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

Early Morning (1am onwards):

I know I sounded like a bit of a hotshot on Day 2 of this thing, but yesterday and today I’ve been taking a real beating. Especially today. I’m definitely eating my words. From about midnight until 7am today I’ve felt like death – no energy, my brain has been non-existent and my eyes won’t stay open. I’ve felt nauseous and it’s been a struggle to eat (so I haven’t). I had to throw in a few extra naps between 1am and 5am, just to be able to make it through. I’ve thought so many times about quitting. Luckily I’ve had some really encouraging friends (thanks Nye, Merrion, Rani and all you kickass people on my Facebook.) The one thing I’ve got to be proud of is I haven’t overslept at any point.

In the last day or two I’ve been trying to work out why it’s suddenly gotten very hard for me. Sleep deprivation has obviously well and truly kicked in, so why is my brain not adapting and giving me some precious REM sleep? I’ve only had 1 dream so far in all the 30+ naps I’ve had, meaning I’m probably getting next to no REM sleep. The naps aren’t doing much for me anymore; when I wake up I feel roughly the same as before I laid down.

I’ve never been a big dreamer (I’m speaking purely about dreaming while asleep here!) It’s probably reasonable to say I never really got enough REM sleep before, since I always seemed to wake up feel anything but refreshed, no matter if I slept for 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 or 12 hours. So perhaps I need to be a little bit more patient with my body while it learns to REM sleep within a 20-minute nap. But it’s hard to be patient when you feel like this and there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.

On that note I’ve decided to give something called SPAMAYL a go (Sleep Polyphasically As Much As You Like). I’ll still be trying to go as long as I can between naps (but maybe never more than 4 hours if I can avoid it) but this should allow me some more flexibility when I’m exhausted and nearly dying. The idea is that anytime I desperately need a snooze, instead of fighting against it and wishing I were dead (or just asleep), I lay down for a lovely rest. I’ll set myself a minimum time-between-naps of 1 hour just to ensure I’m not over-sleeping and being lazy. The theory is if I’m trying to train my brain to REM sleep in my 20-minute naps, it makes more sense to train it with 7,8,9,10+ naps a day rather than just the 6 I’m doing now. I’ll be aiming for something around 8 naps a day, so only a couple more than if I followed the “Uberman” (6 x 20 min naps) polyphasic sleep schedule religiously.

The only thing I’m grateful for right now is at least I’m falling asleep really quickly – last night I was falling asleep about 10-20 seconds after going to bed. As I mentioned in a previous post I normally take a good half hour or so to snooze. Oddly, I don’t fall asleep until I choose to fall asleep. By that I mean I could probably lie there with my eyes closed for 20 minutes and stay awake; yet the second I decide it’s sleep time I nod off. Rather cool! A long-term effect of polyphasic sleep is that you learn to fall asleep really quickly and if you ever stop polyphasic sleeping (and go back to the regular 8-hrs-per-night) you can still fall asleep and enter a dream within a minute of two. No more laying in bed with your head full of thoughts, tossing and turning while you wait for sleep to come, it’s the insomniac’s wet dream!

Morning (9.30am onwards):

Ok, it’s now 9.30 and I just woke up from my morning nap that I’d normally take at 8.30am (delayed because I was watching a movie with my girlfriend). After about 5 minutes of grogginess I feel wide awake and alert, maybe a 9/10 if I had to give it a rating. This is what I want to feel like all the time, or even most of the time, or even just some of the time. This is like the polar opposite of how I felt early this morning. Sadly I’ve only had a couple of moments like this in the last 4 days – hopefully this becomes the norm.

Sometime around 10.30am I went for a walk around town with my girlfriend for an hour or two. I’m like a grandpa at the moment – the walk drained me and I had a nap around 12.30pm. I woke up with a foggy head and my brain screaming, “Go back to bed!” This has been happening a lot in the last day and a half, almost every time I have a nap. But one thing I’ve noticed is when I ignore it, it goes away within 5 minutes and I wake up fully. I supposed that’s kind of cool – when most people wake up groggy (and I’m waking up REALLY groggy) it lasts for maybe an hour or more and often requires a cold shower or a strong cup of coffee (or 3). After that I was pretty much on top of the world, again I’d rate the way I was feeling a 9/10. This has lasted right up until this minute (it’s 10pm as I write this). Other than the extra naps in the early morning, I haven’t needed any more sleep. It looks like midnight – 6am is the time I really struggle. The rest of the time things are pretty manageable and sometimes even pretty great.

Oh yeah, and I deliberately strayed from my raw food diet to eat a banana split. My girlfriend’s never had one in her life (weirdo?) and I’ve been promising to make her one for a while now, so today was the day. Interestingly even though I’ve been completely off sugar and indeed most carbs for a month or so, all that sugar didn’t really affect my energy or my naps. Yay is me :D

On the whole, today has been pretty decent. The morning was horrific but from about 9.30 onwards I’ve felt almost as good as I used to on 8 hours sleep a night. When you consider I’m only getting 2-3 hours sleep a day, that’s pretty damn amazing.

Someone asked me today what I set my alarm to if I don’t know how long it will take me to fall asleep.

On polyphasic sleep I’m usually falling asleep somewhere between 15 seconds and (more rarely) 10 minutes; the average time is usually around 3 minutes.

As for the alarm, some people set their alarms for 25 minutes to give themselves 5 minutes to fall asleep. Other set theirs for 30 minutes. You generally don’t want to be asleep for more than about 20-25 minutes as there’s a pretty-decent chance you’ll wake up more groggy than if you just slept 20 minutes.

I personally just see how I’m feeling the moment I go to bed. Sometimes I can tell I’m REALLY tired and I’ll be out like a light, so I set it for 21 minutes and I’ll be asleep within 30 seconds. During the day I’m usually a lot less tired so I’ll set it for 25 minutes and I’ll be almost always be asleep within 5 minutes. The longer I do this, the shorter my times get, so if I get to a stage where I’m falling asleep instantly then I’ll change my alarm to 20 minutes.

Oddly I don’t ever “drift off to sleep” anymore and by that I mean every time I go to sleep it’s like I’m awake one second, asleep the next. It’s not a gradual process. When I wake up I can’t even remember the last conscious thought I had. There’s no gentle falling asleep; it’s like someone just hits a light switch and I’m asleep. The only thing that changes from nap to nap is how long it takes for that light switch to go off.

EDIT: Scrap that. Something weird has started happening the last 3 times I’ve napped. Before I was falling asleep as if someone suddenly hit a switch. Now I seem to be dreaming before I’m even asleep. This is seriously, seriously weird to me. I know I’m fully conscious, as I can hear people in the apartment next door, I can feel my body, I can scratch my arm and I can even open my eyes if I want to. But while that’s happening, I’m also dreaming. It feels as if I’m simultaneously awake and asleep. It’s not quite lucid dreaming as I can’t directly control what happens in the dream and I’m not fully immersed in the dream (I know I’m conscious).  I’m definitely aware I’m dreaming because it feels like it’s playing on a movie screen right in the middle of my forehead. It’s like I’m watching the dream rather than being part of it. I’m watching myself in 3rd person.

I said I can’t directly control anything that happens in the dream, but I can indirectly affect things that happen by thinking something. So while it feels like I’m just watching a movie play out, if I think “the character should go to a book store” then he’ll suddenly be in a bookstore. Just to make it even more confusing, I’m usually so tired at this point that these thoughts don’t seem 100% conscious. It’s like someone else is in my brain, operating it and making me think “the character should be in a book store”. I can shut the dream off at any time by opening my eyes. I haven’t really experimented with this whole thing much at the moment but I want to play around some more. This is damn cool. Does anyone know much about what’s going on here? I’ve never had a lucid dream in my life so maybe that’s what this is. But I always thought lucid dreams happened once you were asleep, and I can definitely tell I’m awake while these “dreams” are happening.

On a side-note, has anyone watched The Newsroom?  Pretty interesting. I’ve also been going through Arrested Development, watching it for the third time. Damn good show.

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