Oi people. I am another new poster here who has recently attempted to adopt polyphasic sleep. It seems to me that it would be good to talk to other people who are interested in the matter. Do such still read this thread and/or forum?
My experience with polyphasic sleep pretty much matches that of Bruce Achterberg as he describes it here (
How to get rid of sleep-o-holism?), in that I have the hardcore rigid conscious willpower to do this thing PERFECTLY! but then a few days into my current adoption effort, when I am 90% asleep and it is imperative that I refrain from going back to bed, the dreaded sleepohol completely deadens said willpower (along with every other aspect of my conscious personality) and I go back to bed like a chump, possibly without even knowing that I am doing it, because people who are 90% asleep are STUPID. And well I've been doing this for months. And it's probably hurting me, but I refuse to stop until I've accomplished something!
See my thing is that I
need the extra time that a polyphasic sleep schedule would give me. I work, during the day, at a worthwhile (for now) but unfulfilling software development job, and I have to balance that out with creative work on projects of my own. This is not negotiable! Of course it would be silly for me to declare that polyphasic sleep is the one answer to my problems and that I absolutely must adopt it, since I have yet to prove that I'm actually capable of doing so. However I think it is perfectly reasonable for me to declare that since polyphasic sleep shows such potential to help me, I absolutely
must at least try it, for the couple of weeks that it would take before I could say for sure that I was or wasn't capable of doing it.
Well according to various people in these threads, 90% of people just don't have the willpower etc. And Bruce Achterberg says the crux is that you've got to be motivated for the right reasons, and that the way to become so motivated is to like change yourself somehow, to find the real source of motivaton within yourself. This is where he loses me! For I am certain that the motivation could come from outside me. I'm a pragmatic person with a strong tendency to rely on automatic support from machines--if I can cobble together a gadget to maybe solve a problem, that's what I'll try first. I don't go straight for the introspective higher-self-finding stuff that seems to be more popular around here.
So I've done the four-alarm-clocks thing and the drinking-tea-at-night thing and the always-have-something-in-the-oven-when-you-nap-so-you-feel-like-you-HAVE-to-get-up thing and various other kooky plans like that. And... yeah, none of it has worked consistently. But still I am completely confident that SOMEBODY on earth could devise a mechanical system that could keep me awake when my conscious self would want to be awake. The catch, of course, is that I may well not be that somebody....
So I turn in another direction for help. Again, I'm sure Mr. Achterberg has a point, but I'm not going to do what he suggests--I just don't know how to tackle that by myself. I rely too much on my conscious personality to just start working on the unconscious one and expect it to become sufficiently motivated for this effort in a timely fashion. That is maybe a fine cause in the long term but I want to follow a polyphasic sleep schedule starting NOW. So instead I wish to try a completely obvious potential solution that, bizarrely, no other would-be polyphasic sleeper I've read about has ever even suggested might be possible to do: Get a sleeping buddy! I want to find some other person--more than one if possible!--who wishes to adopt the schedule at the same time as I do, or who has already done so, and get them to telephone me when I am supposed to be waking up. Because (assuming I put enough protective tape over the vulnerable parts of my phone) that system would constitute an alarm clock I could not shut off: an intelligent mind that would know when I had not awakened fully, and that would just keep trying until I'd done so. (And then I could do the same for them.) That's what's missing for me--I've got the flow of wake-up signal from the alarm clock to my person, but the flow back from my person to the clock is incomplete. I need a clock that is smart, that observes what I'm doing and that can't be tricked. I need somebody who will hassle the crap out of me until they are sure that I'm speaking consciously to them and that the stupid sleepguy I sometimes become is no longer in charge. And in return I would hassle them back.
So I wonder whether anyone here would be interested in such a thing. And if not then do you know where I might find someone who was? I read something in one of these threads about a Yahoo! polyphasic sleep mailing list or some such--is that any good? Come on folks, we've got to support each other here!