Dream feeding works! Dream feeding is a useful tool for parents to get a couple of extra hours of sleep with a baby. It is not sleep training per se; it helps parents time their baby’s sleep schedule to better align with their own schedule.
What is dream feeding? This is where you feed a baby while they are still asleep so that they do not wake up for a feeding until later. Surprisingly, it works! For example, you might put your baby down for bed at 8PM. Instead of your baby waking you up at midnight for a feeding, you go in at 10PM (before you go to bed) and feed them without waking them up. Many (if not most) babies can eat while sleeping. Babies have a strong suck reflux if you give them a bottle or nipple. With a full belly, the baby then sleeps until 2AM allowing parents a longer stretch of uninterrupted sleep.
Dream feeding definitely worked for both of my kids. But, according to my reading, it does not work on all babies; some babies may wake up during the dream feed. Once in a while my kids would rouse a bit and then go right back to sleep.
Dream feeding works well with two parents. For example, I would go to bed earlier than my husband (around 9PM). My husband would stay up a bit later (10:30PM) and do a dream feed. I would then get up with our baby around 2:30AM. This way I could get at least a five hour stretch of sleep. Dream feeding is especially helpful once parents are back at work and need to have a more standard schedule.
Dream feeding works well when in tandem with other sleep training tools like independent sleep (The Single Most Important Sleep Training Tip) and stretching the length of time in-between feedings (3 Easy Ways to Wean your Baby from Night Feedings). By stretching the middle of the night feeding by an hour or two (see link above), parents can get almost of full night’s sleep pretty easily when combined with dream feeding.
The hardest part of dream feeding is that you are adding an additional night feeding that you then need to remove later. Dream feeding is the last night feeding that we removed for our kids because it is definitely the easiest of the night feedings. But, eventually, we weaned off the dream feed by gradually reducing the amount of milk until they no longer needed the dream feed. We could have removed the dream feed much earlier but we waited until our kids were about one year old.
I was not able to find any scientific literature that looks specifically at dream feeding. However, one of my favorite scientific studies on infant sleep training included sleep training in the methodology.
I had never heard of dream feeding until I started researching sleep training. It is such an easy sleep training hack that I think more parents should know about!