Dummy - is this just a phase?

[MeadowHay]

DD needs her dummy to fall asleep, and to resettle in the night. She is 6 months old and mostly dropped her night feeds from being around 8 weeks old, just wakes around 2/3 times a night for her dummy and resettles herself fine with it. She has gone through a few phases were the waking for her dummy has been hourly and sometimes a bit more, usually for a week or so, she did this around 12 weeks and then again around 4 months. She has been doing this for over a fortnight now which is the longest time. We keep thinking it will pass again, but the last few nights have been worse than ever before - I don't usually count the wakings but last night at around 4am I decided to count them until she was up for the morning at 6.30am, I counted 10 dummy replaements in those 2 and a half hours! DH and I are both getting increasingly exhausted and worn-down by this, but we really don't want to have to take it off her because she is a really difficult baby - she cries for hours every day still, hysterically screams if you leave her alone and hysterically screams if she can't have her dummy to go asleep - the only time she has gone asleep without it in the last few months was once when she was ill a few weeks ago and her blocked nose meant she couldn't suck it, she screamed hysterically for around 2 hours until she exhausted herself to sleep but then woke as soon as we put her in her crib, and then we offered the dummy and her nose had cleared a bit and she sucked on that and settled herself back off again. I really don't think any kind of sleep training method would work without hours and hours of screaming constantly throughout the night for days at a time and I don't think that's fair to do to her just so we can have uninterrupted sleep.

So...will this pass? Is this a phase that she will go back to just a few wakings a night, has anyone else's baby done this?

We had this a some point. I let DD play with the dummy at wake time so she learnt how to find it and put it back in. We used glow in the dark ones which made it much easier.

We use Phillips Avent dummies, and I bought the glow-in-the-dark ones now she's 6 months, but I don't understand how they're glow-in-the-dark, they don't seem to glow at all and I can't see them at all in the night?! DH agrees with me, so it's not just my poor vision (I'm very short-sighted and have poor night-vision).

Last night she actually woke up fully at about 3am, not just crying and turning her head but properly awake talking with eyes wide open etc. I thought she was probably hungry because that's how she is fully awake when she wakes up in the morning. DH thought it was teething pain so we gave her 5ml of calpol and a bottle, and she drank 4oz which is a fair bit of milk. She drank her morning bottle how she normally does so it didn't interfere with that, so she must have been hungry, but also she did wake up for the day basically dot on when she could have a second dose of Calpol, so unsure if it's hunger that woke her, or pain, or both . She doesn't feed to sleep so the downside of night feeds is not so much getting up and feeding her, as she drinks her bottle fast, it's spending 45 minutes settling her back to sleep again, so we were up for around an hour in total, but on the plus side she only needed her dummy replacing once between then and her waking up for the day at 7am, which is better than usual. But tbh she was better than usual in the first half of the night too so I'm not sure if they're related or not. It's such a minefield! I think we will continue with our usual new-ish routine that we've put in place again today because she didn't wake for a night feed the first few nights and last night could have just been a blip and see how we go, but if she keeps waking for a night feed we will change again and offer milk more frequently in the daytime. We've just cut down how often we're offering milk from 5 bottles to 4 a few days ago and it seemed to be working well until last night so we'll see.