Morning Scent Alarm Clock

"I like cinnamon rolls. That's why I wish they made, like, a cinnamon roll incense. 'Cause I don't always have time to make a pan. Perhaps I'd rather light a stick, and have my roommates wake up with false hopes." - Mitch Hedberg

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning." - Lt. Col. William Kilgore, Apocalypse Now

I'm much more excited about waking up when there's some sort of anticipation; I was always the first one to wake up on Christmas morning. But unless someone is cooking your breakfast for you before you're even awake, there might not be much to anticipate in the early morning. I'm also pretty good at rationalizing why that report doesn't really need to be done until the afternoon, or how 10 more minutes of sleep is more important than breakfast.

I'll have a much harder time convincing myself of that, however, if the smell of cinnamon buns is wafting over from my alarm clock. If my alarm clock had a time-targeted scent that would go off maybe 10 minutes before my alarm was scheduled to go off, I'd wake up wanting to taste those cinnamon buns, maybe enough to even make some breakfast. Hopefully enough to not press the snooze button.

Morning Scent Alarm Clocks would work in kind of a Glade Plug-in fashion, with a disposable scent-pak. (Because maybe you can patent "scent-pak", but you probably can't patent "replaceable disposable scent package".) Different scents could be used: fresh grass with morning dew, a girlfriend's perfume, napalm- whatever is going to get you going. Even negative smells -- like a skunk, your grandmother's perfume, or napalm again -- could be used if you respond more to bad smells than to good ones. Or, a more deluxe model could have a good smell to wake you up, but a snooze alarm would let you sleep in scented bliss until the smell of a skunk hit you 9 minutes later. An even more deluxe model could have sounds that were associated with the smell, so that the smell of cinnamon buns could be accompanied by someone calling you to breakfast and reminding you that it's the most important meal of the day. If the scent starts to wear off, or you get accustomed to it, just buy a new scent-pak. Even without the scent-pak, you still have a perfectly good regular alarm clock. But I'd rather have the smell of cinnamon buns too.