The Phantom Alarm Clock

 Not a dream, but rather a moment of less than lucid thought upon awakening, in that liminal spot... 

I heard my alarm go off on my phone, but very faintly. Now, the ring tone on phone for the alarm is something that I recorded on the piano several years ago called "Cool Chord Changes," which is a brief composition in a basic "question-answer" format, one four-measure phrase responding to another, and then doing so again in a symmetrical pattern and reaching a logical conclusions, without much of a melody at all. I find it a soothing tune with which to wake up. It starts like this:  Bam bam bam-bam / bam bam bam-bam / bam bam bam-bam / bam ba-BAM.  

I decided that I must have left the phone in the other room. I let it play rhythmically maybe 5 or six times, and got up to retrieve it from the living room. I remember thinking: if that is how quiet my alarm is, I won't be bothering any neighbors. When I got to the living room, the music had stopped: actually, though, my alarm had not rung at all. I went back to the bed, and found my phone was on the other side of my queen sized bed from where I sleep, and that it was still 6:50--not 7 a.m., the time I had set the alarm for. I lay in bed another 10 minutes until the alarm really went off. 

During this ten minutes, I discovered that I could play this music in my head with some accuracy, actually "hear" it, not just think it. That's what I had been doing when I thought I heard the music from the other room.