My brain's methods to avoid getting up in the morning sometimes rise to a quality of confidence trick which my waking consciousness could never pull off on someone else.
Yesterday morning I turned off my alarm and fell back asleep. As I drifted down, into a dream-teeming stage of light sleep, my feeble sense of responsibility gave a smothered kick, like a chloroformed detective in a mystery novel, and I remembered uneasily that I would have to get up. A dream alarm clock promptly appeared and convinced me that I had set it, and furthermore that this action had taken place in the real world. I resumed drifting down.
Responsibility, nearly sedated, gave a desperate twitch, and a faint unease came through. The dream alarm clock gave me the illusion of options - although all except one were out of focus. I must have tried to perceive it, because the dream pasted on what I'm sure was a random phrase: "minimally successful cave". It then backfilled some story: I had been (in the most hastily conjured information-dump of a dream, with no sensory aspects at all) involved in some vague rebellious campaign, which had been defeated in the field, although with few casualties (hence not outright unsuccessful, I suppose), and now I was hiding out in a cave like Robert the Bruce. So the minimally successful cave alarm clock setting was the right one for me. I had set that one and now I could forget about it.
And I did, until some time later, I bobbed up nearer to the threshold of consciousness again in one of the natural variations that occur even in good sleep, and thought, "Wait a minute." Then, alas, I got up, with an indignant sense of having been scammed, and lazily at that.
