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Ten Things 2006: Pr...
Consider the alarm clock: a direct technological intervention in the natural sleep process. It forces the linear mechanical time-sense of a globally-synchronized waking world upon the cyclic, mytho-logical dreamtime of the sleeper.
Sony's "Dream Machine" alarm clock
In dreaming, identity explodes. Dissociated from artifice and perception, the dreamer is monad: window-less yet luminous, god-like yet amnesial. Dream logic plays at synaesthesis. Things in dreams become disarranged and confounded with their personal meanings and web of associations -- memory and fantasy, desire and fear, Self and Other, love and death, sex and flight. Whether paradise or nightmare, the dreamer is locked in a room with no doors to open, no walls to break down, and no eject button.
"Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bumble Bee Around a Pomegranate One Second Before Waking Up" - Salvador Dali
In waking, identity collapses. The body concretizes at a locus in spacetime: lying in bed, a familiar room, morning light slanting in, plans for the busy day solidify and arrange themselves. If motivated, the sleeper's body rises from bed -- now heavy with the weight of materiality.
In the liminal zone between dreaming and waking, hypagogic logic dislocates and thought is unhinged. The observer is dissolved in the
random walk of associative neural networks. Baby fingers grasping. Eitherout forethought, afterthough. in spring kitchen inspectors waste your time. i kmow. but this isnot what i need. there were RWo;s maubd i coul ome oser. pasivd aedrdoigo psdd blo ccccccccccc gaelic. you should take camera as witness. it's a huge sacrific, the international system. this gesture meant something so deeply important to me but i've already forgotten what it was. the ghost of my father shaking me awake...
I'm in a dark, silent house at night, bare feet cold on the kitchen tile. Starlight pricks down through an immense skylight above, my only illumination. This is a dream. I know it. Standing motionless, alone in the blue-blackness of the kitchen, I listen for any sound besides the slow draw of my breath. The air seems thin and I surmise that this dark house is at high altitude. As soon as the thought occurs to me, I can suddenly smell the clean, cold mountain air. Every surface is cut into a quilt of shadow and colorless night-light, but I can make out the wooden beams angling near the top of the ceiling and the stout logs framing the room. A mountain cabin. But where am I? Stepping carefully to a doorway, I open it and walk outside.
I imagine my movement is like Dorothy's from the Wizard of Oz, leaving the silent, dim interior of her recently-crash-landed house for the dazzling vision of Munchkin Land. In my case I find myself standing beneath the most magnificent star-scape I have ever seen. The Milky Way's swath burns in white fire unattenuated by galactic distance, all frequencies equally visible to my dream eyes. In fact the entire universe of galaxies, globular clusters, pulsars, quasars and every other variety of fusion fire hangs above me. In awe, I stand in the photon rain. Now looking around, I see the cabin is perched on the cliff edge of an invisibly deep valley, gnarled pines its only companions. Above the valley, jagged silhouettes breach the constellations' light, and I intuit that unseen giants hold an unfathomable gathering out there. I whisper a silent wish for a daytime view of the panorama. And there was light.
In an eye-blink I am standing in sunlight. Now the austere mountains stand revealed to me in dramatic grandeur, painted with snow and bathing in an ocean of fog that fills the valley so whitely opaque. Never in my waking life have I beheld a more spectacular view of mountains; a scene such as this must exist only in the high crags of the Himalayas on the clearest of days. Calmed and reverent, I step gently over the edge of the cliff and float like a cloud out over the fog-sea thousands of feet below me.
The snooze button is 1) a reaction against a too-strict regulation of sleep, 2) an addictive crutch that enables sloth without the social repercussions, 3) a tool that allows transnavigation between waking and dreaming thus giving access to the hypnagogic state.
http://www.media.mit.edu/press/clocky/
I think the snooze button can become a device to, in a way, weaken your willpower and make you dependent on the alarm clock (eventually) waking you up. This leads to the need for other devices to wake you up when the snooze button no longer works for you. I'm not really sure, but it doesn't seem like the original point of the alarm clock is to get you out of bed, but rather to tell you when it is time for you to get yourself out of bed.
Just random thoughts, hope it helps!
"aXbo Knows when to Wake You Up" http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/axbo-knows-when-to-wake-you-up-150391.php
"No more snoozing the Blowfly Flying Alarm clock is here" http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/no_more_snoozing_the_blowfly_flying_alarm_clock_is_here.php
SleepTracker is a wristwatch that monitors your sleep cycles and wakes you up when you've reached a state of very light sleep at the end of a cycle -- giving you that effortless, alert wake-up experience because it's not interrupting a sleep cycle. No more groggy reasons to smack the snooze button!
In one sense I view the snooze button as a denial of reality- of difficult responsibilites and decisions that might arise during the day. It might indicate that our society has gotten more tired and lazy. On the other hand, it may be an indication that we are overworking ourselves. If it really takes five perfectly timed alarms and snooze buttons to wake up, perhaps we aren't getting enough sleep.
The Watch / Your feedback on watches/time
