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In "The Body Keeps the Score", Bessel van der Kolk discusses the effects of psychological trauma and how important it is for people to process traumas via dreams which essentially remove the emotional component but leave the learning. When, say, veterans wake up from nightmarish dreams of a trauma, they don't complete processing it. Then they keep waking up from the same extreme nightmares stuck with that trauma unprocessed. He found a medication that helped veterans stay asleep through the entire nightmare, and within weeks the veterans moved past their traumatic dreams. There may also be non-medical interventions to help get past that trauma. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Keeps_the_Score

Another book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker also goes into how important various stages of sleep are for learning and good health: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep

So, while you have found something that seems to work for you to prevent regular dreams, I wonder if it could leave you stuck somewhere emotionally with a trauma or otherwise may also interfere with other healing and learning aspects of good sleep? On the other hand, maybe your approach help keeps you call enough at night, and so you are dreaming OK but don't remember your dreams (which is fine), and so you do have dreams and do process memories through them, and so your approach is a breakthrough in that sense? Anyway, there remain a lot of unknowns about sleep and dreams...

"Sleeping pills" in general are bad news for healthy sleep (as Matthew Walker explains in depth), so good to avoid them. This is because they interfere with normal sleep (as do many other things like alcohol late at night).