There’s a short scene in the final book of The Dark Tower series by Stephen King where the main character, Roland, is talking about how he knows how long a minute is. I think this came up while they were planning some action or attack and needed to coordinate time (but don’t have watches, etc) and Roland is all like ‘why would that be a problem, I always know lengths of time’ and his companion is like ‘what, dude?’ and tests him on it in which Roland, without counting and very matter-of-factly, gets it on the dot.
It’s not a miracle feat or anything. The point was to illustrate that he’s naturally more in touch with the world around him and how he specifically relates to the world around him. I’m willing to bet a lot of us could get pretty close to guessing when a minute has passed without counting, but I was thinking about it this morning when my body woke up before my extra early alarm (to get me to the airport on time).
I don’t know a lot about our internal clocks, but the body does take surprisingly good direction from the mind sometimes. I was listening to a podcast recently (Mental Health & Wellness) and one of the guests was talking about how she doesn’t need an alarm anymore. She tells her body when she wants to wake up and that’s what she wakes up, down to the minute. I’ve heard this before and in my own small way notice that if I set my intention the night before to rise at 5, no matter how late I may have stayed up, I won’t crawl back in bed after batting my alarm off. But I’m not quite ready to try without the scheduled noise just yet (or for that matter, without putting my phone across the room so I have to get out of bed to stop it).
This morning, I woke up a full hour before my 4 am alarm and had to ask Alexa in the dark the time (see previous note about phone being across the room), and just dosed in bed for the last hour. I had set three alarms on both my phone and Alexa to get up so early but I didn’t have to use them at all. My body responded to my anxiety by waking me up when I needed to (even though I would’ve appreciated the extra hour). There must be books written on why that is . . . how does my sleeping consciousnesses know the time? Feel free to send me the scientific references but for now, I’m going to call it magical mumbo-jumbo.
Side note: I shouldn’t have brought The Dark Tower to mind. It’s been eight years since I read that series and I am still not over it. I am also still convinced, more than any other book I’ve read, that all of it really happened. (Everyone’s read this, right?)
With Love,
Natalie