To wake or not to wake..that is the quest

I had previously asked about what age people started doing a dreamfeed but now for my second piece of non scientific research I am wondering if you woke your baby or kept them asleep and what the different outcomes were. There seems to be two schools of thought - some say keep baby asleep and others say to wake baby up (which in my mind is just a late night feed and not a dreamfeed as such).

I am still in two minds as to whether to do one with my DS2. His nights are still a little inconsistent (and I guess he is only nearly 8 weeks old) but we have gone from 8pm-4.30 on a number of occasions but on others he wakes at 1 and again at 4.

What are your experiences please?

Dream feeds never worked for us, DD would still want to feed at 4am regardless of being fed earlier. In the end I left her to feed on demand and got myself to bed earlier and got an extra couple of hours sleep for myself.

She's now almost 7 months and has only STTN on a dozen occasions and frequently has 1 feed over night.

I was told for it to be successful they had to be asleep but not 'dead' asleep just in the restless part

Jacob just sleeps through it most of the time. On the odd occasion, he'll open his eyes when I pick him up, ut close them almost straight away, to the point where you could hardly class it as waking. When he was quite young (four months?) I tried, and he was too asleep to drink anything. When he was a month or two older it worked fine.

Unless DD is awake feed she won't latch properly and the pain from that wasn't worth it.
It is easier with a bottle.

Snap Flossie the same thing happened to us.

With DS1 we woke him for a late feed (10.30ish). DH would give him a bottle of EBM for that feed so I could sleep. He would generally go till 7am after that, this was from around 3mo (1mo adjusted age). At 4.5mo we stopped the late feed to see what would happen and from then on he slept 7-7.

With DS2 who is fully BF, we did a late feed that I fully woke him for, until he was about 10 weeks. He would sleep till 7 from that feed. Then we dropped the late feed and were getting full nights' sleep (yay!) till we went on a month's holiday at 5.5 months and by the time we came back he was waking 2 hourly and being fed back to sleep. Since doing Verbal Reassurance (from 7 months old) we're now doing a dream feed at 10.30 and he sleeps till 6 or later (6.45 today - best yet!).

With regards to DF vs waking them .. I think at the OP's baby's age (around 8 weeks?) it's less likely to "work" although it really depends on what you're trying to achieve. Personally, at that early stage, I saw the late feed as an opportunity for DH to do a feed (or me if I hadn't expressed enough milk) and then I knew DS would sleep around 3-4 hours from the start of that feed. So if I expressed at 9.30 I could be in bed asleep before 10 and then sleep till around 2.30am which was often my longest stretch of sleep in those first few months!

Later, if you're trying to get the "long sleep" to be from that late feed through till morning, it really just depends on your baby. The dreamfeed seems to be starting to work here (we started a week ago) but when we tried it with DS1 he would just wake up so we stuck with waking him fully to feed anyway.

I never bothered with Alex doing a dreamfeed. When hes asleep he doesn't feed anyway so it would be pointless trying. He was stretching out from his 7pm bedtime so I just let him do that rather than mess it up

We were co-sleeping, so when you're nursing in the dark, it's hard to tell if they're actually awake or not. I certainly never woke him up to feed him, just on demand. He would seek the breast for himself every 2-3 hours each night for the first few months, although now and then he would sleep longer. My son really seemed to need feeding at night as he was very big and grew so fast but all babies are different.

He loved the dreamfeeds - still does at 2.5, although it's usually only once a night now. I think it has been really good for him - he's very strong and healthy & seems to have a good resistance to illness.

Oh, I never woke Alex, he slept through it.