Starting Strong

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 21^st 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.

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.