Quote Originally Posted by Laurelindo View Post
In any case, I am fascinated that we call decide to wake up at a certain time like that, how is that possible?
That is the cool thing about the PM mechanism. But we use our PM alarm for many other things as well. For example, you tell somebody you'll call them when a package arrives. You don't from then on remain aware that you need to call them when the package arrives. Instead you leave that task to your PM alarm. When the package arrives, your PM alarm goes off, and you remember to call your friend.

It works the same when we decide that we want to remember to recognize when we're dreaming. By deciding that's important to us, we in effect assign the task to our PM machine. Later, when and if something comes along in the dream that cues that PM task, the alarm goes off and we remember to recognize that we're dreaming. The main difficulty is setting things up so that the cue shows up when we need it to.