Interesting. I sometimes have trouble waking up in a dark room as well, but I've found that increasing the volume of the alarm clock and the distance I have to travel to get to it normally solves that problem.
I am abnormally lazy in that respect. I've been known to get up, walk across the room, turn off the alarm clock, walk back to bed, sit down, think "hmm, 5 more minutes would be great" and then go back to sleep, responsibilities be damned.
My first job out of college was a start-up in the financial industry; strolling in at 11am was highly looked down upon, and so ended my budding career as a finance whore.
I find that, for the first few seconds or minutes after waking up, I'm not even capable of rationalising that I'd rather get up and deal with the consequences of being tired. This is far longer than the time it actually takes me to fall back asleep.
I cured myself of that by getting a radio alarm and turning it up as loud as it would go; I basically shocked myself totally awake first thing. Nowadays just an ordinary alarm is enough because I have made it a habit to get up. (If you are not going to get up when the alarm goes off, don't set it - you will just be training yourself in the bad habit of ignoring it.)
Added: One of my responsibilities was to make sure my brothers got up in time for school. I can tell you from experience, that if you have someone to help, ice water is a great motivator to get out of bed.
distance to the alarm clock has no impact on my ability (or rather, lack thereof) to get up in the morning. I will walk through two rooms, turn off the clock (apparently I'm cogent enough in the morning to figure out that snooze means another infernal buzzing sound in 15 minutes, so I turn the alarm off instead), slouch on the couch, and pass out again. It can be so bad that I will dream about getting up again and going to work, only to wake up half an hour after my necessary leave-home-for-work time
hehe, same here. I actually managed to answer a phone call from a colleague trying to wake me up, tell him that i'm on a bus heading there and go back to sleep. Fast forward a couple of hours, I woke up not remembering that at all.
He was mad, as he pulled a double shift because of that, but hey...beauty sleep :D
