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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)

#61

Post by veeralpatel979 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #14

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.

Strange to say but I actually don't mind being woken up due to someone else's alarm. It lets me experience the pleasure of knowing I get to go back to sleep :)

Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)

#63

Post by perl4ever »

Stierlitz wrote: post #9

You 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 al…

I used to dream I was waking up, dream I was doing stuff more or less normally, and then things would get really weird and I would semi-lucidly conclude I must be still dreaming, and force my eyes open to wake up again. On occasion it happened repeatedly. And in retrospect, it was obvious that when I was dreaming, my ability to tell I was dreaming was impaired. But then I worried, what if I think I'm dreaming and I'm not?

Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)

#64

Post by Dylan16807 »

krick wrote: post #19
downerending wrote: post #5

I 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.

Yeah, I'm pretty much sure OP is unnecessarily complicating things. It I am getting up like 5 minutes before the alarm every time I know I really need to get up at that specific time (because I know something more important than just dragging my ass to the fucking office needs to happen this time), well, that means I somehow know subconsciously really well what's the time is. Because either I'm living in my sleep eve…

Yeah but 5 minutes is much much easier than 3 seconds.

Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)

#66

Post by Talanes »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #64
krick wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm pretty much sure OP is unnecessarily complicating things. It I am getting up like 5 minutes before the alarm every time I know I really need to get up at that specific time (because I know something more important than just dragging my ass to the fucking office needs to happen this time), well, that means I somehow know subconsciously really well what's the time is. Because either I'm living in my sleep eve…

Yeah but 5 minutes is much much easier than 3 seconds.

But even if your brain is measuring time operating at a precision of "around five minutes before," the variance will sometimes cause that to be 3 seconds before.

Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)

#67

Post by brianpan »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #14

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.

When I was young, I would prepare to wake up before the alarm if I really wanted to make sure I didn't oversleep. I would stare at the current time for about a minute and then go to sleep. The next day I would always wake up a few minutes before the alarm.

I don't think it's magic. There are plenty of cues (sound and light) that can tell you approximately what time it is without being conscious.

Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)

#68

Post by RossBencina »

throwaway_tech wrote: post #10

I 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.

I couldn't find a reliable reference quickly, but I believe humans have a "90 minute sleep cycle." (Search for that if you wan't a bunch of half-baked hints.) If you wake up (and get up) during the correct phase of the cycle, then you'll feel good. Otherwise you won't.

Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)

#69

Post by Dylan16807 »

Talanes wrote: post #66
Dylan16807 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but 5 minutes is much much easier than 3 seconds.

But even if your brain is measuring time operating at a precision of "around five minutes before," the variance will sometimes cause that to be 3 seconds before.

The premise is "I often think that I wake up just before my alarm goes off."

If 90% of the time you wake up well before the alarm, the clock saying fifty-something, and can shut it off before it starts,

9% of the time you wake up noticably past the alarm,

and 1% of the time you appear to have woken up just before it goes off,

then that's not very confusing, and isn't going to prompt something like this article.

The article is about being much more precise on a regular basis. Or the illusion of it.

Re: Why did I wake up before my alarm clock went off? (2015)

#70

Post by Izkata »

AgentME wrote: post #58

Besides the overlooked possibility that people are just better at waking up at specific times than is generally expected (which I think is true and probably explains most cases, but maybe not all), there's another explanation the author didn't consider: it's possible that people frequently half-wake-up, and then fall back asleep and forget the experience. However, if you half-wake-up right before the alarm, then the…

> 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.

That happened to me quite a lot during college, and due to a quirk of my alarm I know for certain I wasn't just sleeping through it: The snooze button was between the two arrow buttons for setting stuff, and if I hit an arrow by accident while the alarm was going off, the set alarm time would change. It pretty regularly ended up several minutes off of where it was supposed to be.

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