Yeah, I'm pretty much sure OP is unnecessarily complicating things. It I am getting up like 5 minutes before the alarm every time I know I really need to get up at that specific time (because I know something more important than just dragging my ass to the fucking office needs to happen this time), well, that means I somehow know subconsciously really well what's the time is. Because either I'm living in my sleep ever since, or I actually got up, turned off the alarm clock so it won't bother me, got dressed and went on with my day. Not just lied there fooling myself I'm awake before I actually got awake.

Yeah but 5 minutes is much much easier than 3 seconds.

But even if your brain is measuring time operating at a precision of "around five minutes before," the variance will sometimes cause that to be 3 seconds before.

The premise is "I often think that I wake up just before my alarm goes off."

If 90% of the time you wake up well before the alarm, the clock saying fifty-something, and can shut it off before it starts,

9% of the time you wake up noticably past the alarm,

and 1% of the time you appear to have woken up just before it goes off,

then that's not very confusing, and isn't going to prompt something like this article.

The article is about being much more precise on a regular basis. Or the illusion of it.

I can do this too. Like you it doesn't work all the time, but far better then coincidence would allow.

For fun I try variations: I will wake up in 6hrs. vs I will wake up at 7 o'clock. vs I will wake up 10 minutes before my alarm.

...or whatever my target is.