This was a strange illness.  I had a mild cold near the end of the New York City trip, and I seemed to recover just fine.  That was the first illness I’ve had this whole year.  But several days later (this would be Mon, Oct 29), I woke up feeling terrible:  fever, nausea, headache, sore throat, and massive fatigue.  I finally dragged myself out of bed, made a fruit smoothie for breakfast, and then vomited it back up 20 minutes later.  (Unlike many partially digested foods, fruit smoothies still taste OK on the return trip — they’re just a bit warmer.)  Consequently, I’ve been out of commission for the past few days.  I’m feeling better today, and the fever has passed, but I still have a sore throat and feel a bit spacey.

My initial reaction to being sick (twice in two weeks) was annoyance.  I had a busy week planned.  I tried to get a little work done but couldn’t concentrate well enough to do anything worthwhile.  At one point I got really confused trying to find a file folder I’ve accessed a hundred times before, only to realize I’d been looking in the wrong drawer.  This is why I haven’t done any blogging in the past week.

Eventually I opted to give in and go with the flow.  So this week I mostly slept, meditated, and ate lots of raw fruits and veggies.  I also watched some old comedies, which always seems to help me feel better.

During this illness my usual emotional regulators went completely offline.  While watching Young Frankenstein, I totally lost it when the monster was climbing the castle wall at the end.  It seemed like such a beautiful moment.  I felt like a Vulcan suffering from Bendii syndrome.

One meditation I did gave me some intense insights that I’m still coming to terms with.  I realized I was hitting a lot of roadblocks when trying to go a certain direction, and this meditation allowed me to see why that was happening and that there was a far easier path I’d been completely overlooking.  Sometimes an illness acts like a spiritual head smacking.

Another meditation went so deep that it actually slid into a lucid dream while I was sitting on the couch.  My conscious visualizations started giving way to a stream of unconscious imagery, and I could see I was beginning to enter a dream state.  I relaxed and went with it, and I slipped into a very vivid dream while still conscious.  That’s never happened to me before.  Previously lucidity had always been triggered while I was already in the dream state.  I’ll have to try that again sometime.

I had some extremely deep and vivid nighttime dreams this week as well — the kind where it feels like I’ve spent days or weeks within the dream world.  Last night I dreamt I was kidnapped by some “terrorist” group and transported to a country in the Middle East, where I was held hostage.  I was allowed to move around within a small community and interact with the people there, but I couldn’t leave the country.  However, I still had my laptop computer and an Internet connection, and I was encouraged to blog about the whole experience.  I told my captors I’d cooperate on the condition that I would only post the truth — if they wanted me to post anything false or withhold anything true, they’d have to kill me first.  They agreed and said it was all they wanted.  I spent the next two months walking around, observing, talking to people, and writing.  Despite being a “hostage”, I never felt trapped because the joyful background buzz of awareness was still present everywhere.  It was just a matter of adapting to a new environment.

This seemed like more than just a routine illness.  It’s like I was going through some kind of spiritual/emotional purging.  This sort of thing has happened to me a few times before.  In 2004 I had a string of nearly identical illnesses, always with the same symptoms.  Every time I would get some decent momentum going with my games business, I got sick and was down for a week.  It became really irritating.  I must have had about 10 fevers that year.  Eventually I stopped fighting and decided to turn within and do a lot of soul searching, since I didn’t have the energy to do much else.  That led to a major career transition with the launch of StevePavlina.com in late 2004.  Shortly after that the string of illnesses just ended.  Now I suspect I’m getting another knock on the door.

I’m sure some people consider illness to be a purely physical, objective phenomenon caused by wee beasties.  I’m not one of those people… although I’m sometimes classified as one of the beasties. 

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

It feels great to be up early, and you know you’ll put those early morning hours to good use.  You’ll be able to exercise, shower, get dressed, eat a healthy breakfast, read some inspiring material, and invest an hour in your home-based business — all before 8am.  And you know that the habit of starting each day this way will serve you well for life.

Maintaining this habit is easy for you.  You don’t have to force yourself out of bed, and it doesn’t seem to require much discipline at all.  It feels normal and natural to be alert and active at this time.

If this scenario closely matches your current daily reality, you can stop reading now.  But if it sounds like pure fantasy, then read on…

Waking up groggy

During my teen years and well into my 20s, I would usually wake up feeling very groggy in the morning.  Even after sleeping 8-9 hours, I could have kept right on sleeping.  A couple of my siblings were the same way.  To get them up before noon required dragging their covers off.  We only got up early when we had to, never by choice.

I wasn’t much good during those morning hours.  I’d go through the motions of getting dressed and having breakfast, but I didn’t feel my brain was fully online yet.  Since I was raised Catholic (I know — I’m mostly recovered now), every Sunday morning my parents would take us to church at 7:30am.  Most of the time I sat through the mass in a half-conscious zombie state.  I think they made the pews hard and uncomfortable to keep people from napping… but I’ll leave the rest of the Catholic commentary to George Carlin.

From grog monster to early riser

Fast forward to the present, and I’m a habitual early riser.  Since I work from home and set my own hours, I can sleep in as late as I want.  But I get up at 5am by choice.  I like being up before dawn and getting an early start each day.  It’s very easy to maintain.  It feels like the path of least resistance.

If you’re so groggy you can’t get up before drifting back to sleep, you don’t need a new alarm clock.  You don’t need to move your alarm clock across the room.  And you don’t need a spring-loaded bed.  What you really need is to address the factors that are making you wake up groggy in the first place.

I’m going to share what worked best for me in gradually converting from an AM zombie to an alert early riser.  These tips will expand on and add to what’s already been covered in How to Become an Early Riser, How to Become an Early Riser – Part II, and How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off.  Those articles focused on building an effective strategy for getting up early.  This article is about what you can do to ensure that when you do get up early, you feel alert and awake instead of tired and groggy, so you can develop early rising as a long-term habit.

Experiment.

This is the most important principle of all.  If your current method of getting up each morning doesn’t feel right to you, then admit that it sucks, and try something else.  If it’s not working, stop doing it.  And for goodness sakes, don’t complain about it, since that can’t possibly help.

If you wake up groggy, it doesn’t mean you’re broken.  It just means you’re making some physiological mistakes, and those mistakes can be corrected.  The only way to get there, however, is to try something else.  And if you’ve never been able to wake up feeling totally alert, then most likely you’ll need to try something you’ve never done before.  If you aren’t willing to do that, you’re doomed.

As you experiment, seek improvement, not perfection.  All you really need to is to find some minor tweak that works a little bit better, and repeat.  Some of the changes I’ll suggest may sound radical if you think about implementing them all at once, but those radical steps represent a lot of little changes accumulated over a long period of time.

Be patient in developing this skill.  There’s no rush.  If you can become an early riser in your teen years, that’s incredible.  It wasn’t until my 30s that I felt I’d really mastered it.

Decide you’ll make it.

Like most people, I oscillated between that enthusiastic feeling that I’ll be able to find a way to do this vs. that sinking feeling of having to admit that maybe I’m just not biologically suited for it.  I kept making one push after another, but I could only get up early for a few days in a row at most before the fatigue would overwhelm me, and I’d crash.

If you’re fighting overwhelming fatigue or if getting up early seems virtually impossible, let me suggest that your approach may be wrong.  Yes, there will be an adaptation period if you’re shifting your wake-up time, but it shouldn’t require an inhuman amount of discipline.  It should only be mildly challenging.  If the challenge level is too high, you’re tackling the problem from the wrong angle.  Motivation is important, but technique plays a major role too.

Here’s what success in early rising looks like.  You wake up early, and you feel wide awake and very contented.  There will be some variation from day to day, but overall you’re alert and functional.  As you get up, it feels like your conscious mind is going through a rapid boot-up process.  You may remember having an interesting dream.  You’ll also begin to think about the coming day.  This all happens within a matter of seconds.

When you decide to make it, be sure to hold the right goal in mind.  Forcing yourself out of bed while feeling like a zombie isn’t the goal to shoot for.  I had a real breakthrough when I decided I wanted to get up early AND feel totally alert when I got up.  That may sound like a very basic distinction, but being able to hold the correct intention in mind was a key step.  If you have mixed feelings about getting up early, then sort through those feelings until you can paint a picture that feels right to you.  Make success a matter of when, not if.

Fix your diet.

Diet and sleep are inextricably intertwined.  If you think you can master your sleeping habits without improving your diet, you’re deluding yourself.  Seriously.

Unfortunately most people — Americans especially — consume a truly hideous diet these days, filled with hormone-laden animal products, artificial ingredients, sugar, caffeine, salt, white flour, and heavily processed junk.  An unhealthy diet will tax your endocrine system (which is responsible for hormone production), and that is going to prevent you from enjoying restful sleep.

What works well for me is a whole foods vegan diet, heavy on the raw fruits and veggies.  When I went vegetarian in 1993, I was able to feel well rested with less sleep, and I woke up feeling more alert.  Then when I went fully vegan in 1997, there was another improvement.  As I explained in Why Vegan, the energy difference is the primary reason I converted to such a diet.

Just as you may wake up with a hangover if you consume too much alcohol, you’ll suffer from other types of hangovers if you consume mood-altering substances.  Two of the worst are sugar and caffeine.  If your diet is high in caffeine and/or sugar (especially in the forum of corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup), do yourself a favor and conduct a 30-day trial without them.  I notice that if I have just one cup of coffee in the morning, I won’t sleep as deeply the following night, it will take me much longer to fall asleep, and I’ll wake up feeling a lot more groggy — almost 24 hours later.  (For specific ideas on quitting coffee, see How to Give Up Coffee.)

If you’ve been messing with your physiology by consuming excessive sugar, caffeine, processed foods, etc, I highly recommend you fix your diet first before attempting to master your sleep habits.  Otherwise you’re only going to frustrate yourself.  Two and a half years of feedback from readers attempting to become early risers has taught me it’s almost a rule that waking up groggy and eating a crappy diet go hand in hand.  Keep in mind that in the USA, the average diet is an extremely crappy diet.  I think that’s why people who wake up before dawn feeling totally alert tend to be considered overachievers, freaks, or genetically gifted.  From the early risers’ perspective, it seems like everyone else is drugging themselves into a stupor.

At the opposite extreme, people who are fasting often report needing much less sleep.  I had a friend who was really into juice fasting, and he told me he’d only sleep about 4 hours a night during a fast.

I encourage you to experiment to find the best diet for you, which may or may not be similar to mine.  Find out which manner of eating helps you feel best in the morning.  I could overload you with all sorts of dietary statistics, but I don’t suggest you model your diet on statistics.  Let personal experimentation be your guide, and notice how you feel when you eat different types of food for an extended period – and especially how you feel when you wake up each morning.  If you awaken feeling totally groggy, try eating different foods for a while.

Eat lightly at night.

This could be considered a corollary to the above, but it’s important enough that it deserves special attention.  If your body must digest a heavy meal while you’re sleeping, your sleep will not be as restorative, and you’re far more likely to wake up groggy the next morning.

Social conditioning may have taught you that a big dinner is the way to go, but for the real truth, you must consult your body.  Even if you’re not a strict vegetarian, I highly recommend you try steering clear of animal foods for your evening meal.  They take the longest amount of time to digest and are very likely to make you groggy the next morning.

Fresh fruit is perhaps the ideal food to eat for your last meal, especially low-sugar fruits like tomatoes, avocados, peppers, and cantaloupe.  Personally I’m not a big fan of having nothing but fruit for dinner, but when I do, I usually don’t need as much sleep, and I almost always wake up feeling more alert.  So regardless of what my mind has to say about it, my body clearly likes it.

A very close second choice for an evening meal would be fresh veggies, especially a big salad.  After that would be lightly cooked veggies.  The less processed your evening meal, the less energy it will take to digest, and the less it will disrupt your physiology.  If you eat crap before bed, you can expect to feel like crap in the morning.

You’ve probably heard the advice that you should stop eating at least 2-3 hours before bedtime.  If you normally eat a heavy dinner, that advice will help a little.  But I can eat a large fruit or veggie salad right before bed, and it doesn’t seem to disrupt my sleep.  I think it’s because our bodies are so well suited for fruit and veggie consumption.  Such meals require very little energy to digest compared to other foods, so they don’t strain our internal resources and disrupt our sleep.

This is an area where I encourage you to experiment a lot.  Try eating a very light dinner tonight, and see how you feel the next morning.

Exercise daily. 

Even before I went vegetarian, I noticed a major improvement in my sleep patterns when I started exercising aerobically on a daily basis.  I suppose the current term for aerobic exercise is “cardio,” but I don’t like that word because it invariably triggers my trendy-words-that-make-me-vomit filter.  It’s right up there with Web 2.0.

You’ve probably heard this advice before, but there’s a difference between hearing advice and applying it.  So go apply it, and get thine ass to the gym.  At the very least, run around the block for 25 minutes each morning.  If you don’t do it, you don’t know it.

When I’m exercising aerobically every day for at least 20 minutes, I can shave a good hour off my sleep each night, which more than compensates for the exercise time.  I wake up feeling more alert and energetic too.  But the best part is that I enjoy better concentration and alertness all day long.  It works way better than caffeine… and without the crash.

I’ve also done weight training for months at a time, both with and without aerobic exercise.  Despite the other benefits of weight training, by itself it doesn’t seem to benefit my sleep patterns and morning alertness.  It doesn’t seem to hurt my sleep either though, even when I’ve trained vigorously with major soreness.

Be aware that marketers frequently attempt to manipulate exercise trends to boost product sales.  You won’t normally see inexpensive exercises like running getting much promotional attention (unless it’s to sell you an iPod to listen to while running).  Try not to be swayed by the marketing fluff, and go with what works for you, whether it’s trendy or not.  If you feel compelled to spend money on your health, buy the best organic produce you can find, and keep your daily exercise cheap and simple.

Get up at the same time every day, including weekends.

This was mentioned in the original early riser article.  Getting up at the same time every day is pretty important when you’re first establishing the habit of early rising.  In the beginning it’s too easy to fall off track, so I suggest that you get up at the same time every single day for at least 30 days.  If you feel compelled to sleep in on weekends, you’re probably doing something wrong.  Again, it should feel good to get up early.  If you’re doing it because you want to, and it’s working, it will feel normal and natural to do it every day.  If you think you need a cheat day, something is definitely off.  Why would you cheat yourself out of something you like doing?

After you’ve been waking up energized for at least a month to establish the habit, doing it every single day isn’t critical.  If I want to stay out late one night, I might sleep in until 6:30 or 7:00 the next morning.  But the next day I’m back on schedule with no trouble.  My normal bedtime is between 10 and 11pm, but I can stay up well past 1am without much difficulty if something stimulating is happening.

Last week Erin and I were in New York City, and my sleep schedule was all over the place during the trip.  Some mornings we got up early, while other days we slept in until 8am.  But upon returning to Vegas, I had no trouble getting back on my original sleep schedule.  New York City (Eastern Time) is 3 hours ahead of Las Vegas (Pacific Time), so I was normally waking up earlier than usual on this trip.  I’m not sure how easy it would be to re-adapt if we went to Hawaii instead.  I’ll have to test that soon. 

I recommend using an alarm clock unless you can set very reliable mental alarms.  I still use an alarm clock every morning, but now it’s more of a conditioning maintenance device rather than a wake-up device.  I probably don’t need an alarm to keep getting up early at a relatively consistent time, but since I conditioned myself to get up when the alarm goes off, it’s just part of my routine.  I haven’t put much effort into building skill with mental alarms, largely because the alarm clock solution already works fine.

Go to bed only when you’re sleepy.

This was also mentioned in the first early riser article.  Instead of going to bed at a fixed time each night, stay up until you’re sleepy.

If you’re lying awake at night for 30 minutes or more trying to fall asleep, I’d say you’ve gone to bed too early.  Get up and read for a while.  When you start to nod off while reading, it’s time for bed.

Most nights I can fall asleep within a few minutes after lying down.  If I’m not sleepy, I stay up until I am.  Sometimes I’m ready to crash at 9:30.  Other times I’ll stay up until 11:30.  But most of the time the onset of sleepiness occurs pretty close to the same time, which for me is between 10 and 10:30.  I perceive it as a gentle nudging that tells me if I lie down, I’ll be able to fall asleep fast.

In the first early riser article, I explained that if you start going to bed when you’re sleepy and get up at a fixed time each morning, your body will eventually adapt.  For clarity I should add the caveat, “… if you aren’t excessively screwing with your biochemistry.”  Much of the feedback I’ve received tells me that most people can adapt to becoming early risers within about 3-5 days.  That’s how long it takes them to hone in on a fairly consistent bedtime that gives them enough sleep to feel well-rested the next morning and not feel sleep deprived during the day.  However, the ones who eat a really poor diet or who drink alcohol every night rarely make it past the third day; they almost invariably give up.

Develop a pleasant morning routine.

If you don’t like the way you spend your mornings, you may suffer the problem of waking up without getting up.  A good morning routine can help remedy that.  It’s important to have something to look forward to that makes you eager to get out of bed.

My usual morning routine is pretty basic, but it works for me.  After I get up, I shave and put on my gym clothes.  Then I head for the gym, do my workout, return home, shower, and dress.  After that I’ll usually talk to Erin and the kids for a bit and have breakfast.

I like going to the gym, so it serves as a good reason to get out of bed.  I know that exercising will leave me feeling even more energized.

This is a rich place for experimentation.  Some people like getting up and working on a home-based business for an hour or two.  Others like to meditate first thing in the morning.  In this particular area, the rule is to do whatever works for you.  If playing your favorite video game for an hour helps motivate you to get out of bed early, try it for a few days and see how it goes.

If your morning routine ever becomes boring, change it.  Any effective routine may eventually stop working for you.  Do whatever is necessary to keep it interesting.

What about an evening routine?  It’s common advice that having a relaxing routine for winding down before bed will improve your sleep.  For me it doesn’t seem to make much difference.  I can enjoy a lot of variety and activity in my evenings, and I still sleep just fine and wake up alert.  A stable evening routine can help compensate for a stressful lifestyle, but otherwise I don’t think it’s that important.  Feel free to experiment with an evening shutdown process to see what works best for you.

Make it so!

Early morning alertness is a great habit to develop, and it will serve you well for decades.  Don’t settle for that no man’s land of waking up groggy while your chemically wrecked body refuses to budge.  Mastering your mornings will set the tone for your entire day.  Once you’ve experienced how good it feels, you’ll never want to go back.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

I regard these different levels of reality as being at different frequencies or energy levels.  It’s like tuning into different TV channels.  Physical reality seems slower, denser, and less malleable than the other levels.

Astral projection, out-of-body experiences, and near-death experiences could be said to occur at other frequencies than the physical universe.  And within those there are a variety of sub-levels.  People who are skilled at astral projection, for example, can visit different astral realms with unique properties.  Some astral locales seem like close approximations of the physical world, while others are so different from physical reality they’re nearly impossible to describe.

Perhaps the best analogy I can use to describe these different realities is to compare them to states of matter.  You’re intimately familiar with solid, liquid, and gas, since you interact with matter in those states every day.  But did you know there are a lot more states of matter, including Bose-Einstein condensates, fermionic condensates, strange matter, degenerate matter, quark-gluon plasma, superfluids, supersolids, and possibly others?  How much time do you spend interacting with those?  Are they as real as solid, liquid, and gas, or some delusional physicists just make them up to convince someone to fund more of their expensive toys?

Just as there are different states of matter, there are different levels of reality.  Every state of matter has unique physical and energetic properties, as do all the realms of reality your consciousness can perceive.  Your inability to access all these states or realms at will is a limitation of your perceptual abilities.

I imagine you spend most of your time interacting with solids, liquids, and gases, but it’s believed that most of the matter in the visible universe is actually in the plasma state.  So if you were to assume that the states of matter you interact with personally are the only ones that exist, you’d be very wrong.  You’d also be wrong if you assumed those states were the most common.  With respect to the vastness of the physical universe, your personal experience of matter is rather atypical.  You’re basically living in a bubble.

Similarly, I think it would be just as big a mistake to assume that this physical reality is the only reality there is.  I suspect this realm is only one among many, and I doubt it’s the most popular hangout for conscious beings.  Some people have written fascinating books about their astral explorations, like Robert Monroe’s Far Journeys, and some astral realms appear to be rather crowded.

It’s common to deny the existence of what we haven’t personally experienced, but such behavior is rather limiting.  I think a better attitude is to be an explorer.  If you don’t know what’s out there, and you’re curious about it, go take a look around. You can use the maps created by others as a guide — at least to the extent you find them helpful.  That’s a better approach than summarily claiming, “There be dragons.”

Opening ourselves up to what may exist but which hasn’t yet been observed is how we invite new experiences into our reality.  This is not merely wishful thinking or open-mindedness.  It is the process by which we creatively sculpt reality itself.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Imagine you’re having a lucid dream.  This means you’re lying in bed having a dream, and while still within the dream world, you become conscious and aware that you’re dreaming.  In the dream you might be playing some role other than your real-life persona, but you know the real you is lying in bed asleep, and that your dream persona is just a character you can control.

Even while you’re lucid, you probably can’t control everything, nor would you necessarily want to, but the knowledge that you’re dreaming gives you a fascinating new perspective on your in-dream experience.  You can interact with the dream reality on a whole new level.  I’d say the main difference is that you become virtually fearless, since you know that nothing in the dream world can hurt the real you — the dreamer who’s having the dream.  It will still feel scary to fall off a building, and a hard landing may still trigger the sensation of real pain, but you’ll be a lot more willing to try interesting things just for the experience.

Subjective reality = lucid dreaming while awake

Subjective reality is basically lucid dreaming while awake.  It’s not really a belief — it would be more accurate to say that it’s a perspective.

Subjective reality is the perspective that recognizes that you are in fact the dreamer and that everything you perceive in the dream world, including your dream body and the other dream characters and objects, is taking place within your larger consciousness.  When you’re fully lucid, you know that the dream character you control isn’t the real you — the real you is asleep on a bed somewhere, having the dream.  Your dream body is merely your first-person interface to the dream world, a construct of consciousness.  If your dream body gets hurt, you may still feel the pain.  If it experiences pleasure, you may feel the pleasure.  If something in the dream startles you, you may feel that emotional reaction.  But when that dream body dies, the real you lying in bed remains alive, and you simply wake up.

The non-dream version of subjective reality, the one I’ve described in my previous writing on the topic, is basically the same concept of having a lucid dream, except that you apply it to waking physical reality instead of your nighttime dreams.  In effect you become lucid while physically awake, recognizing that there’s another layer of dreaming and that this physical reality is also fully contained within a larger consciousness, and that outer consciousness is in fact the real you.  Your physical body-mind is merely your first-person interface to the dream world.

Once you reach this level of lucidity, everything changes.  You’re still experiencing reality — it doesn’t simply stop – but because you recognize it as a dream, you’re able to interact with it on a whole new level.  You will still experience pleasure, pain, and fear as you react automatically to in-dream events, but because you know you’re really the outside dreamer who cannot be truly harmed by anything within the dream, you begin to relate to life from a state of inherent fearlessness.

When people experience their first lucid nighttime dream, it’s normally a very exciting experience.  I can describe the feeling as one of exhilaration… like, “Wow!  I’m dreaming.  This is absolutely amazing.”  Once you get a grasp on that perspective, it’s such a wonderful feeling you never want to let it go.

When you have a seemingly negative experience while lucid dreaming, like you get beat up by another dream character, on one level you may still experience some fear or other negative emotions.  But on another level, your knowing that it’s all a dream adds an element of enthusiasm and fun to everything.  It’s like playing a video game.  In a very immersive game, when something bad happens to your character, it can be frustrating, but it’s still fun.  This is the perspective I described in The Joy of Sadness.  Subjective reality is a perspective that allows you to tap into the joy behind every negative emotion.

Solipsism = degenerate, partial lucidity

Solipsism, like subjective reality, also recognizes the dream nature of reality.  However, solipsism assumes that your dream character (aka your in-dream ego) is in fact the real you and is somehow creating the other characters as a projection of its own ego.  Solipsism doesn’t recognize the existence of the outer dreamer in which the whole experience is taking place.  It assumes everything is emanating from the dream ego and that there is no outer dreamer.

This perspective regards your dream character as real and conscious, but the other dream characters are just projections and are not conscious by themselves.  Subjective reality, on the other hand, sees ALL the dream characters (including yours) as equal projections of the outer dreamer, and no character is more or less valid or conscious than any other character; they’re all just projections of a larger consciousness.

Imagine you’re playing a video game where you control a particular character who can move around within the game world.  That character is your avatar.  Solipsism is the perspective that says your avatar is the only thing in the game that’s real, and the whole simulation is somehow a product of your avatar’s mind or ego.

Maybe you can find some value in the perspective of solipsism, but I don’t find it particularly useful.  To me it seems objectively unprovable and subjectively disempowering.  Even so, I tried holding it for a while, but it just didn’t feel right to me.

Subjective reality filtered through an objective lens is not subjective reality

When people tell me they’re concerned that seeing the world through the lens of subjective reality will make them feel lonely or depressed, I know they’re really talking about solipsism.  Solipsism is basically what you get when you try to interpret subjective reality through an objective lens.  If you filter reality through the objective lens and then pass the result of that filtering through the subjective lens, you end up with essentially nothing.  It’s like taking the output of your eyes and then running it through your ears.  What happens when you try to listen to blue?  You get nothingness, the null set.

If you wish to grasp the perspective of subjective reality, you have to put down the objective lens first.  You can run both filters in parallel, but if you try to run them sequentially, you’ll never get it.  I know this isn’t easy to do, and I completely sympathize with those who find this a frustrating endeavor.  Imagine if you were born deaf and then suddenly gained your hearing after decades of filtering reality through your visual sense.  It might take a lot of practice before you could successfully rely on your hearing in parallel with your vision.

What helped me most through this process was that I was an experienced lucid dreamer for years before I began to explore the perspective of subjective reality.  I already had the experience of distinguishing between non-lucid (objective perspective) dreams vs. lucid (subjective perspective) dreams.  I think that gave me a major head start in being able to apply these same perspectives to physical reality.  If you’ve never experienced lucid dreaming or astral projection, I imagine it would be much harder to understand subjective reality.  When the objective perspective is all you’ve ever known, it’s hard to even conceive of other, independent perceptual filters.  It’s like trying to explain hearing to a deaf person.  How can you explain sound in terms of sight, smell, etc?  But that’s essentially what I’m trying to do when I write about subjective reality through an objective medium.  The people that are able to grasp it easily are usually those who’ve already had some experience with it.  For everyone else the best I can do is provide a pointer to the experience, but my words can never adequately describe the real experience.

The only conscious being in the universe?

I sometimes stumble upon people writing on their blogs, “Steve believes in subjective reality.  He thinks he’s the only conscious being in the universe.”  That’s false on two levels.  First, it assumes that I equate my identity with subjective reality, meaning that I don’t also perceive reality through the objective lens.  In fact I rely on both lenses just as I rely on both my eyesight and hearing.  The subjective perspective runs in parallel to the objective one.  It’s like playing a video game — you know you’re playing a game, but you simultaneously perceive the game world through the eyes of your in-game avatar, so the game is experienced both subjectively and objectively.  At any given time, you may temporarily focus on one perspective more than another, just as you may focus on your hearing more than your eyesight under certain conditions.  But at no time do you ever lose access to other perspectives or senses.

Secondly, such statements confuse subjective reality with solipsism.  While solipsism is a distinct perspective from subjective reality, personally I don’t find solipsism very practical, accurate, or empowering.  To say that I believe this Steve persona is the only conscious being in the universe is simply untrue.  I don’t perceive consciousness as being centered within my ego.

Hopefully you can see that solipsism is not remotely the same thing as the subjective reality perspective I’m describing.  Subjective reality is lucidity, but solipsism keeps you trapped in the dream world by making the assumption that your dream ego is somehow the real you.  Consequently, I consider solipsism to be a degenerate, partial lucidity.

I notice a lot of people these days try to utilize the Law of Attraction while harboring a perspective that’s pretty close to solipsism.  They hold a semi-objective view of the world, but they assume their creative power lies within their individual ego.  Their results are often dismal.  Then you get the hard-core objectivists attacking such people as loons.  Oh well.

Subjective reality and creativity

Some people fear that perceiving physical reality through the subjective lens will somehow mess up their lives or make them do stupid things.  I suspect such people have never had a lucid dream.  For me the adoption of the subjective lens was like gaining a new physical sense.  Imagine being deaf your whole life and then gradually learning to hear.  The process can be confusing at first, but it isn’t going to cost you your eyesight, and it certainly won’t switch off your common sense.  If you can make sense of the new perceptual input coming through, it’s a very empowering and amazing experience.

If you can pull it off, I think you’ll find the addition of the subjective viewpoint to be very empowering, much like gaining a new physical sense.  Eyesight, hearing, and other physical senses are perceptive filters, but they’re also creative ones.  Similarly, the subjective perspective can greatly enhance your creative ability.  Imagine cooking a meal without your sense of smell or writing a play without being able to hear.  Sure, you could do it, but the output will probably be bland and mono-dimensional.  The perspective of subjective reality adds a certain spiciness to life, both in terms of perception and creation.  By gaining a new input channel, you also gain new output channels.

When you’re having a dream and you become lucid, your ability to make the dream world “better” increases dramatically.  I find that when I’m lucid dreaming, I can do a lot more, but I still have limits.  The empowering perspective of lucidity gives me access to new abilities I wouldn’t otherwise possess, but I still have to practice in order to build skill.  The dream doesn’t automatically switch to full “God mode.”  I’ve been lucid dreaming since 1994, and there are still many things I can’t do very well.  Overall the lucid perspective is very empowering, but it’s still fun and interesting at times to pay attention to the objective perspective too.

Accuracy vs. popularity

The main issue with the subjective reality perspective is that it’s not very common or popular.  That doesn’t make it invalid, but it does mean that if you choose to pursue it, you’re likely to encounter people who think it’s invalid because they’ve never experienced it… or they’ve experienced something like solipsism and assume you’re on a similar degenerate path.  If you live in a world where most people are deaf, and you gradually begin to hear sounds, how will you explain your new perceptions to others?  Good luck!  They’ll probably think you’re daft.  I’m not saying you shouldn’t try — I’m obviously willing to make the attempt — but don’t be surprised when you witness some resistance from the other dream characters.  You’ll have to ask yourself which is more important to you:  accuracy or popularity.

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© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Adapting to polyphasic sleep took many days, and I felt like a zombie the first week.  At one point I just sat on the couch staring at a wall for 90 minutes, unable to form any thoughts.  But eventually I was able to adapt, and it was one of the most unusual experiences of my life.

I was lucky to have a lifestyle that gave me every possible advantage in conducting this experiment, including working from home, a flexible schedule, and a supportive family.  Most people who attempt polyphasic sleep can’t make it fit their schedules, and it takes a lot of discipline to avoid oversleeping.  You can shift your naps around a little, but not by much.  As soon as you awaken from a nap, you have only 3 hours 40 minutes until your next one.  By adapting to polyphasic sleep, you may gain some waking hours each day, but you sacrifice a lot of schedule flexibility.

Eventually I abandoned the pattern and returned to monophasic sleep, mainly due to social reasons as I explained in my final post of the series:  The Return to Monophasic.  The rest of the world simply isn’t polyphasic.  However, returning to my original sleep pattern wasn’t quite the same after that experiment.  Something came back with me.

Cue eerie sci-fi music…

No, I didn’t come back possessed… although some might refer to my recent ramblings on subjective reality and polarity as evidence to the contrary.  What happened was that part of the polyphasic sleep adaptation seems to have stayed with me.

Polyphasic napping

The critical part of polyphasic adaptation is to reach the point where you can take a 20-minute nap and hit REM sleep.  During typical nighttime sleep, you don’t normally hit your first REM cycle until after about 90 minutes.  So when you first attempt polyphasic sleep, you’ll initially suffer from terrible sleep deprivation because you won’t be getting any REM sleep during your naps.  You’ll awaken feeling even more tired, and you WILL feel like a zombie for many days, possibly weeks.

If you can withstand the sleep deprivation long enough, your body eventually adapts, and you begin experiencing REM sleep during your naps.  Dreams occur during REM sleep, so you’ll know you’re getting there when you start having dreams during your naps.  Once this starts happening, it may take a few more days to make up for the sleep deprivation and start feeling functional again.  REM naps leave you feeling rested and rejuvenated.

After adapting to polyphasic sleep, I could lie down for a nap, set a timer for 20 minutes, fall asleep, and wake up remembering an extremely vivid dream.  During my polyphasic experiments I could normally fall asleep within a few minutes, and I’d often wake up naturally a minute or two before the alarm went off.  The dreams I had during these times were extremely vivid, and I experienced a sense of time dilation.  Even though I was only asleep for 15 minutes or so, it felt like my dreams lasted more than an hour.  I’d awaken amazed at how little time had passed.

The interesting thing is that I still have this ability today.  I suspect it may be a permanent adaptation.  I took a nap this afternoon, had a dream that seemed about an hour long, and woke up naturally feeling refreshed and with a clear memory of the dream.  But the total time I was lying down was only 13 minutes.  As long as I’m in a fairly calm mental state, I can still basically do this at any time of day.

Also, during my regular nighttime monophasic sleep period, I will often awaken within the first 20 minutes after I go to bed, remembering a very vivid dream.  Usually I can fall back asleep again fairly easily after this happens.  Overall the quality of my nighttime sleep doesn’t feel any different than it was during my pre-polyphasic days.

Mental clarity

Whenever I take a nap these days, I awaken with the same feeling I had when I was polyphasic.  I described this feeling in some of my log entries.  It’s a feeling of being extremely mellow and relaxed, as if my mind is a blank slate with no background noise.  Before going polyphasic I never experienced this exact state of mind.  Today my 20-minute naps virtually always return me to this mental state, which usually lasts for hours afterwards.  I’m in this state right now.

This post-nap state is terrific for writing because ideas flow through my mind very easily.  I certainly had a high blogging output (at least for me) during my polyphasic experience — you can verify that just by looking at the archives (Oct 2005 – Apr 2006).

Permanent physiological changes?

For good or ill, my sleep physiology appears to have been permanently altered by my polyphasic sleep experiment.  I wouldn’t even know how to completely revert back to my pre-polyphasic pattern.

I consider these after-effects to be positive, but who knows what the long-term consequences could be?

Polyphasic nostalgia

Despite its weirdness I often miss my polyphasic days, except for the adaptation period of course.  Having so much extra time available was really nice, and to an extent I enjoyed the balance of social time and alone time.  I liked that I always had plenty of time to explore various interests.  It was strange tending a house of hibernating bears at night and the blurry borders between days took some getting used to, but I certainly got a lot done.

Re-adaptation?

My current sleep pattern is that I go to bed around 10-11pm each night and get up at 5am, still using an alarm clock.  It’s the basic early riser pattern I used before the polyphasic experiment.  In an average night I sleep about 6.5 hours, and I normally don’t nap during the day anymore.

Because of the lingering after-effects of my polyphasic experiment, I’m curious as to whether it might be possible for me to re-adapt to polyphasic sleep far more easily if I were to try it again.  Would I have to endure another week or two of zombie-hood, or could I readapt within a couple of days?  Apparently I still possess the REM adaptation, which I believe is the most crucial element.

What if it were possible to switch back and forth between monophasic and polyphasic sleep patterns with relative ease after making the polyphasic adaptation the first time?  What if a person could go one week on polyphasic sleep and the next week on monophasic sleep?  Then you could gain the benefits of polyphasic sleep while falling back on a monophasic pattern when polyphasic sleep was impractical.  For example, a student could go polyphasic during spring break and return to monophasic the following week.  I feel polyphasic sleep would still be impractical for me as a long-term pattern, but I could make good use of it for a few weeks every quarter if it were possible to switch within a day or two.

I have no idea what it would be like to readapt to polyphasic sleep now, but I suspect it would be much easier the second time around.  I’m certainly curious, but I’m not committed to testing this just yet.  I just ran the idea past Erin, and she’s opposed to it because she remembers all the schedule juggling that had to be done to accommodate my naps, especially when traveling.

Nevertheless, I’m going to give it some thought and consider whether I’d want to give polyphasic sleep another trial to see what a second adaptation period would be like.  The downside is that if I do this, I have to be prepared for it to take just as long as (or longer than) it did the first time, which was certainly no picnic.

I mainly wanted to share this information for the benefit of those who are considering altering their sleep patterns (polyphasic, biphasic, triphasic, or otherwise).  I’d caution that once you cross a certain threshold, things might never be the same again.  That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but such experiments shouldn’t be taken lightly.

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© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

I first learned about real astral projection in 1994.  Before that I only knew the phony version as depicted in movies and computer games.  For me astral exploration was a natural extension of lucid dreaming, although the two experiences are quite different.  I learned both from Erin, who’s an accomplished lucid dreamer and astral traveler.  She even wrote a novel based on her astral experiences, although it’s never been published.  I also learned about astral projection from a few books, one of which was Far Journeys by Robert Monroe.  If you’ve never had an astral experience yourself, I doubt you’d be able to believe what he’s written.

Astral projection is basically an out-of-body experience whereby your astral body leaves your physical body for a while, and your conscious awareness stays with your astral body.  In some ways it’s like having a dream, but I don’t think any experienced astral traveler would confuse astral projection with a regular dream.  During an astral projection, I’m conscious and aware.  I know who I am, and I know my physical body is lying in bed.  I know what day of the week it is and what I ate for dinner that night.  That makes it similar to lucid dreaming because I have access to all my conscious memories; however, the astral realms have a very different feel to them than my regular dream worlds do.

When I’m dreaming I know the whole experience is taking place within my own consciousness and that none of it is real.  But when I’m astral, I feel like I’m actually visiting another semi-physical dimension that’s just as real as the physical universe.  It simply has a different vibrational feel to it, a unique energy signature.  Astral matter feels very different than normal matter, as if it’s less solid and more energetic, so when astral traveling you can float through walls and other seemingly solid objects.  Even your astral body is more energy than matter.  There are persistent locations in the astral realms as well as persistent beings who inhabit them.  These locations evolve independently, so I notice changes with each visit.

I have no idea how many astral realms there are, but there seem to be lots of them.  Most of the time I’m astral, I feel I’m only a few degrees away from the physical world.  Often I find myself in a place that closely resembles the physical world, such as an ethereal version of my own bedroom.  But other times I’ve been to some pretty dark places inhabited by beings that I can only describe as pure evil.  I have never known such an intense, uncontrollable feeling of sheer terror in my life as when I had certain astral experiences.  My wife is skilled at dealing with dark beings, but so far I haven’t had any luck manifesting astral swords, guard dogs, or higher frequency beings for protection.  Whenever I encounter something scary in the astral realms, I usually react like Shaggy running away from a ghost in Scooby Doo.  Every time I’ve tried to stand and fight, I’ve failed miserably.

My ability to consciously astral project is near nonexistent.  Usually it just happens at night, often within the first 20 minutes of going to sleep.  My skill is nowhere near that of Robert Monroe’s… or Erin’s.

What astral projection has taught me is that the physical dimension is certainly not the only one out there.  There are other astral dimensions we can visit (consciously or unconsciously), and they’re populated.  I expect that when we physically die, our consciousness ends up in one of these astral realms.

In terms of personal growth, I see the astral realms as being filled with fascinating places to explore.  The astral planes make interesting training grounds for controlling your thoughts.  With practice I find that my thoughts manifest more readily in the astral realms.  In the denser physical universe, thoughts flow through matter like thick sludge through a clogged pipe, so it takes longer for intentions to manifest here.  Ultimately I think these different universes follow essentially the same physical laws.  The unique vibrational frequency of each realm determines the apparent solidity of its matter and the speed at which it can be influenced by pure thought.

I don’t see any problem whereby experiencing astral projection would cause you to neglect the physical world.  Since I normally astral project at night, it doesn’t steal any time from my waking world.  Nor does lucid dreaming for that matter.  However, I will say that astral projection has broadened my perspective about the physical universe and made me more curious about what else is out there.  It also reduced my fear of death and my attachment to physical universe outcomes, since I can see that there’s plenty more that exists beyond the physical plane.  I think this is one reason that my growth efforts today are largely aimed at developing my consciousness, since that’s the only thing I can take with me from one realm to another.

When I see how utterly incompetent I am in most of the astral realms, I realize there’s plenty of interesting growth ahead of me.  For one, I’d like to learn how to confront one of those dark entities without running for dear life.  Fortunately, Erin already possesses this skill, so at least I have someone to model.  But I don’t astral project frequently enough to get much practice.  I typically have a conscious astral experience once every 1-3 months.

I’m sure my wife will write more on astral projection in her blog at some point — she must be at least 100x as experienced as I am.  If you want to learn more about lucid dreaming though, I recommend listening to Podcast #010 – Lucid Dreaming, recorded by Erin.  In less than 12 minutes, she’ll explain how to have your first lucid dream.

This entry is part of the “Ask Steve” series.  See the original Ask Steve post for details, or view the Archives (July 2006) to peruse the entire series.

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© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

That used to be part of my daily awakening ritual too.  When my alarm would blare its infernal noise, I’d turn the damned thing off right away.  Then under the cloak of that early morning brain fog, I’d slowly ponder whether or not I should actually get up:

It’s nice and warm under the covers.  If I get up, it’s going to be cold.  That won’t be too pleasant.

Oh, I really should get up now.  C’mon legs… move.  Go, legs, go.  Hmmm… that isn’t how I move my legs, is it?  They don’t seem to be listening to me.

I should go to the gym.  Yeah.  Hmmm… I don’t really feel like working out right now though.  I haven’t even had breakfast.  Maybe I should have a muffin first.  Banana nut.  Now that’s a good muffin.

Maybe I’m trying to get myself up too early.  I’m still sleepy, aren’t I?  Maybe getting up with an alarm is unnatural.  Won’t I function better with more sleep?

I don’t have to get up right this minute, do I?  Surely I can relax another five minutes or so.  The world isn’t going to end if I don’t get up right now.

I’ll bet my wife is toasty warm right now.  She told me she hates it when I try to snuggle her at 6am, but so what…  she loves me enough to forgive me, right?  I know… I’ll start massaging her back and shoulders first.  She can’t resist a good massage, even so early in the morning.  Then I’ll transition to a head scratching.  Yeah, that’ll do it.  And then slide right into the spoon position.  Won’t that be a pleasant way to start the day?

[ Scootch... scootch... Zzzzzzzz ]

Two hours later…

Me:  What time is it?  I don’t even remember the alarm going off.  That was a good snuggle though.  Oh well, guess I’ll have to skip exercise today.

Wife:  Why do you keep setting your alarm if you aren’t going to get up when it goes off?

Me:  Oh, did you think that was my wake-up alarm?  It’s actually my snuggle alarm.

OK, so I wasn’t really intending for it to be a snuggle alarm.  I had intended to get up when it went off, but my foggy brain kept negotiating me right back to sleep.

Fast forward to present day…

My alarm goes off sometime between 4:00 and 5:00am… never later than 5:00am, even on weekends and holidays.  I turn off the alarm within a few seconds.  My lungs inflate with a deep breath of air, and I stretch my limbs out in all directions for about two seconds.  Soon my feet hit the floor, and I find myself getting dressed while my wife snoozes on.  I go downstairs to grab a piece of fruit, pop into my home office to catch up on some emails, and then it’s off to the gym at 5:15.

But this time there’s no voice inside my head debating what I should do.  It’s not even a positive voice this time — it’s just not there.  The whole thing happens on autopilot, even before I feel fully awake mentally.  I can’t say it requires any self-discipline to do this every morning because it’s a totally conditioned response.  It’s like my conscious mind is just along for the ride while my subconscious controls my body.  When my alarm goes off each morning, I respond just like Pavlov’s dogs.  It would actually be harder for me not to get up when my alarm goes off.

So how do you go from scenario one to scenario two?

First, let’s consider the way most people tackle this problem — what I consider the wrong way.

The wrong way is to try using your conscious willpower to get yourself out of bed each morning.  That might work every once in a while, but let’s face it — you’re not always going to be thinking straight the moment your alarm goes off.  You may experience what I call the fog of brain.  The decisions you make in that state won’t necessarily be the ones you’d make when you’re fully conscious and alert.  You can’t really trust yourself… nor should you.

If you use this approach, you’re likely to fall into a trap.  You decide to get up at a certain time in advance, but then you undo that decision when the alarm goes off.  At 10pm you decide it would be a good idea to get up at 5am.  But at 5am you decide it would be a better idea to get up at 8am.  But let’s face it — you know the 10pm decision is the one you really want implemented… if only you could get your 5am self to go along with it.

Now some people, upon encountering this conundrum, will conclude that they simply need more discipline.  And that’s actually somewhat true, but not in the way you’d expect.  If you want to get up at 5am, you don’t need more discipline at 5am.  You don’t need better self-talk.  You don’t need two or three alarm clocks scattered around the room.  And you don’t need an advanced alarm that includes technology from NASA’s astronaut toilets.

You actually need more discipline when you’re fully awake and conscious:  the discipline to know that you can’t trust yourself to make intelligent, conscious decisions the moment you first wake up.  You need the discipline to accept that you’re not going to make the right call at 5am.  Your 5am coach is no good, so you need to fire him.

What’s the real solution then?  The solution is to delegate the problem.  Turn the whole thing over to your subconscious mind.  Cut your conscious mind out of the loop.

Now how do you do this?  The same way you learned any other repeatable skill.  You practice until it becomes rote.  Eventually your subconscious will take over and run the script on autopilot.

This is going to sound really stupid, but it works.  Practice getting up as soon as your alarm goes off.  That’s right — practice.  But don’t do it in the morning.  Do it during the day when you’re wide awake.

Go to your bedroom, and set the room conditions to match your desired wake-up time as best you can.  Darken the room, or practice in the evening just after sunset so it’s already dark.  If you sleep in pajamas, put on your pajamas.  If you brush your teeth before bed, then brush your teeth.  If you take off your glasses or contacts when you sleep, then take those off too.

Set your alarm for a few minutes ahead.  Lie down in bed just like you would if you were sleeping, and close your eyes.  Get into your favorite sleep position.  Imagine it’s early in the morning… a few minutes before your desired wake-up time.  Pretend you’re actually asleep.  Visualize a dream location, or just zone out as best you can.

Now when your alarm goes off, turn it off as fast as you can.  Then take a deep breath to fully inflate your lungs, and stretch your limbs out in all directions for a couple seconds… like you’re stretching during a yawn.  Then sit up, plant your feet on the floor, and stand up.  Smile a big smile.  Then proceed to do the very next action you’d like to do upon waking.  For me it’s getting dressed.

Now shake yourself off, restore the pre-waking conditions, return to bed, reset your alarm, and repeat.  Do this over and over and over until it becomes so automatic that you run through the whole ritual without thinking about it.  If you have to subvocalize any of the steps (i.e. if you hear a mental voice coaching you on what to do), you’re not there yet.

Feel free to devote several sessions over a period of days to this practice.  Think of it like doing sets and reps at the gym.  Do one or two sets per day at different times… and perhaps 3-10 reps each time.

Yes, it will take some time to do this, but that time is nothing compared to how much time you’ll save in the long run.  A few hours of practice today can save you hundreds of hours each year.

With enough practice — I can’t give you an accurate estimate of how long it will take because it will be different for everyone – you’ll condition a new physiological response to the sound of your alarm.  When your alarm goes off, you’ll get up automatically without even thinking about it.  The more you run the pattern, the stronger it will become.  Eventually it will be uncomfortable not to get up when your alarm goes off.  It will feel like putting on your pants with the opposite leg first.

You can also practice mentally if you’re good at visualizing.  Mental practice is faster, but I think it’s best to run through the whole thing physically.  There are subtle details you might miss if you only rehearse mentally, and you want your subconscious to capture the real flavor of the experience.  So if you do use mental practice, at least do it physically the first few times.

The more you practice your wake-up ritual, the deeper you’ll ingrain this habit into your subconscious.  Alarm goes off -> get up immediately.  Alarm goes off -> get up immediately.  Alarm goes off -> get up immediately.

Once this becomes a daily habit, you won’t have to do anymore daytime practice.  This type of habit is self-reinforcing.  You only have to go through the conditioning period once.  Then you’re basically set for life until you decide to change it.  Even if you fall out of the habit for some reason (like an extended vacation in a different time zone), you’ll be able to return to it more easily.  Think of it like muscle memory.  Once you’ve grooved in the pattern, it will still be there even if you let some weeds grow over it.

Any behavior pattern you experience when your alarm goes off will become self-reinforcing if you repeat it enough times.  Chances are that you already have a well-established wake-up ritual, but it may not be the one you want.  The more you repeat your existing pattern, the more you condition it into your subconscious.  Every time you fail to get up when your alarm goes off, that becomes ever more your default physiological response.  If you want to change that behavior, you’ll need to undertake a conscious reconditioning program such as the one I described above.

Beating yourself up about your bad wake-up habits will not work — in fact, you’ll just condition these mental beatings as part of the very routine you’re trying to change.  Not only will you not get up when your alarm goes off, but you’ll also automatically beat yourself up about it.  How lame is that?  Do you really want to keep running that dumb pattern for the rest of your life?  That’s exactly what will happen if you don’t condition a more empowering pattern.  For good or ill, your habits will make or break you.

Once you establish your desired wake-up ritual, I recommend you stick with it every single day – 7 days a week, 365 days a year.  And for the first 30 days, set your alarm for the same time every day.  Once the habit is established, then you can vary your wake-up times or occasionally go without the alarm if you want to sleep in, but until then it’s best to keep the pattern very tight.  That way it will become your default behavior, and you’ll be able to stray from time to time without serious risk of deconditioning it.

I’m confident that once you establish this habit, you’ll absolutely love it.  I consider this to be one my most productive habits.  It saves me hundreds of hours a year, and it keeps paying dividends day after day.  I also found this habit extremely valuable during my polyphasic sleep experiment.

Think about it — if you oversleep just 30 minutes a day, that’s 180+ hours a year.  And if you’re at 60 minutes a day, that’s 365 hours a year, the equivalent of nine 40-hour weeks.  That’s a lot of time!  Now I don’t know about you, but I can think of more creative things to do with that time than lying in bed longer than I need to.

I encourage you to give this method a try.  I know it seems silly to practice getting out of bed, but hey, what if it works?  What if you knew with total certainty that if you set your alarm for a certain time, you would absolutely get up at that time no matter what?  There’s no reason you can’t create that for yourself over the next few days.  Practice makes permanent.

And if you want some tips on establishing the habit of getting up early, I encourage you to read these two articles:

• How to Become an Early Riser
• How to Become an Early Riser – Part II

Make it so.  You won’t regret it!

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Why the return to monophasic sleep?

First off, this definitely wasn’t a clear-cut decision either way.  I could just as easily have kept going.  As previously noted in my extensive log entries, there were many things I really liked about polyphasic sleep.  Obviously the extra waking time was great.  But there are some drawbacks to polyphasic sleep that ultimately led me to decide to discontinue this pattern.  The drawbacks should be easy to understand even if you don’t try it personally, so I don’t think any of these will surprise you.

First off, let me say that I didn’t decide to stop for health reasons.  To my recollection I didn’t get sick even once while sleeping polyphasically, not even a cold.  My energy and alertness were excellent once I made it through the adaptation period.  A lot of people asked me about weight training and exercise — I didn’t have any problems there either.  My recovery after workouts was just fine.  Perhaps the post-workout nap had a positive effect.

I also didn’t decide to stop because of the general weirdness of polyphasic sleep.  It took me many weeks to psychologically adapt to this pattern of sleeping, but I did eventually adapt.  It gave me a whole new perspective on the passage of time.  I saw time as passing continuously rather than being chunked into individual days.  That was such an interesting experience.

The #1 reason I decided to call it quits is simply that the rest of the world is monophasic.  If most of the world was polyphasic, I probably would have stuck with it.  Obviously when you go polyphasic, you fall out of sync with the way other people live.  You’re awake most of the night while everyone is asleep.  If you sleep like most people, then the hours you’ll gain from polyphasic sleep will come in the middle of the night.  And as I gradually learned, nighttime hours are not the same as daytime hours when you live in a monophasic world.

At first I rather liked the novelty of this new way of living.  I enjoyed having all that alone time.  It was great for writing, since I’d never be interrupted.  But after several months, it began to wear on me.  Although I gained those nighttime hours, I also lost about 90 minutes during the daytime because of my naps.  So that meant less time to interact with people while they were awake.  There were times when that wasn’t such a desirable trade-off.

At first it was fun doing things at night.  Las Vegas is a decent place to be polyphasic.  I played poker late at night a few times, and that was fun for a while.  But even though this is a 24-hour city, most businesses still close at night, and most of the available nighttime activities don’t interest me.  My family and friends are all asleep at night, and I don’t know anyone locally who’s up all night and isn’t working.  And I already spend enough time on the Internet.  So ultimately I was left with many hours of alone time.  Working at night was OK, but I like bouncing ideas off my wife during the day, and that wasn’t an option at night.  Also, if I worked at night, I didn’t want to work during the daytime too.  I tried that and quickly grew weary of 20-hour workdays.  Working at night meant being out of sync with people who worked during the day, like missing business calls and such.  Also, I really enjoy working with sunlight coming in through my window as opposed to using artificial light.

Another challenge was that I had to take my naps fairly regularly, every 4 hours on average.  I could stretch the time between naps every once in a while, but if I did that I’d have to make up for it later with more frequent naps.  Suppose I want to begin working on a project, but I have a nap coming up in an hour.  I didn’t want to start the project knowing that I could only work an hour before having to nap.  So I tried to shuffle my work around to coincide with my short waking cycles.  That became somewhat annoying because I used to enjoy working 5-6 hours without a break.  I didn’t like chopping all of my work into 3.5-hour blocks, and I often found the naps were getting in the way of my flow state.  This wasn’t a very resilient pattern because if something unexpected came up, it would throw off my schedule, and I’d have to take naps while I was in the middle of a task like writing an article, which broke my train of thought.

Whenever I wanted to do anything socially, I had to bracket those outings with naps on both ends.  I got a bit tired of having to do this.  I could never just up and leave.  I always had to nap first unless I was only going to be out a short time.  Also, I’d often be both hungry and sleepy when I returned unless I ate while I was out.  My outings often took the form:  nap-outing-nap-eat.  I like being spontaneous at times, but you can’t be too spontaneous on polyphasic sleep without negative consequences.  That really cramped my style.

I also missed sleeping with my wife.  However, she really liked having the bed all to herself at night.  She said she never slept better.  She actually didn’t want me to go back to monophasic.  But what I really missed was having 90 minutes less with her while she was awake.  Our time together was often interrupted by my naps, especially the one at 9pm.  For example, we couldn’t start watching a movie together at 8pm without it being interrupted by a nap intermission.

So really it was the combination of all these niggling factors that led me to decide to return to monophasic sleep.  There are some things I really loved about polyphasic sleep, and there are some things I found very annoying.  But now that I’ve adapted back to monophasic, I have to say that it’s still not clear who the winner is.  I can’t say that I’ll never return to polyphasic sleep if my circumstances change.  But for right now, for the kind of lifestyle I want to have, monophasic sleep is just a little bit better.  So it’s back to hibernation mode for me. 

What was it like switching back to monophasic?

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I decided to switch back to monophasic.  It ended up taking me several days to re-adapt.  I started out by going to bed with my wife one night and trying to sleep until morning.  I only managed to sleep a few hours.  I kept waking up, but when I couldn’t sleep I just quietly meditated instead.  It was a long, slow night.  The next day I tried to skip naps, but I wasn’t very successful.  I still got sleepy at my usual nap times and took three naps.  The second night was slightly better – I was able to sleep longer, maybe 4-5 hours total.  Each day/night saw more adaptation, and over the next few days, I reduced my daytime naps from 3 to 2 to 1.  Eventually I was able to go the whole day with no naps.  I’m not quite 100% re-adapted yet, since I still need a daytime nap sometimes, but it’s close enough.  I may actually keep the early afternoon nap, since I still find it very refreshing.  I am sleeping a good 6.5 hours at night now, although I still wake up once in the middle of each night.  Last night was sort of funny because I actually fell asleep twice while my wife was talking to me. 

I’m sure some people would rather see me continue with polyphasic sleep — I was amazed at how popular it’s become and how many people have wanted to try it.  Although I opted to blog about this experiment publicly, it was something I chose to do for personal reasons.  So try not to be upset that I won’t be continuing as your friendly neighborhood polyphasic guinea pig.  As I stated at the outset, my main reason for trying this was curiosity.  I wanted to know what it was like.  Now I do. 

Hopefully I’ve shared enough detail throughout this experiment that anyone else who wants to try it will find the archives very helpful.  Even so, this was an individual experiment, and as such its applicability to other people may be limited.  I’m not particularly close to the average in many areas (vegan, left-handed, colorblind, ENTJ, guy who thought Bush was an idiot before he was elected, etc).

Polyphasic sleep was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done but also one of the best growth experiences of my life.  I’m really glad I did it.  I’m sure there will be more wacky experiments yet to come… all in the name of personal growth.  It’s going to be hard to find something as exciting as this though.  I’m open to suggestions (unless you happen to be pissed off that I’m no longer polyphasic, in which case you should seek counseling or perhaps eat some carrots).

So would this be a good time to tell you that the whole polphasic sleep thing was just a big joke?  April Fools and all that?  Remember that if you’re polyphasic, it’s still the same “day” as April 1st, right?

Don’t worry — I wouldn’t do that to you.  While I do appreciate a good joke now and then, this isn’t a joke, although many people seemed to have a hard time believing it at first.

Edit 4/14/06: For your convenience, here are links to all of my polyphasic sleep log entries in order (each link will open in a new window). This is a treasure trove of free information for anyone interested in learning about my trial of polyphasic sleep. To my knowledge these are the most detailed polyphasic sleep logs you’ll be able to find anywhere on the web.

• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 1
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 2
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 3
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 4
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 5
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 6
• Polyphasic Sleep – Response to Reader Feedback
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – A Wife’s Perspective
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 7
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Days 8-11
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Days 12-18
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Days 19-20
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 21
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 22
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Days 23-24
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Days 25-30
• Polyphasic Sleep Seinfeld Episode
• Polyphasic Sleep Update – Day 60
• Polyphasic Sleep Update – Day 90
• Polyphasic Mutants
• Polyphasic Sleep Put to Shame
• Polyphasic Sleep 2.0 (Day 120+)
• Polyphasic Sleep in USA Today
• Polyphasic Sleep: The Return to Monophasic

Sleep well!

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Bear bombing, however, is more than mere polyphasic playfulness.  We bears frequently need an external wake-up call when we linger too long in the state of unconscious living.  In those situations it’s the duty of those who are conscious to lob a few bear bombs into the caves of the hibernating masses.

Here are some serving suggestions for successful bear bombing:

“Hey Shelly…  would you like to place a bet in our latest office pool?  We’re betting on how long you and Tim will continue living together.  The new guy wanted to bet on when your marriage would end, so I had to inform him that he can’t bet on events that already happened.”

“Hey John…  just wanted to let you know that we disabled your office internet access.  After installing spyware on your PC and reviewing the logs, we determined that this would increase your productivity by a factor of 10.”

“Hey Maggie…  Sure I’ll go to lunch with you.  But then I’d like to show you this amazing place around the corner that I guarantee you’ve never seen before.  It’s called a gym.  And there’s this new thing people are doing called exercise.  You’ve got to see it to believe it!”

“Hey Chris…  we were wondering if you could spray yourself down with this can of air freshener before returning from your smoke breaks.  Most of us like the smell of fragrant flowers more than the smell of ashes.  We’d also like to know if there’s anything we can do to change your mind regarding your decision to kill yourself.”

Most bears will not take kindly to bear bombing; however, once a certain frequency of bear bombing is established (at least weekly), the bear will find it increasingly difficult to return to full hibernation.  And ultimately the bear’s newfound consciousness may lead the bear to make some genuine changes to improve the bear’s living conditions.  This has the net effect of improving the conditions for everyone, since a conscious, happy bear is a sight to behold.

Have some fun with your fellow bears, and lob a few bear grenades today.

Update 3/8:  Long-term readers will recognize that I write with a variety of different styles, so if this post isn’t to your liking, try not to get too worked up about it.  Bear bombing is extremely effective with people who have the right receptivity to it and a healthy sense of humor (it worked wonders on me at one time), but if you’re the sensitive type who becomes defensive instead of seeing the humor in such things, then you may wish to replace bear bombs with bear hugs. 

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

I haven’t seen the print version yet (it’s only 3:30am as I type this) [edit: just picked up a copy], and the article should be in is featured dead center on page one of today’s print edition as well as on USA Today’s web site.

USA Today supposedly has 2.2 million readers, so the offline publicity is nice, and now of course I can add the phrase, “As seen in USA Today” to my web site, my promotional materials (what promotional materials?), and my underwear.  But aside from the “that’s cool” factor, I don’t expect to notice much traffic increase from this, especially since my URL wasn’t mentioned in the article.  A few years ago I had a story about my games business published in the New York Times, along with a photo of my daughter and me, and the traffic boost was essentially nil.

I prefer to be interviewed about other personal development topics (purpose, productivity, self-discipline, etc) instead of polyphasic sleep, but it doesn’t surprise me that the general weirdness of polyphasic sleep would capture the interest of a journalist.

If I recall correctly, the writer found me via this blog, if not directly then certainly indirectly by way of referral.  I remember telling my wife a few months ago that given the traffic growth of this site, it’s only a matter of time before all this online traffic starts spilling into the offline world.  I have that same expectation of the blogosphere in general.

USA today, tomorrow the world. 

P.S. For those of you who did manage to stumble upon this site because of the USA Today article and who are curious to learn more about polyphasic sleep, here are all my previous entries on the subject (the first entry below will explain what polyphasic sleep entails):

• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 1
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 2
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 3
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 4
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 5
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 6
• Polyphasic Sleep – Response to Reader Feedback
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – A Wife’s Perspective
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 7
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Days 8-11
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Days 12-18
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Days 19-20
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 21
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Day 22
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Days 23-24
• Polyphasic Sleep Log – Days 25-30
• Polyphasic Sleep Seinfeld Episode
• Polyphasic Sleep Update – Day 60
• Polyphasic Sleep Update – Day 90
• Polyphasic Mutants
• Polyphasic Sleep Put to Shame
• Polyphasic Sleep 2.0 (Day 120+)
• Polyphasic Sleep in USA Today
• Polyphasic Sleep: The Return to Monophasic

And for something less severe (i.e. if you prefer to continue sleeping normally at night but would like to improve your sleeping habits), read:

• How to Become an Early Riser
• How to Become an Early Riser – Part II

Sleep well!

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.