I do this thing sometimes, where I set my alarm for an hour earlier than I plan to get up, in today’s case five when I actually want six. Then I wake up and re-set my alarm for what’s essentially an hour’s nap. I read somewhere, not too many years ago, that this is a way to trick your brain. The fifteen-minute snooze alarm is actually terrible for your sleep pattern, giving you just enough time to sink back into dream sleep…and therefore be even more tired when you’re jostled back out of it. But forty-five minutes to an hour allows for a more natural cycle, and sometimes that single hour can actually trick your body into feeling more rested than a full night’s sleep. It’s worked for me, or at least seems to have, in the past.
But see, I do this other thing sometimes, where I just sleep right through my alarm clock. Or I wake up only just enough to turn it off, not really conscious of it, making all this talk of power-napping, snooze alarms, and tricking the body rather moot. It’s not completely out of my control, but sometimes my body just decides to oversleep.
This morning, I eventually woke up around 6:30. I went to the bathroom, then decided, you know what? I’m going to go back to sleep for an hour. I’ll catch the 8:15 train like I did yesterday and Monday. And I lay back down and re-reset my alarm…and then I threw off the covers and decided, no, fine, I’ll get up now after all and try to make the 7:01 or 7:20 train. So I showered, brushed my teeth, and got dressed…and then it was about ten to seven.
And I thought, as I was pulling on my socks, I’m not going to go crazy here. The train station’s just five minutes away, but I still need to get downstairs, take the dog out to pee, and walk to the station. No need to race through all that, only to get to the station a minute too late. No, I’ll wait for the 7:20 and then…
Ah, screw it, I thought. I pulled on my socks and raced out the door.
That’s how I arrived at the office at eight o’clock. I made the train — which is nice, because twenty minutes is a long time to stand around the station platform in the (relative) cold, but not really enough to do anything if I decided to walk back home.
The day itself was pretty ordinary — unlike that thrill-a-minute tale of when-did-Fred-wake-up-today? above. It only got interesting, really, about an hour before I was set to leave, when my boss asked me to pull together some research on psychopathology courses for a sales conference on Friday. Which doesn’t leave me a lot of time for research, since I have to pass this on to marketing sometime tomorrow, but I’ll spend tomorrow morning weeding through a spreadsheet of some 8,000 book adoptions — both our own and of competing books — and try to piece together some useful data. If it doesn’t sound hugely exciting…well, there’s a reason for that.
Meanwhile, there’s rain and possibly snow in the forecast for the rest of the week, which should make the morning commute a whole lot of fun. Whenever I wake up to take part in it.