I had lunch yesterday in the bar of a hotel near the office. This is the same hotel in which I used to regularly stay whenever I visited the office once or twice every month, back when I used to live in Glasgow.
Between 1995 and 2001, I estimate that I would have stayed in the hotel about 70 or 80 times and most of the time I booked a wake-up call every morning.
And every morning the telephone in my room would ring to wake me up. It was quite a distinctive shrill and chirpy ring and certainly not one you'd be able sleep through.
But now I find that whenever I visit the hotel to just have dinner, lunch or a drink at the bar and a hotel staff member or resident happens to make an internal telephone call to the restaurant to make a reservation or something, I hear the same shrill ringtone (they use the same phones throughout the building) which always has the very destabilising Pavlovian effect of rendering me momentarily confused about whether I'm genuinely awake or whether I'm fast asleep and only dreaming that I'm having lunch with a colleague.
I consciously have to suppress an automatic physical response to jolt myself upright and for a tiny fraction of a second, I experience a mild heart-stopping episode until I'm able to regain my compusure.
I appear to have inadvertantly and permanently hacked my brain for I last spent the night in this hotel nearly four years ago, and the response is still there.
Between 1995 and 2001, I estimate that I would have stayed in the hotel about 70 or 80 times and most of the time I booked a wake-up call every morning.
And every morning the telephone in my room would ring to wake me up. It was quite a distinctive shrill and chirpy ring and certainly not one you'd be able sleep through.
But now I find that whenever I visit the hotel to just have dinner, lunch or a drink at the bar and a hotel staff member or resident happens to make an internal telephone call to the restaurant to make a reservation or something, I hear the same shrill ringtone (they use the same phones throughout the building) which always has the very destabilising Pavlovian effect of rendering me momentarily confused about whether I'm genuinely awake or whether I'm fast asleep and only dreaming that I'm having lunch with a colleague.
I consciously have to suppress an automatic physical response to jolt myself upright and for a tiny fraction of a second, I experience a mild heart-stopping episode until I'm able to regain my compusure.
I appear to have inadvertantly and permanently hacked my brain for I last spent the night in this hotel nearly four years ago, and the response is still there.