I've probably previously documented my endless battle with alarm clocks and other devices for waking up. I've scattered them around the room, made a trail of them leading to the shower, had a friend throw cold water on my face, made my computer play incredibly unpleasant sounds, made it play songs. In truth the battle isn't against the alarm clock but against myself, against the alarm clock. My alert self wants a solution that will always get me up in the morning. My just-awakened self is always cleverer and more able in shutting down that solution without waking me up enough for my alert self to take over (sometimes without my ever becoming conscious of what I've done). I think the just-awakened self is actually a part of my brain that is more active during sleep. I know that's not such a new or strange idea. The stranger part is the apparently distinct motivation and reasoning that goes on there.

So far the only progress I make in this battle is when I change up my method and temporarily disorient just-awakened self. This effect tends to last a few days or so. Some recent developments suggest promise toward a more permanent solution. There's MIT's Clocky, which runs away and hides when you hit the snooze. But I can already imagine the devious ways just-awakened self would trap and kill Clocky. Its designer seems to understand pretty well "the foggy logic of our drowsiness." The SleepSmart, which "measures your sleep cycle and waits for you to be in your lightest phase of sleep before rousing you," is a quite different and inspiring angle. Time will tell if this technique can sufficiently weaken just-awakened self's influence on my psyche.

One idea I've had is an extension of the principle of the alarm clock's very nature requiring one to be fully awake to disable it. Working on the assumption that just-awakened self's reasoning powers are weak, one way to accomplish this is to require you to solve a puzzle of some kind. Of course the puzzles have to change every day, preferably not just in detail but in type, so that just-awakened self does not have a chance to get too good at them. A small crossword puzzle one day, a maze the next, a logic puzzle, math problems. This is probably easiest as a software solution. It would need a daily puzzle feed from a web site that offers lots of different types, and a hook up for the air horn to stop when the puzzle has been solved. Then again, it's very tough to make a piece of software that can't be shut down in some way other than intended--I don't think just-awakened self would be above a hard shutdown of the whole computer to achieve its malevolent ends. Turning off the computer speakers would probably do just fine too. So the noisemaker would have to be a separate piece of hardware that can operate independently, and can only be turned off by the proper signal from the computer. In practice this means powered by batteries, no easy access to the battery compartment, and built pretty solidly.

The more elegant hardware solution would be some kind of endlessly configurable puzzle box. But even a Rubik's cube that must be put into different configurations each day would probably only last so long, until I internalize the algorithm enough that just-awakened self can perform it. I don't think I could design anything with enough flexibility, but perhaps someone can. There's also the problem that if I have to configure it myself each night, that might give just-awakened self too much of a head start in the morning in how to solve it.

I know what people will say to this: how about going to bed earlier and getting enough sleep? I don't have a great explanation, but I have tried to do this, and it just doesn't work for me, at least it doesn't last much longer than a typical crazy alarm clock solution. Either I find myself physically unable to go to sleep at the hours necessary, or I can't stand to stop what I'm doing and spend so much time sleeping. So the struggle continues.