The Falling of the Year

[hrj]

Summer must be well and truly over because I've parked my fold-up bike in the office and am back to driving to the BART station on the home end. I think I held out longer last year but I don't feel like searching through FB entries to see if I commented on it. Last winter I thought seriously about hunting down one of those "simulated sunrise" timed bedroom lights to see if it would help with my sleep habits, but when I looked around I couldn't easily find one I liked. Last weekend I saw one at Fry's and picked it up. It has a reasonably bright light that slowly waxes starting 15 minutes before the alarm set time. You can also have accompanying sound: either a radio station or one of 4 possible "natural soundscapes" (birds, frogs, waterfall, waves). The problem is that you can't have the light increase and the sound increase on separate schedules and after some initial experimentation I've confirmed that the sound wakes me immediately while the light works as intended to wake me slowly. So I have the light set to get me primed and then the regular radio alarm to make sure I don't sleep through it.

So far it seems to be a clear success, although I wouldn't discount the possibility that I'm waking more fully simply because it's a new stimulus. Well, actually the problem isn't "waking fully" it's more a problem with wake-up whiplash, going from fast asleep to stumbling out of bed without the proper interim brain cycles. So there's still some fine-tuning of the time settings to do. I think I can set the alarm about 15 minutes later than currently as long as everything's laid out and ready to go, and as long as I don't doze through the alarm.

The other part of fall is setting the automatic light timers in the living room so that I'm not stumbling around in the dark in the morning or coming home to a dark house in the evening. Thus is the shortening of daylight measured. Of course, it isn't dark yet on the homecoming commute but that will come.

Comments

[kareina.livejournal.com]

I love waking to a dawn light, and even use it in the summer (and as close as I live to the arctic circle that is saying something, since the sun only sets for a short time at midsummer and it never really gets dark outside. But it does get reasonably dark inside with the blinds closed, so the light does make a difference.

The one I have now is more like the one you describe--it makes noise and turns on over 15 minutes in the morning. I do not like it nearly as well as the first one I ever had. I still have that one, but can't use here--that one is just a tiny box into which one plugs a light of one's own, and the computer in the box adjusts the electricity reaching the lamp (I used to have a rack of full spectrum bulbs hooked up to it) such that the light goes from off to full bright over 45 full minutes. It also had a one-push "dusk" button that turned the light off over 15 minutes. It made no noise, it did one thing, and it did it well. The 45 minutes is slow enough that one doesn't really notice the light coming on, but by the time it is full I really am awake and ready to go. The shorter time span of the one I have now isn't as good, but it is better than nothing.

I really dislike the noise feature of the modern one, especially as there isn't a proper silent mode. We have the sound set to the lowest possible setting, which means that with my hearing aids off I can't properly hear it, but it is still doing it. We really should open it up and disconnect the speaker, but it hasn't happened yet.

I probably should give my old one to someone who lives in the States. I held onto it when I moved to Tasmania because I thought I would be returning to the US someday, but that is looking really unlikely now. I did try hooking it up with adapters and using it when I lived in Italy, but the adapters interfered with its function. I could turn on the light plugged into it using the buttons on the little box, but when set to dawn it went from nothing to full on in an instant, which is so not what it should do.