Them weird dreams

I’ve never been excellent at waking up to alarm clock, especially early in the morning. I basically sleep through the alarms, turning them off without waking up — kinda like sleepwalking but more like sleep-turning-off-alarm-clocking. Weirdly, it’s considered as a personal character flaw even though nobody can control themselves while they are sleeping.

Anyway, I have this one really weird subcategory of dreams that happen occasionally when I really need to wake up early and sleeping in has consequences. I happened to have one of those this morning and still remember it so I wanted to share it.

My theory is that these dreams trigger after the first alarm. My brain knows something’s up but it sabotages its own opportunity for success.

This morning, I had a doctor’s visit at 8 so I wanted to wake up at 6. The last dream I remember from the night was that I had to complete 4 tasks (which were coded in a video game style guests) before I could wake up. Obviously, it wasn’t quite that straight-forward. Almost always, the trick is that either one of them is impossible within the dream’s fabricated reality to achieve or they keep switching around so that I’m always one short.

Somehow then, I get stuck in that loop for a long time — or sometimes what feels like a long time — before somehow resolving it. Unfortunately sometimes it means I wake up hours late because I spent so much time stuck in that loop. It’s kind of a groundhog day style dilemma but completely in a dream state so I have very little active agency to solve the problem.

Today, I luckily woke up early enough and made it to my appointment.