on a related note, the human mind possesses the brilliant power of habituation. in its finest moments, it can completely ignore an event that becomes too scheduled or uninteresting. for instance, if someone were to punch you in the face at 5pm every single day you may eventually not feel the punch. your brain could grow so completely used to the schedule that it decides the information is not worth registering anymore. this is why we sometimes sleep through our alarms. on the other hand, there is pavlov, and it becomes possible you will just start crying every day at 5pm regardless of being punched at all.
the brain is weird one way or another.
most of that is not the point.
in the world of waking, i say we can at the very least do away with the alarming aspect of the alarm clock. if we have to be woken up at an hour our body has deemed ungodly, that's one thing. but there is nothing saying we need to be scared out of dreams and into the harsh reality of 7am in a foggy city. or 2pm, for that matter.
i know enough people have thought of caffeine IV-drips because it's been all over a variety of comic strips and anti-starbucks advertisements. the cubicle worker with his caffiene drip in his arm. but generally it's brought up by freakish morning people who wake up chipper and think it's funny to make fun of caffiends. it kind of makes me wonder how very horrible their dreams must be in order for them to be so happy to be awake.
but this is me talking about intravenous caffeine in loving light as someone who depends on coffee and espresso about as intensely as cougars depend on highlights and stilettos. neither of us would be a pleasant sight without them. i've had certain girlfriends refuse to talk to me till there was a coffee in my hand and a smoke in my lips.
so laugh all you will, morning-people, but we're just at the opposite ends of the same spectrum: i'm a cold dry organism that refuses to operate without the aide of caffeine, and you are a mutant that will never fully understand regular humans. everyone's got their thang.
i would be interested in taking the caffeine IV a step beyond jokes, and moving toward the future of alarm clocks, morning commutes, and probably lawsuits. when you think about it, caffeinated alarm clocks have been thought of under the cuff. proof is the fact we have a programmable coffee-maker in the house, complete with the capability of brewing at any scheduled time-- when i wake up, the coffee is already brewed.
but still exists that screeching brat of a clock, yanking me from my magical subconscious moments. the alarm clock is the cockblocker of dreams and the closest it gets to pretending it's our friend is when it plays music rather than blasting it's repetitive beeps and wake-up sirens.
but those sorts of alarms are pushovers and they don't generally wake me up-- in which case they've defeated their own purpose.
what we need is a clock that gradually, and successfully, wakes us up each morning-- without doing so by frightening us back into reality.
with a caffeinated intravenous alarm clock, we could schedule the machine to slowly begin pumping caffeine into our circulatory system before we've even awoken. at first our dreams would probably be a little bit weird. but then, gradually, we would find ourselves waking up and feeling surprisingly ready to go. we would, for a moment, feel like a morning person.
this would eliminate the twenty to thirty minutes it takes to prepare and drink coffee. and it would allow us to sleep longer because of the time saved.
furthermore, there is no hitting the snooze on a clock that has already been pumping uppers into your blood-line.
surely about 90% of the alarm clock would need to be covered in all kinds of warnings, disclaimers, and unfriendly asterisks in order to avoid potential deaths, lawsuits, or bed-diarrhea. but in a world already filled with surgeon general warnings and overpowering canned stimulants, i would argue that we're already in that playing ground and may as well embrace it.
waking up with a needle in my arm could not be a whole lot worse than being yelled at by an attention-whore of a clock.
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