Hummingbirds servicing the flowers over my head.
A rooster standing on my chest and crowing. Went from sound asleep to standing upright and ready for “fight or flight” in .000002 seconds flat.
One of the perils of sleeping outside in a lawn chair on a farm. Stupid chickens.
As I was sitting up from my night of sleep my cat Bob decided to climb on my alarm clock. As I was trying to pick him up he grabbed on and squirmed out of my hands taking my lamp and alarm clock with him. This also took out my glass of water which spilled all over the side of my bed.
Got up this morning, autopiloting as usual to the bathroom, the TV, the kitchen, back to the bedroom, got half dressed, walked around the other side of my bed in my stocking feet…
…and stepped in a puddle.
A small cold puddle.
THAT woke me up.
The rain had come in under the windowsill and run down the wall in some quantity. If I hadn’t walked around the bed (which I normally don’t do in the morning) I don’t know when or if I would have noticed. I reported it to my apartment building’s front desk on the way out the door.
Occasionally an owl outside the bedroom window, often turkeys, if I sleep past sunrise. A screaming territorial fox can get me going… but usually it is just a whiny dog.
Weekdays:
In theory, the alarm clock.
In reality: the alarm clock, followed by drenching myself in the shower, followed by rousting Dweezil to get ready for school, followed by stumbling downstairs to get breakfast. By the time the bowl of cereal is half-finished, I usually remember my own name 
Weekends: The kids slamming doors or squabbling.
If we don’t get up in time, we get a cat crying piteously at the foot of the bed. If we still don;t get up, Midnight, the oldest cat, repeatedly bops Pepper Mill in the face with her paw (claws always retracted).
My gray cat Hobbes is often responsible for waking me up. Once there’s a hint of daylight outside he’ll go to the window, paw at the blinds and meow until I get out of bed. Shooing him out of the room does no good because two minutes later he will be back again. Ther’s no point trying to go back to sleep on mornings he’s really persistent so I just resign myself to getting up and getting an earlier-than-intended start to my day. He doesn’t do this every morning, and he seems to be doing it less as he is advancing in age, but he still reminds me that he’s still the same cat he was when I got him 13 years ago. I don’t get a lot of sleep in the summer months because of this.
It’d be our little black kitty, Maggie, walking on me and purring in my face, crawling under the covers with me, snuggling up to my belly and giving herself a bath under there. Then she would go to sleep, except by that time I’m awake and have to get up anyway.
thud
Thud
Thud
THUD
BAM!
“WAH! MOM!”
One kid or the other rolling down the stairs and slamming into the door. Such a pleasant way to awake. I pop a Diet Mountain Dew, fix breakfast, and go back to bed with the babies after the older one is on the school bus.
Yeah, we’re grumpy in the mornings.
There is an intersection on my regular route home where I always turn right. Not turning right sends you to the County Attorney’s office, Job Placement Center and some other government stuff that is well advertised at the intersection, but I that I never go to. So “waking up” is when I realized (1) I’m in the County Attorney’s Office parking lot, and (2) I do not know how I got there or remember any of the last ten minutes of driving. Not a recommended driving technique.
Your cat does this too? It is impossible to sleep through the noise of rattling blinds. Yet I still keep trying after ten or so years. I wonder how the hell did he figured out that pawing the blinds would always get me out bed.
I was cycling to work one morning about two years ago and was a little surprised that the main road I was on was deserted both by traffic and pedestrians but that early in the morning Ididnt dwell on it .
After several hundred yards I came across police who were part of the effort to cordon off the area because a WW2 bomb had been unearthed and the bomb disposal boys were sorting it out.
(Something that is not unusual round this neck of the woods )
Certainly woke me up.
I’d accidently slipped into the cordoned off area because I’d joined the road via a little known alley.
I started this a month ago, discussing the cops shooting someone down the block from my house, and cordoning off the block for me to discover the next morning.
Well, it looks like the police are EXTREMELY diligent in making sure that I’m awake.
I arrived at work this morning to discover:
Bomb Threat Causes Neighborhood Lockdown
All things considered, I’d rather stay in bed. This is 1/2 block away, and I’m in a huge glass building…
Eli
Ah, THAT’S the problem. You are in the southern suburbs. It is nice and quiet up here in the North! (Except for the turkeys, still…)
You weren’t perhaps stationed in Fulda, were you? I was there then, and the exact same thing happened to me. You can’t hear the bastards until they’re just about directly overhead, then, boy, can you hear them.
As for me, what wakes me up is my bladder. It wakes up about 5:38am. Even on weekends. Damn it.
Lightning striking a tree outside my bedroom window.
I attained full consiousness about three feet above my bed, still horizontal.
At which point the universe noted that I was in violation of certain laws of gravity and promptly slammed me back into bed.
The whole levitation thing was pretty cool while it lasted though.