3 weeks of polyphasic sleep

This last week has been the toughest. Most notably, during the night I've had trouble keeping awake between naps. The worst part comes right after I wake up: I have a very hard time leaving my dream state and returning to the real world. Both I and my wife have noticed this problem. It is especially unsettling to her, because it's clear I'm not in a dependable mental state as soon as I'm awake. With a four-month old, I want to know I can be called on at any time in the event of an emergency. As a scary example: twice now I have been so muddled that I didn't know how to turn off the alarm app on my phone while it was going off. Once my wife had to come out and turn it off herself, after it had woken her up too. I may need to search for a more simple device, especially if I can find something that wakes me up, but not the rest of the house.

In the past 8 nights, I've "messed up" at least five of them, meaning I've overslept. Usually this means I decided to go back to sleep directly after a nap. If I don't realize I need to reset my alarm before doing this, it's especially dangerous. I did not experience WedThurs because I slept through it. Waking up on Thursday morning was not pleasant; I had a headache and was groggy until I napped later in the morning.

Another big con for my current mental state is that I can't trust myself to lie down without having an alarm set. 9 times out of 10, I will fall asleep. That means I can't lie down to hang out with my wife if she's feeding the baby or to watch TV. This is what happened on Wednesday evening. I convinced myself I didn't need to worry; my wife could wake me up if I fell asleep. Well, she did this, but in my sleepy state I told her it was okay and refused to get up.

On the other hand, I really don't want to give up at this point. I am still extremely productive in the evening and have been able to work on looming projects before the deadline gets too near. 1-4:30am is a wonderful quiet stretch of time I have to myself for getting work done and paying attention to the housework. Cleaning the dinner dishes has become my responsibility, and I enjoy doing this in the middle of the night when no one else is awake to mess up the water pressure, etc.

On MonTues and TuesWed, I had a new experience: after a bit of trouble arising from a nap, I hit a period of hyperactivity. On MonTues, this lasted for hours, during which time my mind was more alert than I normally am during the day. Ever. I was as awake as though an airhorn were being blown directly next to my head, without the annoying noise. :) On TuesWed, I spent this time working on writing up a worksheet for my class, which turned out to be spectacular. Naturally, I was bummed on Thursday morning when I realized I had slept through WedThurs.

In all, it seems that I'm not getting enough sleep. I've been reading through some of Steve Pavlina's early polyphasic posts, and this helps me get some hints about how to cope. He got onto the schedule easily within 2-3 weeks.

My wife and I sat down tonight and discussed how to judge whether this project is successful. We agreed that the big test is being able to wake up and exit my dream state immediately. If I can't turn off my alarm reliably, I can't make decisions right away. (And any discussion I have with my wife will probably freak her out.)

Here are my plans:

* 25 minute naps instead of 20. This actually means I will set the timer for 25 minutes, not that I will necessarily sleep that long. I think 20 is a bit dangerously small, especially since I don't always necessarily fall asleep immediately. I am already interested to see whether I will come out of my naps better. I don't know why I hadn't considered this before; I was doing 25 minutes before (back before school started, maybe?) and I don't recall having the same trouble escaping naps. I may even need more time than others if I'm still having some trouble with apneas. Actually, I've had a lingering cough for a while now, and that has been aggravating my asthma when I lie down. This change could make a big difference.

* Sleep on the Sabbath. Byebye FriSat. I'm going to sleep instead. I observe the Sabbath---in my own way (sorry, Grandma)---and thus I'm not working during FriSat anyways. I think historic polyphasic sleepers threw in some 8-hour sleeps, though I don't know how often. We'll see how this goes.

* A long nap in the middle of the night. This gets a little closer to resembling the Everyman sleep schedule (as opposed to the Uberman, which I've been attempting). 2 or 3 hours of sleep as a long nap. Currently, my last sleep was one of these. I had a really hard time getting up from the long "nap" but I have not experienced the same drowsiness that I have had trouble with the past week+. (Unfortunately, I'm not experiencing the hyper-mode mentality, either.) This is the change I'm least excited about; it nearly doubles the amount of sleep I will get each day and seems to stray most from the Uberman routine I so want to adopt.

One thing I notice a bunch is how much I wish more was known about these sleeping habits. Although it's kind of fun to do something so unconventional (what a great discussion topic!) especially alone in the middle of the night, I wish more was known about what I'm doing. What are the health risks? How long should it actually take me to fully adopt the schedule? How will I know when I'm in the Uberman Zone? Is there a chance this is speeding up my aging? Are my telomeres in danger?

I kind of wish there was more support for being polyphasic. It would be great to go to a convention and hang out with other polyphasic sleepers for 21 hours a day and get tips from them. I get the feeling this might be a bunch easier if I were keeping the same schedule as a buddy or something.

TL;DR Been drowsy the past week. I'm not giving up, but I'm going to add in some more sleep.

Two tough nights than an easy one!

Day is breaking on Sunday morning. It's been storming all night long, but I have been awake without problem. I nearly forgot about my 1am nap and felt like the 5am one was unnecessary. I'm glad I hit them both, but this has been the easiest night to stay awake by far.

The past few nights leading up to this were off-putting, however. On Thursday I had a doctor's appointment; I had to go WedThurs without any food or water and then had to drink a bunch of chalky white dye on Thursday morning so the machines could take good pictures. This dye has given me cramping and back pain ever since. On ThursFri, I could barely stay awake. I think my body kept trying to convince my brain to lead us over to the sofa to lie down and recover. It finally worked; I don't remember anything after 4:45, but at 7am I woke up and realized I needed to get in to work!

In the middle of Friday, the cramps came back, and I was feeling overly drowsy. I fell asleep in the evening for a few hours accidentally, then received some minimal prodding to get me to sleep the rest of the night. I woke up at 5:30 on Saturday morning. Oops.

I could barely sleep on Saturday (First week of college football!) but I managed to lie down for all my naps, and usually got ~5 or so minutes of sleep. I was not sure how the night would go.

And yet, somehow, SatSun went just fine. Better than expected, even. I got the most work done of any night so far.

Let's hope this continues through the day today!

Trouble in Night 6

I am currently keeping myself awake the seventh night in this uberman attempt. By the morning, I'll have gone a full week without a "regular" sleep cycle. Awesome. I am still not as productive at night as I want to be. Staying awake is a bit more difficult if you know you're going to spend your time attacking a pile of work. Oh well.

Last night was really tricky, and I wanted to point out all the pitfalls I hit. Basically, I stayed up late to play some Magic, pushing my 9pm nap back to nearly 11:30pm. Oof! I made some terrible play mistakes at the very end that cost me dearly! Still, it was super fun to play, and it was nice to think that I had some real freedom in stretching out the cycles.

I realized I was deluding myself. Although these stretches are apparently possible later on, I wasn't quite at that point yet. I hit the hay for my 2am nap, but woke so confused that I almost went back to sleep. Luckily, I would have set the alarm again, but even more fortunately, my wife explained to me that I had already taken the nap; a second one was not a good idea. This is a real problem: rising from a nap so confused that I don't understand it is time to get up and try to get back to bed.

The trouble was not over, however. I was so tired, that I fell asleep sitting up in a chair. I recall looking at the clock around 2:40am and then remember jolting awake at 3:50. Oops! That's the longest I had slept in a long time!

Then things got worse. I somehow found my way back to the bed without an alarm set. I didn't wake up until Liv got me up, too late for me to watch the baby while she goes to her workout. Normally I am her alarm in the morning... oops! When I was awake, I was in a deep confusion and had a real hard time shedding my dream state. This is extremely frightening: when I try to defend or explain what I'm thinking, when I'm thinking about outlandish notions that were prevalent in the dream. I wish I knew how to better deal with this, but when in this midway mindset, you really don't want to lose your dream and are completely convinced that it has merit in reality. Yesterday morning I told Liv something about how I would have been better equipped to stay awake if I had friends willing to fold themselves into a short wall I could lean against. Something like that. Odd.

I'm not sure where I most went wrong, but I'm not planning on stretching out the cycles any more until I am much further into the schedule. We'll see how that goes.