I Love Horses (Blitzkrieg mix feat. V2)

[prog]

Another morning of waking up at circa noon and proceeding to do almost nothing all day long. Last week, on Wednesday, I had a great day cuz I was outta bed by 8 to dodge the street sweeper (who hasn't tagged me in months, yay), and ended up spending the morning working on stuff for several hours before toodling on into the office. And today I was looking forward to some fun research projects, but when I have my morning coffee at 1 p.m., and am bodily aware of the sun starting to set just a couple hours later? I'm not going to get anything started, nossir.

This ends today. Or so I have said to myself. Have I already linked to this article? It's got a lot of good advice I can try. Harsh, though.

To start things off, I have made a new alarm-clock sound that mixes a terrifying British air-raid siren with the "I Love Horses" song. This is my attempt to force myself into full wakefulness using a scary noise, but adding just enough non-scariness around the edge to prevent adrenaline injection, bowel voiding, etc. in the process. We'll see how well it works tomorrow.

(I tried looking for MP3s of the backmasked baby-scream that is said to be used by the .mil as an incapacitating sonic weapon, but couldn't find anything. (Except for rumors about backmasked Britney Spears songs.))

I think that my ideas about finding an alarm that's hard to shut off are wrongtreeuppengebarkers. When an alarm clock fails me, it's either because a) I have simply slept through it, and it has given up (both my clock radio and my cellphone give up after an hour of noisemaking) or b) I have managed to shut it off while still basically asleep. I now think that if I can just make myself really and truly awake through alarms, I will succeed.

The two things that make me snap awake from deep sleep are (a) pantshitting terror and (b) novelty. I have experienced (a) many times (though not lately, since my present apt doesn't have windows facing the right direction), where direct line-of-sight sunlight pouring through the first crack of my eyelids is immediately interpreted by my brain as NUCLEAR EXPLOSION and my first reaction to this unfortunate news is to sit straight up, like a movie character waking up from a nightmare. And (b) comes into play every time I set up a new alarm clock, with a new noise.

So, for a while, the horse/siren will probably succeed by filling both roles, but I don't know how long it can continue to work before it fails both counts due to sheer repetition. (The siren is already slightly less scary to me, just from my working with it.) If it stops working (as a third alarm, mind you, next to the radio and the cellphone) then I have other options. We'll see.

Comments

[jordanwillow.livejournal.com]

It seems likely that you've already tried this, because it sounds like you've been struggling with this for quite a long time-- but have you considered putting very loud alarms in other rooms, so that you have to get up and walk a distance in order to turn them off? Such that the walking wakes you? Maybe sound simply doesn't wake you up, though... or maybe you would sleepwalk into the other room, turn the alarm off, and then fall asleep on the floor next to the alarm.

My waking up problem isn't nearly as extreme as yours, but I do always put my alarm someplace I have to walk to. Otherwise it's useless.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I am completely sonambulatory when it comes to shutting off alarms. I even make it all the way back to my bed. When I do this, I have the semblance of one who is awake, and am semi-aware of what I'm doing, but I am still dreaming. Unless something unexpected happens, I can easily maintain my fragile half-asleep state through the whole trip.

I have faith in my relatively recent conclusion that the key isn't making frightful noise so much as it is forcing myself to engage the waking parts of my brain somehow. Fear and novelty both work because the fragment of consciousness that's on watch freaks out at the threat or the unfamiliar stimulus, and rouses the whole camp. But, given repetition, most anything will lose its scariness and certainly its novelty. So, I need to use my big brain to think of other tricks I can pull on my idiot night watchman. Hmm. Hmm.

[jordanwillow.livejournal.com]

Wow. It does seem like a sound conclusion. Well, if I were there, I would offer to help, perhaps by screaming like a banshee outside your window. I wish you the best.

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

I envision a complex mechanism rigged up where you have a bucket of cold water set a few feet over where your head lies, with some timing mechanism, coupled with a recording of someone overacting a Peter Lorre maniacal laugh.

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

I don't suppose also putting a coffee maker next to you and hearing it percolate in the morning would overpower your sleepy head with "mmm coffee" thoughts?

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

Does the phone wake you? Can you get someone to call you every morning and engage you in stimulating and/or terrifying conversation long enough to wake you up, kind of like that cure for hiccups.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

You know, I tried that for a while--well, the phone call part, anyway. The hard part was getting someone willing to call you every morning, I found. Also, if prog's sleep is like mine, and so far it sounds like it is, he's probably perfectly capable of faking a phone conversation, even a stimulating one, for long enough to convince the other person he's awake.

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

Maybe move to an apartment which regularly has something annoying occur in the morning right above your head, such as a bunch of kids clomping around getting ready for school -- a couple having noisy sex -- a train coming by, stopping, and turning around so you hear all the cars slam into each other repeatedly -- or someone dropping what sounds like a single BB.

I've lived in apartments with all 3 situations... luckily not simultanously.

The thing that confused me most was that last one. I'd be sitting around, everythings all quiet, and I hear 'tap-t-t-t-t' from above as if someone dropped a BB. I got to the point where I could completely ignore the trains going by but that 'tap-t-t-t-t' would always get my attention.

[queue.livejournal.com]

I'm envisioning some kind of service where your computer fetches an MP3 file every morning and plays it. That MP3 file was previously created by someone else, and you get a different one every day or two. So it's not only novel, it's unexpected.

If you don't want to involve someone else, you could always just set up something that randomly plays a series of different sounds/clips, some frightening, some just bizarre.