When I was in college, one of the girls who lived across the hall had so much trouble waking up in the morning for classes that her mother would call her, long distance, from home every morning in an attempt to wake her up. Problem was, she didn’t hear the phone either, so her roommate would have to get out of bed, walk over to the wallphone by the door (this was the 70’s) answer the phone and then attempt to wake up the roommate. the wakeful roommate was a friend of sleepyhead’s from high school; and knew what she was getting into, rooming with this girl…but it wore really thin really fast for her.
Unfortunately, I am one of these people. I am a VERY HEAVY sleeper. I’m a night owl. On weekends, I play havoc with my sleep schedule. I have no problem going to bed at sunrise as long as I am able to take a nap during the day. Football and beer help out a lot in that aspect. (PS: I know this is a bad habit. So nyaah.)
The problem is, I have an 8-5 regular day job. I try to make sure to get at least 6 hrs of sleep a night (but not usually), and I set the alarm for 6:30. Sometimes it can go off for a half hour before I even hear it. Sometimes I get out of bed and hit the snooze bar without realizing it. I also have 2 alarm clocks.
My roommate gets up at 5 AM on her own. She usually beats her alarm clock. She’s never complained about my alarm clock.
I used to be in the Field Artillery (army). When firing missions, you gotta sleep sometime. I have learned to sleep through 155mm Howitzer fire.
In college, my roomie and I scored a handicapped room (under the caveat that if a handicapped person enrolled and needed housing they would have priority for the room). It was bigger in every aspect, and it had a tub. Most of the alarms to the fire alarm system were just outside of every other door to each room. To protect the handicapped person, the alarm for this room was inside. Right above my bed. That sucker was LOUD! Being the drunken irresponsible folks that college students are, about once a month somebody would pull an alarm. My roomie often had to wake me up to tell me the alarm was going off.
The condo I live in now is the same way. The alarm siren is directly across from my bedroom door inside my unit. Our building’s alarm goes off about every other month. I almost never hear it if it goes off while I’m napping. I have to hear about it from neighbors.
I’ve always been like this. Once, in high school, mom thought I had gotten myself off to school because my car was gone in the morning. Actually, I had been drinking and what not all weekend and friends drove me home. I scared the hell out of her when I came out of my bedroom after sleeping for 23 hours. And I still had to find out where I left my car.
I recently saw a link to a site about a book describing how people are hard-wired to be either night owls or early birds. I can’t find it now, but I think it would be an interesting read. Or just a way to prove to my boss that it’s not my fault that I’m late for work almost every freaking day.
I live in a house with five other people. On the top two floors, it’s me on the second, a friend next door, and a couple on the third floor. My friend and I are quite light sleepers, especially regarding sounds. The guy on the third floor… well. He has trouble waking up. Usually the issue regulates itself to some extent, since his girlfriend will yell at him to get out of bed when his alarm is going off for the tenth time. But one weekend she was out of town.
Well.
After the alarm had been buzzing insistently for half and hour, I yelled up at him to turn it off. I managed to fall back asleep even though my dreams were haunted by buzzing. I woke up at 11 to find that his alarm was STILL GOING OFF. He finally woke up a bit before noon. I must have said something quite grouchy, because he looked like a puppy who knew he just peed on the carpet the rest of the day.
While I was writing this post, his alarm went off for a few minutes. At least I’m starting to be able to tune it out.
Why don’t you just throw it out? It doesn’t do him any good and annoys the hell out of the rest of you.
My cat alarm went off for two hours this morning (they’re not allowed in the bedroom with us). Damn it, cat, I’m sleeping here. Take your furry self off somewhere and do the same.
Since it’s my suggestion, I’ll defend it:
This is nothing more or less than habit, and it’s not only possible to change your habits, it’s a bit stupid and irresponsible not to change your habits when it’s in the interests of a regular paycheque and peaceful cohabitation to do so.
I used to be Basement Dan, as far as sleep schedules are concerned. I’d go to sleep somewhere around 1:00am, ride the snooze button for as long as I could safely get away with (or a bit longer) and then rush off to work.
Now I’m a freaking morning person. I just got in the habit of going to bed early - because that’s what my S.O. did, and I came to understand eventually that “excruciating” wasn’t an intrinsic & permanent quality of morning, and that life sucks a lot less harder if you consciously make an effort to set a sensible sleep schedule.
I wish I could. The problem is the first time (and sometimes the second and third times) the alarm goes off, I hit snooze in my sleep. It doesn’t register with me.
So in high school I blocked the snooze button, with the theory that I’d have to get up since “snooze” wasn’t an option.
I turned the alarm off completely.
So I blocked the “off” button also. (I taped lids from film canisters over them.) The only way to stop the alarm was to move a slider switch over two spaces.
I started doing that in my sleep.
I moved the alarm clock across the room. That worked for a couple of months. Then I started walking in my sleep. I could get up, walk across the room, turn the alarm off with the slider, and get back in bed without ever remembering it. Except for the morning my right leg had fallen completely asleep and I fell on my face when I tried to walk across the room. And it didn’t quite register, so I got up, took a step, and fell again. That morning I woke up.
So now the only way I can get up is to add at least 18 minutes of snooze time to my intended wake-up time so that my lizard brain can recognize the alarm. Radio doesn’t work - I incorporate the talking/music into my dream.
I have a very patient husband who doesn’t complain. Much.
Is this possible because the alarm is within hitting distance of your bed? If it is, move it away from the damn bed! If the only outlet is near your bed, get an extention cord so you can’t reach it in your sleep any more.
You mean like this?
I have seriously considered the “clocky.” Fortunately, I have an understanding “Spousy.”
It isn’t quite this easy when you are hardwired to a specific sleep cycle. Mine is approx 2 am to approx 10 am, so the decades that I worked 9 to 5 ish were just pure hell for me. Despite going to bed at what the rest of the world thinks is a reasonable hour and then getting up at what was tourture for me, I never was able to reset my internal sleep clock. So, I would generally have 2 or 3 nights of about five hours of sleep, then get one full night of sleep, then back to five hours for the 2 or 3 nights. Not fun.
On the up side, I learned to know which was my bus stop even in my sleep and can function quite well for most of a day on even two hours of sleep! 
Get one of these. I have a severe hearing loss in both ears, and can’t hear most alarm clocks. This thing has a super loud beep (which can be adjusted or turned off), a vibrating “bed shaker” you can put under your mattress, AND an outlet for a lamp. Plug the lamp in and it will flash on and off when the alarm hits (you can still use the lamp normally, just hit a button on the clock to turn it on and off).
It’s around $60, maybe less on ebay. It’s a lot for an alarm clock, but if you sleep through this, you have died sometime during the night. I turn the beeper off so it doesn’t wake everyone else in the house, the bed shaker is more than enough to wake me. Note: there are a few different versions of this clock, the one listed here is the best version, the others are cheapo travel versions and don’t have all the features.
Several years ago I had a roommate who had that alarm clock. She slept through it until the bed shaker would fall out from under her pillow and vibrate against the wall and wake me up. She cried when I told her she had to move out at the end of the year but I couldn’t handle that shit anymore.
You guys think you’re bad? I can’t sleep, I fall asleep and wake up every 15 minutes, but once I’m past that “initial” stage I’m OUT. I have slept through getting punched hard enough to be bruised, having both very hot and very cold water thrown on me, and being physically thrown from my bed, beeping, music, and talking just get incorporated to my dreams. The ONLY way I wake up after the “totally out” is either an intense urge to use the bathroom or getting a dream that literally instructs me to wake up.
I can somewhat lucid dream*, so the only way I can wake up in the morning is to force myself to wake up before I get into deep sleep every half hour or so, this works for a while but causes me to sleep for one night from 4PM - 10AM give or take every couple months just form sheer exhaustion (luckily I can usually hold out until the weekend).
- I can lucid dream in deep sleep too, but for some reason the trick only works in light sleep.
I think I’ve figured out the evolutionary reason for people who are such heavy sleepers. Back when we competed with the bears for the caves we lived in, it was important that someone stayed behind to keep the bear busy while the rest of us made our escape. It is the “I don’t have to out run the bear. I just have to outrun you” theory of evolution only in reverse. As all members in the group were probably related, these selfless individuals sacrificed themselves (unknowingly) for their genetic heritage. Or it is like those goats in England that fall down when they get scared.
I see your point, but I don’t agree with you. 
I think our natural biorhythms are fairly hard-wired - at 42, I have gotten up early and gone to work for extended periods of time, and every time I stop working, I fall back into my natural biorhythm (asleep by 11 or 12, up at 9 or 10). If the habit of getting up early superceded my natural rhythm, I don’t think I would fall back to that sleeping pattern every single time I’ve been off work.