Intro to Polyphasic Sleep | First attempt (lasted 30 days) | Second Attempt (lasted 7 days) | Third Attempt (ongoing)

Early Morning (1am onwards):

Crazy to think I’ve been at this thing for a full 3 days now (technically 3 and a half if you count the day before Day 1 – I didn’t sleep much that night). It’s 1am right now and I just woke up from my nap. Something strange happened – I woke up 2 minutes before my alarm was supposed to go off, completely on my own accord! However I’ll be quick to point out I didn’t feel hugely refreshed. I also had a dream that I can remember fairly vividly –  a sign I’ve been REM sleeping! I dreamed I was outside my grandfather’s house late at night taking photos of his street. What’s amazing to me is I had a full dream crammed into the space of only 18 minutes of sleep.

I didn’t experience the refreshing feeling other polyphasic sleepers talk about after an REM sleep, but the theory goes I’m behind on my REM sleep so I’ll need to have a few more naps before I catch up sufficiently to feel refreshed. We’ll see.

Day/Evening (6am onwards):

Holy crap. Holy crap. Forget what I just wrote about the early morning being ok. It’s mid-morning now and all I can say is this morning has been the worst moment so far and I would almost say it’s felt like (physically) the worst day of my life. That’s no exaggeration. My head’s been dizzy for hours, I was walking around like a zombie and I had my eyes closed for up to 10 minutes at a time, listening to music. I’ve backtracked on what I said yesterday and added in an extra nap early morning around 6am. That didn’t help. I considered giving up on this whole thing so many times; it was honestly that bad. I’ve stuffed my face full of food; didn’t help. I took 2 showers; didn’t help. I went walking around; didn’t help.

I was sitting around feeling like I could sleep for a year without waking. I felt like my face got run over by a train. A really big, ugly, stupid-ass train. I felt like maybe this was all a big joke and everybody else who’s ever said they were successful with it was lying. Some big conspiracy or something.

Eventually I had the genius idea to go and sit outside in the freezing cold on my balcony. I wish I’d had the idea sooner – within 10 minutes I was at least half-awake and feeling a lot more alert. The rest of the day was still a struggle though. After my 12.30pm nap I had to go for another one at around 1.30pm.

However, I’m not disappointed. Despite feeling like I could pass out at any moment, I didn’t give in to the temptation (serious temptation) to nap for more than the allotted 20 minutes at any point. I have never overslept. Adding in 2 naps doesn’t seem like it will make much of a difference in the scheme of things. I’ve also been considering the idea of changing to something called SPAMAYL which stands for Sleep Polyphasically As Much As You Like. The idea is that instead of having 6 x 20 minute naps at predetermined, inflexible times, you sleep as many 20 minute naps as you feel you need, with a minimum time between one nap and another.

If the current strict way of doing things doesn’t get a little easier in the next day or two, I’ll probably give SPAMAYL a go. I can’t have another day like today. I’ve also noticed that at times I will feel wide awake and on top of the world (while the rest of the time I’m waiting desperately for my next nap). It’s really hard to force myself to snooze during one of these “up” periods, and even with my lack of sleep it sometimes takes 20 minutes to fall asleep. If I do the SPAMAYL thing, I’d simply sleep whenever I felt like I couldn’t stay awake any longer – I’d let my body dictate when I sleep and would never have to force myself to sleep when I’m not tired, nor force myself to stay awake when I’m almost passing out.

On a side note, sorry about the general-crappiness of this post. I’ve given it my best but my head just isn’t working all that well right now. I can perform low-level stuff just fine, I can even hold a conversation as well as normal, but things like reading and writing just seem too much for my tired brain to handle right now. If you’re got any questions or if there’s something I haven’t covered, feel free to drop a comment below and I’ll answer. Thanks, and goodnight (for you, not for me).

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