of the things that often stops the otherwise near-constant crying, so she spends a lot of her time with a dummy in her mouth - definitely not just for sleep and naps like a lot of people say their babies do! I really dislike it, but I dislike the constant crying and screaming more - it's really had a huge impact on my mental health and put a big strain on my marriage.
DD usually wakes 2/3 times in the night slightly and goes back off to sleep straight away with her dummy put back in her mouth. She doesn't even open her eyes, just starts to cry a little and moves her head side to side rooting for it. If we leave her, she cries more and more, and properly wakes up, and then you can't get her back to sleep without spending up to an hour rocking her, dummy, patting her, etc, or end up needing to feed her a few oz of milk (she's bottle fed). However the last week or so she is waking hourly, sometimes a few times in an hour, all night long. It is absolutely killing us. She is in a Bednest on DH's side of the bed, so he only has to lean over to put it in, but the noise obviously wakes me too. DM pointed out frequent waking like this is a form of torture!!
So I am looking for some advice. I won't do controlled crying or anything like that at least not at this age. Shall I suck it up and in time she will learn to put the dummy in herself? But how will that work if she doesn't even open her eyes in these brief wakenings? I'm worried that by the time she is old enough to actually put the dummy back in, she won't because she would need to fully waken for that, open her eyes etc, and then she might not want to go back to sleep again if she's properly awake??
I feel that weaning her off it would be really tough if we go the cold-turkey route. I have read about babies crying for short periods of time and going to sleep quickly after people have ditched the dummy. I have tried short periods of time, 10/15 mins and she has cried and when she starts to get hysterical I give up. She frequently screams for an hour/two hours at a time (although it is getting less as she gets older), so I never want to do anything to add to that! However we are exhausted with this poor sleep. The other thing though is that I'm worried that if I took it away, we would end up having to spend longer soothing her on a night, and/or getting up to feed her multiple times, although she doesn't feed to sleep anyway!
Sorry that was soooo long. What would you do in this situation??