So, it's been a busy week.  Here's what's gone on:

Tuesday and Wednesday, I napped at 10 pm and 1 am.  The 10 pm nap went perfectly, but I had the same difficulty getting up after the 1 am nap as I did from my midnight naps.  

Thursday and Friday nights, I developed an annoying habit of getting up, walking across the room, shutting off the alarm, and getting back in bed, without ever actually waking up, or so my boyfriend tells me.  This was rather problematic.

Saturday night, I completely cut out the 1 am nap and just went with the 20 min 10 pm nap.  I had difficulty staying awake from 2-3, but by 3:30 I was going strong and actually laid awake in bed for some time after 4.  This is promising.

Of course, that was also after two nights of nearly 8 hours of sleep.  It remains to be seen how sustainable it may be. 

So I got in bed at one this morning, and conked out readily . . . then woke up again at six in the morning, on the couch.  I have only one memory of the intervening time: pulling blankets up on the couch because I was cold.  It was probably also the fact that I was laying on a comfortable couch with blankets that put me to sleep so quickly.  This morning, I had a random youtube video paused at about seven minutes, so I figure with time to get to the couch, situate myself, and pull up the video, that gives me at least ten minutes between my nap and my sleep, and probably closer to fifteen.  

I guess my body clock kicked in, because I woke up on my own a little after six and, although rather groggy, had the sense to not go back to sleep, after I'd slept for about four and a half hours.  I'm lucky that happened; if I'd slept until eight or later, I might have had a problem.  As it is, I only slept for half an hour longer than normal, and woke up two hours before I normally would, so I think I'll be okay.  I almost fell asleep this afternoon when Bryon took a nap, and I consider that to be a good sign.

I'll post again after my 10 pm nap.

New Nap Schedule?

Okay so here's the deal:

As things are now, it's not possible for me to fall asleep for my 7 pm nap - it just doesn't happen.  So I don't get any sleep then, and then I'm exhausted for my midnight nap and have to fight like I mean to live just to get up and stay awake until four.  So today, I'm trying something new. I couldn't sleep at all at 7, so I took a fairly successful nap at 10.  Also, I'm pushing forward my midnight nap to 1, and I'll still start my core sleep at 4 as usual.  So, I've got my second nap in 20 minutes, and I'll post based on how it goes.

Second Nap

Okay I officially have no idea what is going on with my naps.  I did manage to sleep some during my midnight nap, I think.  The whole experience is just rather strange and outside my experience. Sometimes, I'll have . . . almost a spasm of intensely deep sleep, for just a few seconds or minutes. Other times, I'll wake up, and be startled to be awake, because I genuinely thought I was awake when I had actually been asleep.  That might be the result of slipping between light sleep and wakefulness, maybe? 

As far as the spasms of intense sleep are concerned, I don't know what's going on with those. Sometimes they're associated with weird things, like mathematical formulas.  And for at least the last two naps, hearing the alarm has actually pushed me deeper into sleep for a few seconds - it induces one of those spurts.  

EDIT: I forgot to add that it's a little frustrating, because it's always something very specific that induce those spurts, and I can never remember exactly what it is, even though I'm trying to hang on to it at the time - and I'm aware of this, which I guess makes them extremely lucid intense sleep bursts.  Anybody have a name for this?

Nap

I didn't fall asleep until the last three or four minutes of my nap at 7.  I still feel okay, but I'm not sure I'll be able to really fall asleep at that time with the amount of core sleep I have.  My first idea was to cut my core sleep down to 3 hours, but I think I'm going to give myself a few more days to see if I can learn to fall asleep faster.  I kept getting some really intensely deep waves of sleep at the very end that only lasted a few seconds each.  But it's now 10, and I'm still running fine on those few minutes of intense sleep.  This is utterly fascinating.

It's only Day 9? Damn, I was sure it was later than that

Despite my difficulty getting up after last night's midnight nap, I did in fact stay up until 4, by virtue of Portal.  It took me most of an hour to really get going this morning, but by 10 I was really quite solid.

Then I made a mistake.

I let myself relax during lunch.  I didn't sleep or get in bed or anything, but I let myself lay back in a comfortable recliner for twenty minutes while I talked and checked my email, and I guess that sent the wrong message to my body.  By the time I got up to leave, I was completely exhausted, and it took me most of the rest of the afternoon - until 5 or so - to shake that feeling off.

I'm actually laying in that recliner again as I type this, and feeling my cognition rapidly decline, but it's okay this time, because my nap is coming up in half an hour : )

Holy shit guys

I am tired.  

Yeah, I know, it's an adjustment to polyphasic sleep, you're gonna get tired.  This is the first time it's taken me this long to get going after a nap, though.  I've been up for almost an hour, and I'm only now getting to a state where I'm not in danger of drifting off accidentally.  My eyeballs hurt, and I didn't want to get out of my warm bed with and leave Bryon there.  

This also confirmed a suspicion I've had for some time: I'm much more vulnerable to cold than I used to be.  I am, without exception, freezing when I get up, to the point where I've been getting in the bathtub and turning the hot water on and just letting it run for twenty minutes when I get up from a nap.  Now, I do live in the south, so getting cold easily would not normally be a problem.

Unfortunately, my job is that I run the freezer section of a food warehouse.  It's normal for me to spend several hours a day in a 0-10 degree environment (and yes, that's Fahrenheit).

I also scare much more easily.  I've several times had to fight off sudden, violent urges to shriek like a little girl when something startles me.  I almost did it at a lionfish in Petco.   Haha, thank god I didn't.  That wouldn't have been embarrassing at all.

Ugh, I'm getting tired again.  I need to go find something to do so I don't fall asleep.

7 pm Nap Attempt

I knew I wouldn't be able to fall asleep for my 7 pm nap today, but I went ahead and laid down anyway just to get in the habit.  Two of my three alarms went off on time.  The Timex that I was originally worried about seems to get louder over time, so I think it'll be okay.

The third alarm was the one on Bryon's iPod dock.  I suspect I just didn't set it correctly.  I'm gonna look into that and try to get it fixed before my midnight nap tonight.

Also, I have added a fourth alarm; one on a radio I forgot I had.  Hopefully Bryon will not murderize me when they all go off at 12:30 in the morning : )

EDIT: Forgot to mention that I was a notably tired at the time of the nap, and that feeling is increasing as time goes on.  Hopefully I'll be able to nap well tonight.

Alarms

So I went to Walmart today and got another alarm clock.  This one lulls you to sleep with brook, ocean, or wind chime sounds, and wakes you up with old-fashioned alarm bell, chimes, or cathedral bells.  The chimes and cathedral bells are softer than the alarm bell, but I hate the sound of alarm clocks (bad trait for a polyphaser, I know), so I'll try to use them first.  Also, I'm ganking my boyfriend's iPod dock that he never uses and hooking it up to my own mp3 player, so I'll have a total of three alarms.  I'm going to sync them, and then set them all for within one minute of each other and place them all over the room.  Sleeping through an alarm? Not gonna happen again : )

Day 8

So, I just woke up from my midnight nap . . . at 6 am.  Dammit.  I need a louder alarm clock.

Day 7

Hey, it's been awhile.

So here's what's gone on in the last week.  On day 3, I was unable to fall asleep for my 7 pm nap.  I continued to lay down for naps at various times throughout the evening, but I never managed to fall asleep until 11.  Then I woke up at 8.  Okay, so 5 hours of sleep isn't enough to let me fall asleep at 7.  It's like I've got a really solid wall between myself and sleep, and I can't sleep unless I can break through it with a large amount of sleep debt.

Obviously the next step would be to only sleep 4 hours a night  That, though, would mean that I would have to go into a full day of work with only 4 hours of sleep and the possibility that I still wouldn't be able to fall asleep that night. I didn't want to risk this on any more than one day, so I waited until the night before the last day of work and stayed up until 4 am this morning.

I still had my alarm set for 8:30, but I popped awake at 8 all on my own.  I felt pretty decent for only four hours of sleep.  Early on in the day, I experienced occasional waves of tiredness, but I think it was more psychological than physical.  By 11 I was going strong.

At 7, despite having only 4 hours of sleep the night before, I still wasn't that tired.  So I laid down anyway, and used a biofeedback technique I thought of.  Generally speaking, in biofeedback, the more senses you can tie into the attempt, the deeper you can reach.  So I focused on seeing and feeling myself slowly drift through this wall into sleep.  I guess the combination of sleep-dep and biofeedback worked, because the next thing I knew, my boyfriend was shaking me awake because it was 8.

I laid on the couch for about fifteen minutes as I slowly came all the way awake, and about fifteen minutes after that I started to feel good.  Like, really good.  After about half an hour, it started to wear off.  I'm still decently awake now, but I'll be ready for my next nap in two hours.

Day 2

It's been an interesting couple of days.  Yesterday, I went to bed at 8 pm, but didn't fall asleep until almost 9:30.  My alarm failed to go off at 10, and I didn't end up waking up until 2 am, when I awoke violently ill.  I doubt it had anything to do with the sleep schedule - my boyfriend had the same problem, so it's most likely something we ate.  At any rate, I decided to just sleep the same number of hours I would have slept had everything gone according to plan, so I stayed up until 6 am and then slept until 8.  Work went by fine today ; I was alert and didn't get tired.

I went to bed as soon as I got home at 6:20 pm, but again I didn't fall asleep until almost an hour had passed.  However, during that hour, I was much closer to falling asleep than I was yesterday, so I'm still pleased with that.  My alarm didn't go off at 8:10 pm (I gave myself some extra time to allow for the fact that it takes me a long time to fall asleep), but I woke up on my own at 8:12.  It's now 12:38, and I'm up for 2 1/2 more hours.  I don't feel at the top of my game, but I'm acceptable.  I could work in this condition without difficulty, but I do have to keep resisting the urge to lay back in the recliner and close my eyes.

So currently, on paper I'm cutting about 1 1/2 hours off my sleep schedule.  That's not much by polyphasic standards, but remember I'm only sleeping about 30 min during my hour and a half naps, so it's more like 2 1/2 hours. Additionally, I'm one of those people who normally requires 9 hours of sleep to function, so that brings it up to 3 1/2 total hours, which is not a bad chunk of time to suddenly gain.

I think the biggest effects at this stage are more psychological than physical.  While I am somewhat tired, I think it's exaggerated by the fact that I'm expecting to be tired.  I keep looking at the clock, thinking it's almost time to go to bed, only to find I've got another 2-3 hours.  It'll be interesting to see how I adapt to this over the coming weeks.

Prologue

Last night, I mentioned that I'm going about this somewhat differently than other people have, and I think it's time to expand on that.  Where other people have gone with the fast-and-hard approach, basically turning themselves into living zombies for weeks on end, I'm taking a more gradual stance.  

My first step is to split up my sleep into two times of day: 3 - 8 am and 7 - 8:30 pm.  To that end, I slept six hours the last two nights, from 2-8.  Today, I'll take a nap from 7-8:30, and then stay up until 3 from now on.

For a long time it seemed to me that polyphasic sleep would be impossible for me.  I can't afford to sleep-deprive myself too much, or else I'll do poorly at work.  But then, something occurred to me: everyone else has moved into polyphasic sleep by falling behind on sleep.  What if I did it by getting ahead of sleep?

That is the true intent behind my strange method.  Two days of 6 hours of sleep won't kill me at work, but it will help me fall asleep for my first nap.  I won't have 1 1/2 hours of sleep debt just from that - but I'm betting that I'll stay asleep until my alarm goes off.  And then, *bam*.  I go from being 45 minutes behind on sleep to being 45 minutes ahead.  

The idea is to nap for slightly longer than you actually need to, so that rather than staving off collapse with naps, you're actually sleeping before you feel the need to.  I freely admit that I have no idea if this is biologically possible.  That's why it's an experiment.  I have strong doubts that it would be permanently sustainable, at least for someone on a regular schedule - sooner or later your body is going to get used to falling asleep at an established time no matter what - but I'm not absolutely certain of that.

I do realize that almost all my methods fly in the face of established wisdom on polyphasic sleep.  That's because I simply can't afford to do things that way, so I'm going to do them my way instead.  If it works, fantastic, if not, well, I'm no worse off than I was before.

I'll post again after my first attempt at a nap tonight.

Preface

So!

Beginning yesterday, I have begun what will hopefully be an extended experiment on polyphasic sleep.  All my life, I've been angry that I had to lose eight hours of every day to unconsciousness.  Don't get me wrong - I like sleep.  I like it fine.  But at this point in life, I need more hours in the day; I need more time to live.  

I say 'experiment', and I mean it in all but the most clinical sense of the word, in that my particular attempt at this is different from any other attempt I'm aware of, in several ways.

1) Most polyphasers who go back to monophasic sleep do so because of their work schedule.  I'm doing this /because/ of work.  I work 9-10 hour shifts up to 10 days in a row.  My life, for weeks on end, becomes wake up-go to work-go to sleep-wake up-go to work-go to sleep, and I really cannot stand that feeling.  The majority of the time, all I do is work and sleep, and that just will not do.  I refuse to spend my life marking time waiting to die.

2) My job is fairly physically demanding.  It's a far cry from a truly athletic lifestyle, of course, but it is notably more physically challenging than the lives of most polyphasers I've read about (typically students or people who work from home).  It'll be interesting to see if polyphasic sleep allows my body to relax enough so I can function from day to day.

3) Let's not overlook the fact that I /have/ a full-time job, with hours I don't get to set.  I can't just take a surprise nap in the middle of the day if I feel like it (probably actually a good thing, from what I've read).

4) A lot of people try polyphasic sleep because they want more time to be productive.  I . . . am just not that kind of person.  I'm not hyper-organized and energetic.  I'm curious to see how these personality differences will affect the experience.

5) I have a fairly in-depth background in biofeedback, which I'm hoping will allow me to notice things about the experience other people may have missed in the daze of sleep deprivation.

6) My method is different from that of other people.  Instead of making one huge adjustment, I'll be making several smaller ones over time.  

And I think that about covers it.  I'll give more details tomorrow, particularly on the last point.  Additionally, my boyfriend is a psychologist, so it might be interesting to get his input on apparent changes in my mood and affect over time.  But for now, it actually is time for bed (for once).  So, goodnight, and I'll see you guys in a few hours : )