Alarm Clocks

I don't know about you, but I have this sort of love-hate relationship with my alarm clock. Without this necessary little machine, I simply could not get out of bed in the mornings to go to work. This is not because I want to stay in bed all day. I actually dislike sleep. Find it to be a waste of valuable time. Still, the body needs it, so I deal.

Enter the alarm clock. Because I would rather be awake, I never get enough sleep. This is one reason I wonder to bed after midnight quite often. I like down, pass out, and only a handful of hours later, there is this rather intrusive noise. The sleeping mind cares only about one thing: sleep. It also, apparently, has no idea how to work an alarm clock, so everyday is the first day it has ever seen one. It thinks, "The noise is coming from this area and must be stopped." It finds the source. "What is that?" it thinks. I have had the same alarm clock for the last 14 years, yet my sleeping, subconscious mind find it to be a new and fascinating archaeological find whose secrets must be discovered.

It has numbers ... and speaks. Such power...

I recall standing there in the dark, feeling of the cube thing that is making a racket (either singing or just beeping - I have to change it up ever so often or I just sleep through it). "How do I work this thing?" my subconscious wonders. There are buttons on it, and surely one of them makes it work. I press the handle to open the lot loading CD tray. Nothing happens! I tap it over and over, but still nothing happens. "I can't shut it off!" I think in a panic. I know there is a switch on the side that turns it completely off, but I don't want to do that just in case I fall back asleep (like it's an involuntary thing). Eventually, the caveman subconscious hits enough surface area on the cubic alarm clock to make it shut up. Of course, not remembering how it worked at the time, I am not sure if it is completely shut off or just snoozed.

Then, somehow, once that is all done, it believes that the dream state can be recovered if only I go back to sleep. The other times when I go back to bed, it uses the complete lie that I'm only lying down to rest until the alarm clock goes off again. After all, that is what the snooze button is for, right? Most of the time, I do actually fall for it since the conscious mind is not quite awake yet. Sometimes, it is in the background yelling and trying to talk me into staying awake.

And I assure you that neither of us are schizophrenic. That would be crazy.

So when I wake up at 6:45, my conscious mind curses the subconscious for allowing it to oversleep again. I am forced to jump out of bed, throw my clothes on and run out the door. I am simply grateful that I have a job where my arrival time is simply when I say I plan to be there rather than a strictly enforced and disciplined deal where being late is a strike to being written up. I'd be in so much trouble.