Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
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Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
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Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#2I regularly wake up about 5 to 10 minutes before the alarm goes off. I think it has a lot to do with light levels. I tend to set my alarm to go off about 7:00 in the winter and earlier in the summer, so there is some light outside to wake up to.
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#3I almost never use an alarm to wake up. Whenever I use an alarm I wake up 5-10 minutes earlier and I wonder if the alarm went off or not. I consider this some kind of anxiety because usually I use an alarm to e.g. catch a flight
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#4>> A couple of days ago I lay in bed thinking “the alarm is just about to go off” and then a second later it did go off and I thought “how come I woke up just before the alarm went off?”
What is the alarm like? A beep every 10 seconds? I dont follow how a consistent sounds would not be recognized.
This seems to posit. Alarm is recognized by the brain, he then has enough time to have a conscious thought but then the ears arent passing the signal they've already received, (which triggered the wake up), to the brain to "hear" it?
Does this happen to anyone else? I've never heard of it before
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#5I discovered at an early age that I could "will" myself to wake up at a desired time. It's certainly not perfect, but my accuracy is way better than chance.
Living things have all sorts of biological clocks, so this isn't really magic. Rather, it might be a bit surprising that we have some conscious control over it.
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#6The famous experiments from Benjamin Libet seem relevant here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet#Implications_of....
In particular, see Daniel Dennett's response (the relevant aspects of which are quoted on the Wikipedia article linked above).
I will say, I don't think this is a terribly interesting _example_; as others have noted, it's not uncommon to actually wake up minutes before the alarm goes off. (I commonly wake up 20 or 30 minutes before my alarm goes off; I can be reasonably sure my subjective experience is accurate because I look at the clock!)
But what the author hits upon (apparently naively, but it's nonetheless a useful insight) is that cognition (if one is a materialist) is not a monolith and that, as a result, various timing issues can confuse observers (as with Libet).
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#7>> A couple of days ago I lay in bed thinking “the alarm is just about to go off” and then a second later it did go off and I thought “how come I woke up just before the alarm went off?” What is the alarm like? A beep every 10 seconds? I dont follow how a consistent sounds would not be recognized. This seems to posit. Alarm is recognized by the brain, he then has enough time to have a conscious thought but then the e…
It's more that the conscious brain incorrectly orders events when building memory. Deja Vu is a common phenomenon of falsely feeling a memory of something that was just learned.
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#8I regularly wake up about 5 to 10 minutes before the alarm goes off. I think it has a lot to do with light levels. I tend to set my alarm to go off about 7:00 in the winter and earlier in the summer, so there is some light outside to wake up to.
I'm also one to wake up 5 to 10 minutes before the alarm, but my alarm often varies. Some days it's 5:30 AM. Others it's 8 AM. So the ambient light level theory is out for me. But probably 6/7 days per week I find myself waking up a few minutes before it goes off.
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#9You didn't wake up before the alarm went off. What happens is your mind is dreaming about a minutes worth of some random scenario. At the moment the alarm sounds, this scenario undergoes an alternation to incorporate the alarm into the dream and is then stored in your short-term memory. When you fully wake-up, your mind replays the dream, the last bit of which contains the sequence of you waking-up just before the alarm going off.
Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)
#10I think even more interesting is when I wake up before my alarm and actually get up/out of bed I feel like I had proper sleep. However, if I decide to go back to sleep for the short period of time before my alarm, I usually wake up by the alarm and feel like I got terrible sleep.