waking

By anders pearson 27 Sep 2002

some people seem to have the ability to instantly transition from sleeping to awake and alert. as soon as their alarm clock goes off and their eyes open, they’re operating at 100% mental capacity.

i’m not one of those people. i believe that i truly should not be held accountable for anything i do or say within about 30 minutes of waking up. my mind just cannot go from sleep to awake in a short period of time.

when i was at <a href=”http://www.mssm.org/“>mssm</a>, we used to have fire drills in the dorms. sometime in late october or so, they thought it would be a good idea to have a 4am drill. being northern maine, 4am in late october means that it’s really cold and there’s a thin layer of ice on the ground. i didn’t actually become conscious until i was about 100 feed away from the dorm, standing in the parking lot, on the ice, in bare feet with no idea how i got there, what was going on, and why my feet were freezing. somehow my roommates had gotten me out of bed and directed me, zombie-like, out the door. naturally, all my classmates had been alert enough to grab some slippers or shoes so the next day, i was the only one with frostbitten feet.

that’s a pretty extreme example. most of the time, when my alarm goes off, i wake up in a semi-conscious state where i might be able to remember it later but i have no ability for rational thought. my brain seems to stay in that sort of dream-logic mode.

yesterday, when my alarm went off, i somehow “discovered” the snooze button. now, i’m a big fan of the snooze button; i’ve probably hit it 5 or 6 times a day, every workday for the last couple years. but yesterday, in my sleepy state, the discovery that “if i stick my arm out from under the covers and hit this button over here on the alarm clock, i get to sleep for another 10 minutes!”, was totally new to me and had all the perceived importance of discovering a practical method for cold fusion.

i’ve apparently been awakened numerous times by phone calls and managed to carry on groggy but somewhat intelligible conversations that i don’t remember any of later on.

my job allows me to keep pretty flexible hours and basically come in to work in the morning when i feel like it, but occasionally we have meetings scheduled early in the morning that i’m supposed to go to. of course, i’m notoriously bad at showing up on time for these (at other times, i can be annoyingly punctual). with my rational mind working, i know that if i have a 9am meeting, i need about an hour to take a shower, put in my contacts, get dressed, and walk to work so i <em>need</em> to get up at 8am to make it on time. of course, when 8am hits, this airtight logic falls apart and 4 or 5 snooze buttons later, i finally become alert enough to realize that i have a meeting in 15 minutes and i end up sprinting up amsterdam ave unshowered, wearing whatever clothes were within reach.