No, my alarm clock doesn’t save me from being late. I am never late. Okay, once back in the dark ages before GPS and turn-by-turn directions on smartphones, I got lost on the way to an appointment in an unfamiliar city and was maybe five minutes late.

This is different. Something people don’t talk about. Relax — it’s a G-rated subject, albeit a little bizarre. Or maybe it’s not and is just something everyone experiences and no one talks about. So I’m just going to blurt it out. Here goes:

MY ALARM CLOCK IS AN EARLY WARNING SYSTEM FOR DREAM CALAMITIES.

Everyone knows what a dream calamity is. The classic one is the falling dream. It can present in a lot of different ways. E.g.: Falling off a 10-story building. Falling 10,000 feet off one of those insanely high one-lane, no-guardrail mountain roads in the Himalayas. Jumping on a trampoline that suddenly sends you 200 feet into the air. Parachute didn’t open. Plane lost power. Someone pushed you. Whatever. The ground is rushing toward you and this is not a survivable fall.

This isn’t, “Help me! I’ve fallen and can’t get up!” No. This is SPLAT.

And then you wake up — generally an instant before you hit. There is a folk theory that says if you actually hit the ground in your dream, it will kill you. I call it a folk theory instead of a folk myth because what if there’s some truth to it? You know those obituaries wherein you read, “He died peacefully in his sleep”? Well, what if he didn’t? What if he was dreaming of falling and hit the ground? We will never know so I’m leaving it in the theory category.

There are other calamitous dreams, of course. Being chased by something scary and you are running in slow motion. Or running in quicksand. Drowning. Fire. Snakebite. Wild Animals. Scary stuff…

But my alarm clock saves me from all manner of dream calamity. Pick your category and bring it on. My alarm clock is my early warning system. Logically, and by way of partial explanation, I have for decades slept the deepest in the early morning hours right before I wake up, and deep sleep is typically the time you dream. So why not a dream calamity early warning device?

We have fire alarms and smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, cars with proximity warning alarms. Leonard Green gave aviators the stall warning device in 1946, and air-brake-equipped trucks have a warning buzzer if air pressure falls below 60 PSI, indicating imminent brake failure. This is only a partial list, but we like our early warnings because we dislike calamity.

Recently, I dreamed I was a passenger in a Beverly Hillbillies 1921 Oldsmobile type 43A truck being driven by a clown. Not an idiot but a real circus clown with a red nose. Probably also an idiot. Someone must have swapped out the original 43 horsepower 4 cylinder for a big V8 because we were going like 100 MPH.

The clown (now clearly an idiot) was passing everything on the road because we were on an important mission. When he couldn’t get past a slow semi, he decided to pass on the right through a gas station parking lot that was far too congested for that stunt.

Right before we smashed into the gas pumps at 100 MPH, my alarm clock saved me from the dual calamities of splat and explosion. This is one of those digital alarm clocks from the 1980s with the red digits and fake wood grain tops. If you don’t already know, they are immortal.

The human mind is an amazing thing. I am convinced it can keep time as well as an atomic clock if we let it. Many times I have awakened from sleep and thought, “It’s 2:17 AM.” I open my eyes and look at the immortal clock, and it’s 2:17 AM. I mean, if my dog can do it — she rarely misses 6 AM by more than a few seconds — why can’t I? It’s hit or miss for me but not my dog.

Weird, I know, and probably another one of those things no one talks about.

So in theory, I have my dog as a dream calamity early warning device as well, which is good because I rarely travel without my dog. And when I do travel, the immortal dream calamity early warning device stays home by the bedside.

So if the power goes off and I simultaneously find myself without my dog, I’m just going to sit up all night and read or look at the stars.

I’m too old to take chances.