It's habit that makes you get up to turn off the alarm, and it's very difficult to overcome this. I myself have 'woken up' multiple times standing near my alarm with my finger on the button, not even realizing I already switched it off. But, in general, alarms are just killer for dream recall. You don't want anything to be on your mind when waking up, because memories of dreams are washed away immediatly if you have other thoughts. So ideally, you just want to wake up naturally, spend a couple of minutes on recalling your dreams, then move to wake up. It's not always reliable, but your mind can do the timetracking for you. If you consciously think 'I have to wake up at 8 AM tomorrow.', chances are that you will remember this when sleeping, and will wake up damn close to 8 AM. But, if you really can't risk running late, it is always better to be woken up by a person. See, alarms just keep screeching untill you press a button. People wake you up, then leave immediatly, not requiring you get out of bed or do anything, leaving you with time to remember your dreams.
Alternatively, you could use a computer as a more sophisticated alarm. I'm going to assume you run Windows XP, if you don't, tell me what operating system you do run, and I'll come up with a way to do it. This is a crude solution, but might serve your purpose nicely. Get yourself a wav or mp3 of some sound that you want to wake up to. Edit it into two different lengths, a short and a long version (there's a myriad of ways to do this, I'll leave this one up to you, you can also just use two different audio files, whatever you want). Go to Start Menu -> Programs -> Accessoiries -> System Tools -> Scheduled Tasks. Now double-click Add Scheduled Task. Click Next, and then hit browse. Select the short audio file. Now hit Next again. Set the task to perform daily, and give it a nice name like 'Alarm' if you want to. Hit next, now select it to perform when you want to wake up, like 8:00 AM, and set it to every weekday (assuming you don't have to wake up early in the weekend). Now, you have to enter a username and password. For security reasons, you have to have a password on your user account to use Scheduled Tasks. Hit next, and check the box that asks if you want to open Advanced Properties, and click Finish. Go to Settings, and select the very last option that says 'Wake this computer to perform the task'. Now, use the same process to add the long audio scheduled around 10 minutes after that.
What you should have now, is an alarm that will play a short (I recommend 5 seconds or so) audio file to wake you up, then stop automatically. This will not require you to get out of bed, and thus leaves you with some time to recall your dreams. Ten minutes after that, it will play a long audio file, ensuring you get out of bed if you did not wake up the first time. This task will also run if the computer is put into low-power state, like Standby or Hibernate, which reduces the power consumption of the computer to nearly nothing, but more importantly, turns off the fans so you can sleep without an annoying hum! I hope that helps.
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