Jumping Up To Alarm Habit, Bad Bad.

It seems in the last month or so I've gotten this bad habit of jumping up out of bed and sprinting to turn off my alarm as soon as it sounds. Thus I lose all my last dream thoughts and am unable to write them down. It's become sort of a habit it seems because I'm not even aware of where I am until I'm like half way to the alarm, which is across the room. I keep it there so I won't be tempted to snooze.

Does anyone here have experience about how to condition the mind to just let the alarm go for a few times while remembering the dreams. If I could overcome this reflex, I wouldn't have a problem recalling dreams while the alarm is going off.

Personally, I can't even attempt to remember dreams if that blasted alarm is screeching at me. Even though you'll be tempted to hit the snooze if it's next to your bed, it would probably be beneficial to your recall. You'll just need to exercise some self-discipline and not let yourself snooze the morning away. :wink:

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Originally Posted by Burns

Personally, I can't even attempt to remember dreams if that blasted alarm is screeching at me. Even though you'll be tempted to hit the snooze if it's next to your bed, it would probably be beneficial to your recall. You'll just need to exercise some self-discipline and not let yourself snooze the morning away. :wink:
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That works ok until you have gone thru a week of going to bed at 1 or 2 am to get up at 5:30 AM. This makes it very difficult to get up without an alarm. :wink:

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Originally Posted by dazed

That works ok until you have gone thru a week of going to bed at 1 or 2 am to get up at 5:30 AM. This makes it very difficult to get up without an alarm. :wink: [/b]

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No, I meant have the alarm next to your bed and still use it (that way he doesn't have to actually get up to shut it off), but making sure he doesn't just keep hitting the snooze because it's convenient.

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.

You might try to find an alarm that can be set to get gradually get louder so that it doesn't jerk you out of sleep as harshly as a standard alarm which begins and ends on the same obnoxiously loud setting. However, I've noticed that when I've been waking up to an alarm at the same time for about a week, I start to awaken naturally a couple of minutes before the alarm goes off (like what Jalexxi describes). My alarm has been set for 7:20am for over a month now, and I regularly wake up to find that the clock says 7:18. Then I can lay there and remember my dreams until the alarm (for which I'm now prepared) goes off and I can turn it off without affecting my recall. I'm not sure how usual or unusual such an accurate internal clock is, but if you can manage it, it's extremely helpful for recall to wake up gently on your own and without the harsh and insistent blaring of an alarm.

I have one of those alarms where it starts out with long intervals between beeps but the intervals get shorter every few seconds so it's not as painful to wake up. It doesn't usually hurt my dream recall unless I push snooze and go back to sleep, which generally completely anihilates my recall.

I'll try that tonight. I just used Cool Edit Pro to make a 440Hz tone 1 second long that is enveloped to fade in and out very smooth. It plays 1 second, silence for about 5 mins, 1 second, silence for 2 mins, and 1 second, followed by 1 minute of silence and a 1 second tone at the end. It sounds very easy.

I use scheduled tasks a lot at work for automating scripts for reports, so it wasn't too hard to configure that. I did find it interesting that I could schedule a WAV file and not just an EXE.


Update on 8/4/06

Well, I woke up to the easy sound for the first time, and just opened my eyes. Now I'm able to wake up without moving a muscle. However, when I was trying to think about the dreams I had, my mind was still blank. A few images here and there but could not make them out. Then I just give up and fall back asleep. Maybe I woke up outside of REM so didn't have as good recall as I could have.

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Originally Posted by Jalexxi

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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