Giving up my phone at night has supercharged my dreams and sleep experts say there is a very worrying explanation, writes ISOLDE WALTERS

When I wake up again, exhausted and grumpy, with my phone under my pillow, I decide something has to change.

According to my screen time reports, I scroll an average of seven hours and four minutes a day. I’ve developed a terrible habit of using my phone in bed and falling asleep with the flickering light.

And I’m convinced it’s affecting the quality of my sleep, leaving me irritable all day long.

The evidence suggests I’m not alone. Eight out of 10 people keep their phones on at night, according to research conducted by Sleep Hero. And studies show that excessive use of our phones at night can make it harder for us to fall asleep, and subsequently reduce the amount of time we spend asleep.

That evening, determined to break the grip of my smartphone, I plug it into the charger in the living room and head to bed.

I can read 20 pages of a book before my eyes start to droop and I notice how much calmer I feel when I turn off the light.

But instead of the peaceful awakening I had anticipated the next morning, I am jolted to my feet half an hour before my alarm goes off, reeling from one of the most vivid dreams I can remember. This is unusual for me. I rarely remember my dreams, and certainly not with the heightened detail of this one.

I dreamed that I was dating three men and that I was going to meet them all at the same time and in the same place: Liverpool Street Station.

Ten minutes before the appointed time, my dream self realized that disaster was coming, but I was too late.

The dream friends all appeared. One of them was wearing a bright blue PVC jacket that was so real to me I could almost feel the shiny material under my fingers as the panic grew. And then I woke up.

The dream seemed more lifelike than any other dream I can remember.

The next day I woke up abruptly again, before my alarm went off, because I had become confused by a sensory dream.

This one was more fragmented. All I could remember was putting slices of exotic fruit in my bra. And the next night I woke up in a panic because I dreamed I was trying to interview Taylor Swift with the wrong questions.

Could these striking dreams on three consecutive nights be a coincidence, or could they have something to do with my new technology-free bedtime?

A friend told me she had a similar experience when she threw her phone away one evening.

“Last night it was particularly intense, almost like I was hallucinating,” she said.

There are no scientific studies on the effects a smartphone can have on your dreams, but there are some basic principles about our dream life that we do know.

A typical night’s sleep consists of five sleep cycles, each lasting about 90 minutes. The first four are considered restful sleep, and the last stage is REM (rapid eye movement). During REM, we usually dream and process memories.

Could sleeping without my device have affected my REM sleep? I asked Dr. Neil Stanley, who has been studying sleep for over 40 years. He gave a completely unexpected – and rather disturbing – explanation.

He explained to me that the difference of the last three nights was not that I dreamed differently, but that I waking in the midst of these dreams, and thus remembering them.

“We dream four or five times a night, but if you don’t wake up during a dream, the dream essentially doesn’t exist,” he explains.

“But why should I wake up?” I asked.

“Maybe because you’re anxious,” he suggests. “You’re thinking, ‘Where’s my phone?’ It could be separation anxiety.”

Surely I couldn’t be so addicted to my smartphone that I couldn’t sleep without it?

“The problem isn’t the device, it’s the mentality around it,” Dr. Stanley continues.

“You’re attached to your smartphone, you’re dependent on it. So it makes sense that not having it can give you separation anxiety.”

He pointed out that there was one simple way to test his theory.

“Take the phone into the bedroom and see if the dreams stop.”

That night, my iPhone was back on my nightstand, and later under my pillow, and I fell asleep with a YouTube video in my hand.

Just as Dr. Stanley predicted, the wild dreams were gone. Or at least, if I dreamed, I can’t remember it.

Sleep expert and coach Dr. Sophie Bostock agreed with Dr. Stanley.

‘If your brain associates your phone with control, with connecting with people, and if your phone is usually within reach when you’re in bed, then part of your brain is likely to become anxious if you change that.

“My hypothesis would be that this separation anxiety might actually make your sleep a little bit lighter. And what happens when we’re a little bit tense or our emotions are running high for whatever reason is that we have more intense REM sleep.

‘Intensified emotions often lead to more intense dreams.’

So my panic about being separated from my smartphone probably woke me up every night. It’s a tough diagnosis – I know sleeping with my phone next to me is bad, but if I can’t sleep without it, what can I do?

Dr. Bostock suggested that I gradually wean myself off my phone use.

“Try a transition period where you keep it in the bedroom, but you put it on airplane mode for a while. Then maybe turn it off, but keep it nearby. And then a few nights later, put it in a different room.”

For now, my phone is on the nightstand, but it’s on airplane mode so I can’t be tempted to ping an incoming message or social media notification. I’m hoping that eventually I’ll move it to the living room without causing a panic attack that will have me jolting awake and staring around in the dark at the electronic device that has unwittingly become a security blanket that my body can’t live without.