Call in the Night

Tags: books

I learned about Call in the Night earlier today.

A few years ago I thought it’d be cool to practice dream recall and eventually start lucid dreaming. With approximately one third of our lives spent asleep, it seemed like a fun way to pass the time. In the end, I didn’t think it was fun enough to really change my sleep habits.

The Call in the Night project looks a little interesting just because it’d be a way to tap into dream recall without waking up and immediately remembering to journal everything possible, but that’s not really what struck me the most.

If we’re writing software with a root cause of waking people up, we should use that power for good. This is obvious, and it’s probably been done: use Twilio Voice + SMS to send a wake up call.

  1. Sleeper receives phone call.
  2. Sleeper hears inspirational text, important business info, personal performance metrics, whatever.
  3. Sleeper receives a random code number and a question, like “what project will receive most of your time today.”
  4. Sleeper texts code number and answer to the wake up service to disable the snooze feature (repeat calls).

Or I could just get out of bed on the first alarm. Because just doing that has worked so well so far. (I’m a 2-3 snoozer, but that can extend if it’s a weekend and particularly chilly. Rationally I know this is stupid, but ask me again after a few hours of sleep.)