I know exactly what you mean. I am a computer programmer, and sometimes I have dreams that I am writing programs on my alarm clock. This usually results in an “Oh shit!” moment when I wake up at 11:30, having turned off the clock in my sleep.
I have never been able to wake up when the alarm first goes off. I’m also not a morning person. I’ve tried the alarm across the room and using several alarms. It never works.
The funny thing is that I will wake up to any noise outside as long as it is before 6am. After that it’s nearly impossible to wake me up. I’ve slept through an ice storm that caused half the trees in the neighborhood to crash to the ground. My mother said it sounded like machine guns going off.
I need my snooze button to gradually wake up. If I set the alarm for the proper time to wake up I would constantly be late.
The snooze button is my god. I will usually set my alarm for say, 7:30, and finally get out of bed at somewhere around 8:15 to be at class at 9. The first few times I hit the snooze button I usually don’t even wake up. Even when my alarm was across the room I did that. When I eventually muster the energy to actually look at the clock, it takes me a second to think…“do I actually have to get up now?” If I set the alarm for 8:15 every day, I would be late for class. I don’t have a roommate anymore so I don’t have to worry about annoying someone else, and my alarm is quiet enough to not wake up the neighbors.
I think it’s a family thing with me. My father’s alarm clock has to be about 25 years old. It doesn’t beep, it whines. It makes this continuous high-pitched “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeennnnnnnnnn” sound. And my dad will sleep through it for hours. It was a bit of a ritual in our house when I was a child. Dad’s alarm would go off about two hours before he actually had to get up, and then every ten minutes or so one of us would yell up the stairs, “Da-aaad! Time to get u-up!!” And eventually, he’d get up.
My sister has two alarm clocks. One of them is one of those super-loud alarm clocks that advertise that they’re 48 decibels or something, the other is a normal beep beep beep alarm clock. Both are placed on the night stand about 4 feet from her head, set to go off a couple of minutes apart. And she still sleeps through them. Doesn’t even wake up enough to hit the snooze button. They wake me up, through the wall, but she doesn’t even hear them and I usually have to get out of bed and go beat on her door to wake her up. And that 48-dB sucker is loud. I used it once and almost had a freaking heart attack. She sleeps riiight through it.
So some people have to set the alarm early because it either won’t wake them up immediately or at least won’t wake them up enough to get them up and out of bed. Setting it early and snoozing gives us time to wake up and pull ourselves out of bed gradually and still be on time to wherever we have to be.
I use snooze sometimes. Never usefully - except occasionally taking another 5 min to get up is good. What happens is:
Tomorrow morning, I think I’ll wake up at 8.00; plenty of time to get to lectures.
BRRIINNNNNNGGG!
Uhh… 8.10 is just as good. Snooze.
BRRIINNNNNNGGG!
I don’t need to shower, I did last night. Snooze.
BRRIINNNNNNGGG!
I’m getting up now. I’ll just lie here for a second first. Snooze.
BRRIINNNNNNGGG!
Fuck! I fell asleep. Oh well, my bag’s nearly packed, no hurry. Snooze.
BRRIINNNNNNGGG!
CRAP! CRAP! CRAP! CRAP! It’s 9.05, how many times did I snooze? Oh well, I’ve missed the first lecture anyway, I’ll have another 5 min. Snooze.
BRRIINNNNNNGGG!
FUCK! It’s 11.45, how did that happen?
So in summary, it’s stupid but it happens.
I have TWO alarms, one at the foot of my bed and one across the room. One is set to go off at 6 and one at 6:30. I get up when the 2nd one goes off the 2nd time, at 6:39. It takes the multi=snoozes for me to work my way from “completely asleep” to “awake enough to find the shower”. One alarm would never wake me up.
To illustrate, I have a freaking lump on my forehead, right above my left eye, the size of a quarter in diameter that I woke up with on Friday morning (so it’s 5 days old) that I have no idea how I got it. If I could sleep through that, how am I to wake up to one alarm?
Do those of you who snooze button do it because there isn’t any real repercussion if you do oversleep?
For example, I have an 8 am Tuesday meeting. If I miss it, my ass is grass. Knowing my old snooze button habits, I decided that snoozing was risky, and that the only thing I could do is give myself the minimum allotted time for getting up, washing face & teeth, getting dressed and leaving with enough time to get to work. Even if I’m up at 2 am the night before, I have no trouble at all waking up with the alarm (1 time only) for that meeting.
Is this familiar for anyone else?
I used to snooze when I slept alone. Once or twice max. Now Mr cajela & I set the alarm to about 20 mins earlier than we need to be awake, and lie there listening to the radio, vaguely snuggling, and pat the cats if they’ve decided to drop by. Waking up takes time, neither of us can just bounce out of bed immediately.
I am a morning person–as in the latest I can get to work is 8:15 and I am invariably there by 6:45–but I still snooze. The snoozy state of mind is a unique one, and I enjoy starting my morning planning in a semi-dreamy state. I’ll lay there half awake and start running my mental to do list for the morning through my head. If it weren’t for snooze I couldn’t do that because I would lay there and panic “what if I fall asleep?”
That said, I usually hit snooze only once or twice, and at most three times. How many times I can hit snooze is determined by how well I prepared the night before–I only reward myself with the “three-snooze” if I laid out my clothes, packed my lunch, and set up everything that I am taking with me to school by the door before I went to bed.
I still don’t get it. How can you possibly enjoy your extra nine minutes of sleep, or semi-dreamy state, or whatever, if you know the alarm is about to shatter it again? I can’t even get back to sleep if I wake up within half an hour of the time I’ve set the alarm for. (Which I almost always do, because my body hates being blasted into awareness by the alarm and will do almost anything to forestall it, even giving up an extra twenty minutes of sleep.)
Alarms are vile but necessary. Snooze alarms are especially vile and unnecessary, and I am extremely glad that I no longer have roommates who use them.
No, I do not.
Yes… YES!
Finally someone who understands. Someone who relates.
I’m not alone.
And I forgot all about the half-hour thing. I do that too. Wake up just a little before the alarm would go off, and say screw it, might as well be up for good.
Yesssss!
Were amongst animals here porpentine.
I’ve never been a morning person. I’m one of the type who moves the alarm clock in random places so I have to get semi-conscious to find it, plus every couple of days I randomly set the actual clock time so that I really have no idea what time it is when the alarm goes off. Some days I find myself 10 minutes behind schedule, some days a half hour ahead. By the time I’ve done the math in my head to figure out what time it actually is, I’m awake enough to get my lazy ass moving.
Snooze has no purpose to me. When the alarm goes off, I flail blindly at the horrible noise with ham fists, not only to make it shut off, but so that I get it fast enough that it hopefully doesn’t wake up the wife (ain’t I just the most loveable damn thing). If I was smart enough to use a snooze, I think I’d be smart enough to know that I didn’t HAVE to get up right then, and not use snooze in the first place to take advantage of every possible second of sleep.
I am SO not a morning person. At. All.
I use my snooze button faithfully, lovingly religiously every morning. My husband gets up at some ungodly hour I can’t even fathom (although it involves hearing at least the first 5 minutes of the morning radio show until I kick him to *make it[/] STOP). Then he showers dresses, kisses me gently on the cheek (or so he says) and leaves. At least a half-hour after that, my sorry alarm clock goes off.
My alarm clock is very special. It’s designed for people who need more than one alarm to wake up, or who just want options in the way they are torn painfully from their rest. It has two alarm features, a radio and a “buzzer” (which is really a “beep”).
Currently, the radio goes off, and then about 15 minutes later, the beep begins. During full daylight hours I have difficulty counting past 15 but in the wee, snuggle-under-the-covers hours of the morning, I can routinely count by sevens. I let the snooze button carry me through to the last blessed second before I have to haul my sorry ass out of bed, shower and get to work.
Thanks be to all that is holy that I can be flexible with when I get to work. Today, for instance I hit the snooze from 7:15-7:48, reset the alarm for 8:15, played the snooze button game until 8:34, reset one more time for 9:00, woke up and realized I had a meeting but it had been pushed back to 11:00, somehow got my feet to the floor and then back under the covers, and finally woke up at 10:00 to shower, dress and be there on time. In that time, I had several lovely dreams and one nightmare, forgot at least three times where my husband was and generally had the best rest of the night. Go fig.
I set my alarm for 7:00am and get up as soon as it goes off. I then hit the snooze button. I do this every 9 minutes until I leave for work at 9:00am. Annoys the hell out of my neighbours.
I love my snooze alarm. I live in the country, so it does not bother anyone else. I have been known to set the clock for 7:30 and have it go off every 8 minutes until 9:30/10:00. Oh, and I’m retired, so that helps also.
Well, it’s nowhere near as enjoyable as proper sleep, for instance. But once the choice is between lying in bed waiting for a buzzer, or getting up, lying in bed seems better. And when I’m very tired I can fall asleep almost instantly in that situation.
Why don’t I set my alarm later? Because the night before I optimistically think I’ll be able to get up in time to do things before my first appt.
Well, not me. Even when I have to get up earlier, perhaps to catch a plane for example, I’ll set the alarm to go off anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes earlier than I need to, just so that I can experience the joys of lying in bed after hitting the snooze button.
When I was a kid, I was addicted to the snooze alarm. I’d hit it for at least half an hour, every day. Eventually, I figured out that, while those extra minutes felt good, I paid for it throughout the rest of the day- I didn’t actually get any good rest when I snoozed. So I tried to stop, and wasn’t actually successful until I moved the clock all the way across the room. Like most of the posters in this thread, I’m not a morning person.
Now I never use the snooze timer. I don’t wake up 'til about five minutes after I’ve been moving around, but I’ve trained my body to just go through the motions 'til the brain catches up.
However… Microbug snoozes. Pretty much every day. For what seems like hours. Unless I can manage to sleep through it, I tend to wake up about the third time she hits it.