Tiredness so far
Not entirely surprising, but the naps tend to be more
important near the night time, which make sense. I have created a graph which
represents how tired I feel (1 is not very tired, 10 is very tired) as I wake
up from each sleep period on each day. As you might expect, at least during the
adjustment period, I have not felt very tired at all after awaking from the
earlier naps and as the day progresses I feel more and more tired. I plan on
updated this graph every few days or so and see if this pattern continues or it
starts to level out.
I think that if this goes on as long as I intend it to, in
the future I may switch to something where I remove the 30-minute nap at 11-11:30am
and just take a 1-hour nap from around 4-5pm and then a 30-minute nap from
10-10:30pm. Or perhaps those same times but switch the durations. It seems,
somewhat obviously when you think about it, that I am the most alert after the
REM sleep and as I get through the day I get more tired and I would want to
incrementally step up to longer and longer periods of sleep. I’ve even seen
such a pattern on another blog where there were variations of the Everyman.
For now however, I will stick it out for the sake of
consistency in my experiment. I am hoping that as I become more and more tired
my naps will become more and more necessary and things will balance out. As of
right now, I haven’t slept a whole lot at all during the first nap each day. I’m
just not tired enough at that point. And then during the second nap I have
usually managed to sleep about 15 minutes out of the 30. When the 3rd nap comes,
I am pretty tired and I managed to sleep straight through and I have definitely
had the biggest struggles so far waking up from the 3rd nap. When I wake up
from the REM sleep, I can just pop out of bed almost instantly, but not that
damn 3rd nap. I have a feeling that will be the worst part of this every day,
but we shall see I suppose.
Dreams
I haven’t had any crazy dreams yet, because most of my naps
haven’t completely worked out so far. As I said above, most times I have been
only falling asleep about 5-10 minutes into my 30 minute nap. Despite the
extreme change in my sleep schedule I have started to been more alert throughout
the day. I don’t feel mental lagging at all. If anything, I have already
noticed a slight increase in alertness. My mind is going a million miles a minute
with all sorts of ideas floating around. Physically my body does take a little
hit near the end of the day. After that third nap my body wants to just stay in
bed.
But the thing that has been interesting is that I have
really been very aware of myself falling asleep. Perhaps this is an effect of
the transition between monophasic and polyphasic but when my physical body
starts falling asleep it seems like my brain is the very last to go out.
Usually, in my own personal experience, the brain goes out either before I
start the physical shutdown or during. So I find it interesting this time
around to be completely aware of myself falling asleep. It’s a weird fuzzy
sensation that I can’t quite put to words yet.
I have a question though: Is this the effect of being both the subject and
observer of my own experiment?Perhaps this alertness is not an actual side
effect of polyphasic sleep but rather my own observations affecting the
outcome. That’s perhaps too metaphysical for this blog, but it is still
interesting to question. I can only hope that my experiences soon translate
into the 3-hour REM sleep and I start lucid dreaming, inception style.
Difficulty
Overall I haven’t experienced much difficult yet. Perhaps it
is because I came from the oft sleep deprived lifestyle of an architecture
student, but so far there hasn’t been a whole lot of difficulty waking up. The
hardest time period so far, as I mentioned, is waking up after the last nap.
This is somewhat strange and perhaps unrelated but around
2:45pm on the 21st I got a major headache. I rarely get headaches so
I just wanted to make a note of it. If this seems to continue, it may be
connected and if not, I’ll just write it off as coincidence.
Also following my 3rd nap last night, I had the hardest time waking up and actually woke up about 20 minutes later than planned. I decided to deduct that 20 minutes from my 3-hour REM sleep, which may turn out to be a bad idea as 3 hours is little sleep enough as it is, but it seemed like an okay thing to justify this time.
Also following my 3rd nap last night, I had the hardest time waking up and actually woke up about 20 minutes later than planned. I decided to deduct that 20 minutes from my 3-hour REM sleep, which may turn out to be a bad idea as 3 hours is little sleep enough as it is, but it seemed like an okay thing to justify this time.
Creations
With my time I have thus far been able to do a ton of things
both during the day and at night that seemed to take so much longer before.
Perhaps I will get bored but right now, I’m really enjoying having the
different blocks of time arranged the way they are. I especially like that I
can spend time with Lizzy without being distracted. I usually have had something
I wanted to work on and in the past, it was harder balancing between Lizzy and
my projects. While Lizzy usually won out over them, it left me struggling to
find time for some of them. But now I feel much less congested with stuff and I
can spend time with Lizzy and my friends without worrying about my projects,
because I know I’ll have time to work on them when they all go to sleep. For
example, today after my 4:30-5pm I met Lizzy and her coworkers for a few drinks
at a birthday celebration. I actually had a great time and I seemed to handle
the beer just fine when combined with the minor sleep deprivation so far, so it’s
not something I am going to avoid just yet.
The part where this all may start to be tricky is on the
weekends, when friend time tends to go later and I may have to nap in the car
or something. Not sure how that’s going to work yet, but I will figure it out.
I also recently bought a hammock for camping that I might set up in the studio
when the fall quarter officially starts back up as I may need to be there for
longer than a single block of awake time. Luckily this quarter all my work is
essentially independent study so I can schedule things whenever I want to make
it work with the schedule.
Also, I can foresee difficulty whenever we have guests
staying over. My apartment is small and so guests usually stay on the couch in
the living room. That couch happens to be very close to “The Beast” (which is
what I call my desktop computer). And even though I have a laptop the only
other place to work would be in the bedroom where Lizzy and Argo (my dog) are
sleeping. And San Luis Obispo (SLO) is not exactly the kind of place that has
many 24 hour establishments where I could hang out. There is only one I have heard
of that probably would mind me sticking around for a while and would have free
wifi. Buts is the SLO Donut Company (http://slodoco.com/)
and I have a feeling I might break the first commandment if I’m surrounded by
donuts for 5 hours!
Closing Thoughts
Overall, I am really enjoying all this extra time so far. I
can see how some people could feel lonely or bored if you had nothing to do. I
seem to have a very long list of “To-Dos” and I have loved going through them
at breakneck speeds so I do not plan on stopping any time soon.
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