#771 Waking up before your alarm clock and realizing you’ve got lots of sleep time left

Peaceful and extremely quietDark windows, dead silence, dim moonlight dancing on the walls. The night is calm and quiet and peaceful.

And then BOOM: your eyes burst open and you bust out of bed in an adrenaline-gushing, brain-rushing, heart-crushing state of emergency. Dizzy and blind, you urgently stumble over to the clock as thoughts whip through your head — am I late for work, did I miss the buzzer, do I have time for a shower?

You swipe the clock, zoom it up to your squinty eyeballs, and get a good look.

“4:56 AM,” it screams in its trademark crisp, bright-red florescent silence. “4:56 AM.”

Thump Thump, you're alrightStunned, your wobbly brain slowly pieces it together. “That is too early much than I thought,” you think. “I should back into go to bed.”

And then a slow, thin smile curls on your lips as you turn to stare at your crumpled cocoon, readying yourself to flip the pillow and dive back into Bedhead Paradise. Oh, you know that sweet cruise into dreamland will be a doozy for a few big reasons:

  • Ready to rock. Hey, the bed is pre-warmed, the mattress pre-dented, and the cool side of the pillow just waiting to hug your hot, salty head. Detangle the sheets a bit and you’re good to go.
  • Dare to dream. If that rocking dream you’re having is still fresh in your head, you can clench your eyes, squeeze your brain, and pop right back into it.
  • Take a break. Hey, your body woke up early because it felt pretty rested, so the extra sleep is just its way of saying “Go ahead, take a long lunch.” People, this is like a snow day without the shoveling — just a big, wet puddle of free time to soak up guilt-free.

Yes, waking up before your alarm clock and realizing you’ve got lots of sleep time left is a great thing. Sure, your heart pulses and your brain convulses, but you quickly realize there’s a long time left for a lot more sleeping.

And you know what we like to call that around here.

AWESOME!

Looks good, don't it?

Photos from: here, here, and here

96 thoughts to “#771 Waking up before your alarm clock and realizing you’ve got lots of sleep time left”

  1. actual lol @ “salty head”

    it’s funny because it’s true.

    actually laughing out loud at something you read on the internet. there’s an awesome thing. consider it my gift to you. ;)

  2. lolllll i love this one…. especially when i can get back into that dream

  3. Aw man… this is on my list of “1000 annoying things.” I seem to do it almost every night, but can’t fall back asleep when I get back into bed. Too much pressure.

    1. This is EXACTLY what i was thinking. sure it’s awesome if you fall back to sleep but what if you just lay there thinking ok i have 3 hours to get back to sleeep, now 2, now 1, now none, great.. so un-awesome.

  4. I get to experience this every morning. My wife leaves for work around 5:30 am, and always gives me a kiss goodbye as she heads off for work. This stirs me a wake, but only for a moment, before I get to jump back into “sleepy time”. AWESOME!

    But no mention of birds chirping or sun glinting in the window? I know of one M. Dover that is going to be mighty P.O.’ed!

      1. I heard that too. And possibly a bit of a cyber-stalker as well. But not to worry…

  5. That is soo cool.
    It is even better when you fall into a deep sleep and wake up a hour after you hve gone to sleep to realize you still hve about 6 hours of warm, cozy bliss…Awesome

  6. The best is when you wake up feeling like you’ve been asleep for hours and it’s only been 30 minutes.

    AWESOME.

  7. That feeling is multiplied when you also realize that it’s not a work day.

  8. You’ve summed up the joy of waking up earlier than needed so well.

  9. Wow that is weird since it happened to me this morning and if it was 4:56 when I looked a my cell phone. What a coincidence!!…(and BTW, it’s the first time I come to this site as well)…

  10. I love this!
    But it’s just nasty to wake up before your alarm clock rings just to realize there is only something like half an hour left before you must really wake. Then you probably end up checking the time in every five minutes and not being able to sleep anymore.
    Otherwise, this is wonderful.

  11. I don’t think any human being on the planet can possibly appreciate this even as much as I do. Just thinking about it makes me so happy…

  12. This happens to me a lot. Unfortunately, I don’t get back to sleep easily. And if I do… forget about jumping back into the same dream. Oh, I’ve tried. I’ve tried.

  13. i agree,this situation is funny…
    but..
    WHAT HAPPEN WHEN IS TRUE..
    AND YOU REALIZE THAT …
    YOU MISS THE BUZZER!!!

    and your boss is not so funny at all..
    ! you are dead meat!

  14. Actually, 4:56 is what my alarm clock is SET to (or around that time, it’s a classic sort so you can’t really tell)… sucks to be in high school.

  15. how true how true……..but the worst when you wake up with only one minute until the alarm goes off…..I hate that!

    1. I actually love waking up one minute before my alarm is to go off…. I feel I beat it to the punch.

  16. Awesome indeed!

    And I’ll defo remember this brill line “Hey, your body woke up early because it felt pretty rested” from now on. =))))))))

  17. Occasionally I’ll wake up just a little bit earlier than my alarm goes off, and since it’s only about half an hour I’ll spend the time to give myself a better than usual breakfast. No cereal or toast on those days. Eggs all the way!
    Pancakes are still reserved for weekends so I can have enough time to make a perfect stack.

  18. The only thing better than this is realizing that not only do you have more sleep time, but it’s Saturday and you don’t have to go to work at all.

  19. Yesss – this one is all kinds of awesome

    Except you wanna change that time to say 2:38am

    BECAUSE I WAKE UP AT 5AM IN THE MORNING!!! Argh. It’s painful some days I tells ya.
    So 4:56am usually has me staring at the clock in horror that I missed out on a precious 4 minutes more sleep.

  20. just the other night i woke up at about 3 in the morning, thinking that it was 10am despite the room being dark. i sat up, completely horrified and mumbling something about missing class to my roommate. she looked over and just told me to go back to sleep…and then made fun of me for it the next morning. XD

    …still, i appreciated the extra sleep.

  21. The sad thing about this is… I get up before my alarm — about 2 minutes before it goes off.

    I get up at 4:00 a.m. each day to run. :-(

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  23. when I was a kid I would set my alarm clock to 5 am just so I could wake up and enjoy my last 2 hours of sleep. I think it damaged me, because I can’t wake up for my life now. Or maybe that’s why I did it – chicken or the egg, eh?

  24. I set my alarm 15 – 20 minutes ahead. Just discovered that a long-time friend does this also. But what is really awesome is waking up to the click before the annoying beeping or buzzing starts, shutting it off before it wakes me up all the way, and knowing I’ve actually got about 15 minutes more to fully come to the surface of wakefulness.

    What I do find awesome, and sometimes annoying, is when I’m convinced I’ve been asleep for at least half an hour and look at the clock to see only 4 minutes have gone by. Makes that waking up an hour or so earlier seem like days. Sometimes it tricks my mind into thinking I’ve had a truly decadent lie-in. An unexpected sense of pampering. =)

    Awesome!!!

  25. The best is when you wake up thinking it’s Friday, but it’s really Saturday…awesome!

  26. This happens to me, but quite often I don’t register the time very quickly so I’m convinced I’m late and I’ll be up with the light on getting changed before I realise it’s like 2:30.

  27. Eddie, you are not alone! I still do this. I set my alarm at least once a week for about 3 hours earlier than I need to get up. I don’t know why but it just feels so awesome to get up, have a tall glass of cold clean water, use the “big boys room” and then slide right back into to bed for 3 MORE HOURS! Ecstasy, and rather awesome.

  28. This is not awesome for me. It’s the opposite of awesome. When I wake up before my alarm, I am annoyed because I know I’ll have trouble getting back to sleep and the spare sleep time will be wasted. Not awesome :(

  29. I set my alarm to give me half an hour leeway so I can do this or get up earlier…I think you can guess which one I do more.

  30. I HATE when that happens. Just makes me paranoid, and i look at the clock every 3 minutes.

  31. Sometimes I get delusional looking at the clock, several times I swear this old clock I had read 11:63. I got rid of it, it creeped me out.

  32. This is possibly the best thing in the entire world.
    I was hoping this would be on here, because of the various time this has happened to me.

    AWESOME!

  33. i honestly loved all of these. to know that someone thinks about all these little things as much as i do is actually pretty cool. (:

  34. alternatively, i absolutely hate waking up a few minutes before my alarm goes off because it’s a few minutes worth of sleep i missed out on, but not enough time to go back to sleep. makes me grumpy every time!

  35. such an awesome feeling… especially when you feel like you’ve already slept long enough and realize you still have 2-3hrs or more to go, you know right then you’re going to have a great sleep!

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