Someone brought up that they have the habit of waking up just a few minutes before the alarm goes off. Another member then responded that Cecil had written a column addressing this phenomenon (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_300.html.
In the column, Cecil suggests that the cause of this is Pavlovian conditioning that causes the sleeper to rouse himself out of sleep in response to perceiving a very faint click or change in rhythm prior to the activation of the alarm, and that a clickless electronic radio or radio clock would not produce this conditioning in the sleeper.
While I agree that this idea would help explain most of these cases, it does not explain my own. I was born severely-to-profoundly deaf, and regular alarm clocks are simply impractical for me. Instead, I use a small vibrating alarm clock, which is approximately the size of my fist. It is placed within my pillowcase so that it is opposite the pillow from my head. The clock is purely electronic, and does not produce any slight motion prior to the activation of the alarm.
Nevertheless, like the persons posing their original inquiry, I also habitually wake up just a few moments before the alarm, usually by about 2 to 3 minutes. This happens even if I vary the time I go to bed, or if I change the alarm time by 30 minutes or an hour. Since I would not be able to hear any cues from the alarm clock prior to its activation, the hypothesis Cecil proposed in his column would not be able to explain why this happens.
I’ve already sent off an e-mail to His Perfectness about this, but I wanted to see what ideas the rest of you might come up with. Do you think this might be evidence that the brain really does keep time on an unconscious level?
I think the answer lies a little bit in Pavlovian conditioning, and a little bit in the odd ways the human mind can work. Taking the pavlovian angle, I used to wake up every morning to R.E.M.'s Drive, and it’s gotten to the point now where I can’t even listen to it because it immediately connotes a feeling of utter despair and desparation. Too bad, because that song was really good. Anyways, taking the weird mind angle, my mother has never needed an alarm clock. She decides what time she wants to wake up in the morning, goes to sleep, and invariably wakes up at that time. She’s only semi-aware of this, however; often she’ll have my father wake her up to maintain the semblence of normal human ability, and the only times she ever sleeps in is when he forgets. She’s also capable of knowing what time it is without consulting a watch or clock, within about five minutes. The point I’m trying to make is that perhaps some of us can get our mind working in a certain way so that it will wake us up when we need to be up. Of course, then you have the worst-case-scenario of waking up before the alarm; namely, waking up several hours before the alarm, a grave misfortune that befell me once morning about a year ago. Got up, showered, got dressed, and was in the kitchen eating cereal when i casually glanced over at the clock to discover that it was 3:12, almost two hours before i was supposed to have awoken.
Here’s a theory - are you sure that it produces no motion at all before activation of the alarm? There might be “something” happening in the clock a few minutes before the alarm vibrates.
I’m certain of it. I’ve held the alarm clock in my hands a number of times just prior to the alarm as a test to see if any motion occurring prior to activation. There is none.
Where did you get this alarm clock? It sounds neat.
On a somewhat related note, sometimes, I have dreams where I do something like turn on a radio right at the time my clock radio starts going off, implying that my mind knows it’s about to go off, and makes up a story to go along with it. Either that or it starts going off before I really hear it, and my mind blocks it until it can work “turning on the radio” into my dream. I’ve always wondered.
(incidentally, when this happens, I don’t usually wake up. I happily listen to the radio in my dream for a few minutes)
It’s called the “Shake Awake” alarm clock. I ordered it online. I’m sure you can find their website with a Google search. I’d put the link here, but that strikes me as spamming, so I’ll pass on it.
Pretty powerful vibration, and it does its job well.
Shy ghost, I believe there is some inner conditioning involved. I get up before the alarm most days too, except when I’m extremely fatigued. But if I forget to set the alarm, I’ll get up for the time the alarm should have been set. Now there’s no way to explain that on some minute signal externally. It’s some kind of internal signal.
Agreed--some people simply have a sense of time to wake up. My wife is that way--unless she's quite tired, she'll wake up at the appointed time regardless of the alarm clock, or even whether it's set. She'll often take a nap and ask me to wake her at such and such a time--but it's unusual for me to actually wake her, normally she wakes up on her own a few minutes before.
I concur on this one. I wake up every morning at 5:30, no matter what. Doesn’t matter what time I go to bed. Doesn’t matter how tired I am. No alarm necessary. (Okay, to be honest, last month after returning from a long weekend trip at 2:30am, I slept in until a decadent 6:05. I wanted to keep sleeping, to no avail.)
I will very occasionally set the alarm when I absolutely HAVE to be up, but I can’t remember the last time I was awakened by one.
The funny thing about it is that there’s no reason why I have to be up so early, and hasn’t been for 20 years. Nor am I particularly compulsive in other ways. My body just insists on full and unrelenting wakefulness at 5:30.
I agree that the cause can’t always be attributed to the ‘click’ before the alarm starts. A few years ago, every morning for about a year and a half, I woke up at exactly 5:41 and usually just went back to sleep. No reason I can think of–my alarm was set for something close to noon. I don’t do it anymore (too bad, I thought it was pretty cool), but thought it sounded relevant.
Actually, I think this is a different phenomenon. I was recently discussing this with my brother, who said that one morning he dreamed that there was a countdown before his alarm went off, like “5…4…3…2…1…bzzzzz!”. I, too, have had many dreams where not only did I incorporate some external sound into the dream, but actually dreamed of events leading up to the sound. I don’t think this was actual precognition, though. I believe that what happens is your mind pieces things together after the fact, so you remember, for example, turning on the radio in your dream BEFORE the alarm went off, when actually you heard the alarm first. I know studies have been done where they have actually observed a “time lag” between when an event occurs and when your brain reacts. If you wake up before the alarm, that’s an external event that proves you actually anticipated the alarm. But if you only dreamed it, I think it’s often a case of your mind reinterpreting the actual order of events. That would be a good topic for a new column (maybe it was done already?)
My wife will wake at whatever the appointed time is--regardless of what time that is. She'll often take a nap in the afternoon, but have something she needs to do later. She'll wake a few minutes before the appointed time.
I don’t know about anyone else. But my bladder wakes me up early.
Sometimes the body wakes up because it’s not comfortable lying down longer than 8 hours. Sometimes it has to do with seasonal changes of daylight. (I can never sleep once the sun is up.) I think that as often as people cite waking up just seconds before the alarm, there are probably more times when the alarm wakes them up but those instances don’t stick out the way the pre-alarm wakenings do(remember the theory about the one streetlight that goes out every time you walk by it?).
There are LOTS of people who must be awakened by an alarm, and those who will sleep right through one. Pavlov’s theory is nice but I think this is just a few cases being turned into a phenomenon.
I am rewakening this old thread only because the classic column http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_300.html was emailed to me today (as well as a recent question in the last word in New Scientist) so it got me thinking.
I think what happens often (though not always) is similar to what is described above. In the morning you are often in a very light sleep, and can be aware of your surroundings. However, as you know, if you are dreaming then when you awake you often can only remember the last minute or so of the dream clearly (and even that rapidly fades). I suspect that is what happens in very light sleep - a sort of rolling conciousness in which only the last minute is retained. When the alarm clock goes you wake up properly, but with the last moments still in your memory - thus it appears that you remember the alarm clock go off - hence you assume that you awoke just before it ( but were in fact alseep).
I don’t think that the alarm clock is giving off any kind of “signal” before it goes off. I routinely wake up 15-30 minutes before my alarm is set to go off, regardless of what time I set it for.
I don’t use a regular alarm clock - I use the alarm on my cell phone, which I place on a table next to my bed. I’m sure that the cell phone alarm doesn’t give off any kind of signal before it goes off, because I use the alarm to remind me of various things throughout the day and it never gives any warning before it goes off.
I always wake up a few minutes before the alarm, no matter what time it is set for.
However, if I am sleeping somewhere and not using MY alarm clock, I wake up every hour, on the hour to check the time as I apparently don’t trust any other alarm clock. I then wake up a few minutes before the alarm.
Also, I never wear a watch but still know what time it is. Not sure how or why, just do.