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For instance: alarm set for 8 AM.
You wake up, look at the clock: if it says 7:59AM or earlier, you woke up before it had a chance to ring. If it says 8:00AM or anything past that, it already went off.
Unless, of course, you have an alarm that does not show you the current time. Otherwise, it's pretty easy to figure out what's happening.
The real question: Why is it that if you don't set your alarm you won't wake up before it would normally go off, had you set it.
Come again? English is such a funny language.
Nope. I slept in a common room with 3 brothers. If my alarm went off (half an hour before they needed to get up) I got a whopping. So I would wake up moments before the alarm, scramble from bed to my desk and slap the snooze button sometimes just as the buzzer started to sound. This guy is over-thinking it. And underestimating the human brain.
To do it blindly you can have someone else do it, scramble the clock, use an app,...
Nope. I slept in a common room with 3 brothers. If my alarm went off (half an hour before they needed to get up) I got a whopping. So I would wake up moments before the alarm, scramble from bed to my desk and slap the snooze button sometimes just as the buzzer started to sound. This guy is over-thinking it. And underestimating the human brain.
It should be easy to test. Just set the alarm at a random time. Something like 5 to 10 minutes earlier. To do it blindly you can have someone else do it, scramble the clock, use an app,...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though I don't have the common room experience that you had, I too regularly wake before my alarm goes off with more than enough time to turn it off. The answer isn't that I have a clock in my brain, but rather that waking phases occur regularly during sleep. I start to wake up, think "what time is it?" and check my phone. If it's within 30 minutes of my alarm, I just turn my alarm off and get up. No magic required.
That's a reasonable scenario. But not the one I experienced. My history is of waking up seconds before the required time.
100 years from now the conversation will be about how back in the day we didn't know all of the ways time, space and quantum mechanics worked and we thought it was just a coincidence or some psychological brain function that has a highly tuned timer.
I used to have an alarm clock very close to my bed, and I would be able to turn it off or hit the snooze button very quickly after it went off without getting up. I believe I could hit the button in my sleep, or wake up just enough to hit it and then fall back asleep fast enough to forget the experience. I remember many times waking up at my alarm starting to go off at 9:30am (or some other round ten minute interval time after 9am) even though I scheduled it at 9am; I must have snoozed it several times and fell back to sleep quickly enough to forget the experience.
I even switched to a phone alarm clock app where I had to solve simple arithmetic problems in order to snooze or disable the alarm, and I had the same experience. I'm not sure it if it makes sense to say that I was solving the math problems in my sleep; I think it's more correct to say I woke up, solved it, and then fell back asleep and forgot the experience because I fell asleep quickly enough.
This seems to happen to me pretty often, given that I'll wake up in "the middle of the night" (usually because I need to use the bathroom, or because I want a glass of water), then check the clock, realize that the alarm goes off in 3 minutes, and grumble about the lost sleep time.
Nope. I slept in a common room with 3 brothers. If my alarm went off (half an hour before they needed to get up) I got a whopping. So I would wake up moments before the alarm, scramble from bed to my desk and slap the snooze button sometimes just as the buzzer started to sound. This guy is over-thinking it. And underestimating the human brain.
It should be easy to test. Just set the alarm at a random time. Something like 5 to 10 minutes earlier. To do it blindly you can have someone else do it, scramble the clock, use an app,...