Polyphasic Sleep Q's

[pmonco]

Okay, so I recently started a polyphasic sleep schedule (much to the dismay of my girlfriend) and have ran into a few problems and weird developments.

First, I have been having a lot of trouble falling asleep at my designated nap times(4, 8, 12, 4, 8, 12). I figured being super sleep deprived would help me out here but I still can't seem to fall asleep from 12 pm all the way to 12 am. Is there anything short of a rubber mallet to the head that would aid my passing into REM world?

Secondly, and related to the above, sometimes at the aforementioned hours, I can't even remember if I have fallen asleep. I know I am laying down with my eyes closed and the alarm goes off. But I can't recall the past 10 minutes or so but I don't feel as if I had fallen asleep. I don't know if anyone can help me here but is this normal or am I indeed a mutant?

Now to the weirdest thing for me. I have never, in my life, snored before. I'm 20 yeras old and have sleep with a lot of "buddies" over the years, and shared a room with my brother and sister countless times. Yet I would say for the last couple of days, I have began to wake myself up...snoring. While I am sleeping, I will hear a noise and it will draw me out of sleep like a sponge, only to find my mouth agape and my nose vibrating from a recent snore. Has anyone else encountered this?

Lastly, I have been experimenting with polyphasic sleep for a couple of weeks now. I started to try Dymaxion about 3 weeks ago but I never got any restful sleep and just ended up oversleeping for a 12 hours on the 6th day. Now I am trying Uberman sleep schedule and I really like my energy level during the day. But at night, I can only make it to 4:00 am and when I go down to take my nap, I oversleep by exactly 2 or 4 hours. No matter where, how loud, or how many alarms I have, I sleep right through till about 6 am or 8 am. I feel like my body is trying to tell me to switch to a biphasic schedule but I am too stubborn, simply because I want to reap the benefits of polyphasic. I am already beginning to love the late hours.

Any thoughts/advice for this aspiring, sleep-deprived student on winter break?
Anything at all is appreciated!

Thanks a ton

Peter

[vuurstorm]

Hi Peter. firstly how many days are you on the your polyphasic sleep?
I am currently on day 13.

I don't have a problem falling asleep, but what you can try is including some down time before a nap like listening to some slow paced music with your eyes closed. When you go to sleep ensure that your sleep environment is as dark as possible, you can even try putting on a blindfold I found this technique helped a lot when I started.

In response to not recalling if you slept or not, it is easy , if you don't feel like you where laying there awake for the whole 25 minutes then you where definitely sleeping. You must remember that your sleep process is now totally different that before. I can remember my first lucid dreams, it doesn't seem like dreams at the time, it is more than when you wake up you think that you where just thinking of something only to later realize that you where not just thinking of things but seeing it as well meaning that it must have been lucid dreams. It is very weird in the beginning as you can start dreaming even before you sleep. Now when I go to sleep I just close my eyes and while awake I wait for my dreams to start and as I watch my dream I drift into sleep.

I have no answer about the snoring thing, it can be because even though you don't realize it your sleep sessions is more intense, try sleeping in different positions.

I am currently experiencing the same problems in my energy levels at night times. It sometimes takes me up to half an hour just to get to a fully awake state. To assist in the wakening process I undertake a physical task that doesn't require much brain power like washing the dishes. The worst problem I am experiencing at the moment is eye soreness because of to many hours in front of a computer.

Feel free to read my blogs at Vuurstomr's Blender 3D there may be some posts that you can find useful. Also follow the "Post your polyphasic sleep logs here" posts where we usually do you sleep updates.
I also plan to start a polyphasic sleeping guide with tips and tricks, any advice you have will help others also attempting polyphasic sleep.

[pmonco]

Well, I never really thought that my sleep would be different but now that you say how you are watching a dream and then go into sleep, thats about how I feel. Its like my mind begins to wander off on some tangent and then my alarm goes off.

I recently read one of the threads on which someone described a sleeping position/technique from yoga, so I am going to try that for my next couple of naps and see if I can solve the snoring mystery.

I am also going to try your schedule of sleeping (06:00, 12:00, 18:00) for the next couple of days and see if that helps me during the night hours. One of the things I have found to help is I have made up a "outline" of activities I could be doing in the night. When I am in zombie mode, I need some direction and that has really helped me pass the time, rather than zoning out during Lord of the Rings.

So for I have been polyphasic for about 7 days, give or take a few over-sleeping incidents. Just for the record, about how detrimental do you think it is to oversleep? At the moment, I am in the mentality of putting failure behind me and just to keep on trucking through.

Thanks for you help, I am interested to see if your eye soreness goes away. Best of luck!

[TheHulaQueen]

I've just joined you guys! My husband and I are doing a core sleep from midnight to 3 am, then three 20 minute naps at 8 am, 1:30 pm and 8 pm. We have company coming tonight and I already warned them we're leaving them to read while we nap after dinner!

That makes a full FOUR hours of sleep. Way more than the 6x20 minute sleeps. We briefly considered that style, but decided that we liked the idea of having only 4 sleep times.

So far it's been hard to tell if I'm asleep or not... but it seems that I have been. I'm slightly tired today (coming up on the first 24 hour mark) but not exceptionally so. I hope I get neat dreams like you two!

If waking isn't a problem would sleeping in bed in the dark be best? I figure I need to get the most deep sleep possible during my nap times.

[vuurstorm]

Good luck for the next couple of days. Days 7 to 9 has been the most difficult for me and if you read other people's blogs most of them stopped at day 7 with some lame excuse.At day 10 things should start getting a lot easier.

I hope that schedule works for you, I personally think it is a very nice schedule as it removes a lot of the awkwardness in having to sleep twice during the day. I unfortunately stopped that schedule until my eye problem is gone and will hopefully get back to it this weekend.

On oversleeping I do not have a lot of experience, I never overslept for more than one hour. Sleeping an extra hour does not seem to be bad as it really boosts your energy, I am not sure if it effects your schedule as after my hour oversleeping I had a very difficult 3:00 AM session the next day. This may be because of the extra hour of sleep or it may be because I am changing my schedule yet again.

[vuurstorm]

Welcome TheHulaQueen.
The sleep schedule you're considering is called the Dymaxion schedule. If you read the beginning of the "Post you polyphasic sleep logs here" posts you may find some more info as David Hausladen attempted it but failed. That schedule seems to be very difficult I would suggest rather going on a polyphasic schedule for 10 or so days to get used to the short sleep sessions and then adjust you schedule to Dymaxion by removing a session and reshuffling your times once a week.Note that is is only my opinion as I am only on day 13 and are still adjusting myself.

There is a lot of discussion around whether to sleep in a dark or lit room. In the beginning I would think that a dark room is best as it will make the falling asleep easier and then by day 4 when you are starting to adjust switch to a lit room to help coping in that nightmare early morning hours where our internal clocks keep saying we must sleep. My wife is a mono sleeper thus I don't have the luxury of experiment in sleeping with the lights on.

You can also change your sleeping times to 30 minutes in the beginning if you are having trouble to fall asleep and change that to 25 minutes after day 4 where you should start falling asleep almost instantly.

As you can see I keep using day 4 as a benchmark. Day 4 seems to be when your body starts recovering from sleep depression, saying that you should keep in mind that the worst seems to be between days 7 to 9, so don't let your guards down at day 4 thinking you are past the worst.

I will attempt on writing a poly sleeping guide, so please post any experience that you have that is different than ours. The more people that attempt this the clearer all the patterns seem to become.

And lastly - sorry for the long update - Good Luck.

[pmonco]

Just a quick update.

So yesterday (whatever yesterday is), I started on the schedule and so far, so good. Amazingly, by taking my naps at: 12:00 AM, 2:00 AM, 4:00 AM, 6:00 AM, 12:00 PM, 6:00 PM, I was able to fall asleep almost instantly at every time slot. And even better, I didn't oversleep a wink and was able to get up right when the alarm dragged me out of sleep. Although, I did decide to take an extra nap this morning at 9:00 AM since I found myself trying to figure out how I could align the chairs in my dining room to make a good sleeping spot.

Thanks for your info Vuur, it's encouraging to know that I am getting in the thick of it and still going strong.

As for sleeping in dark vs. light, I followed Steve Pavlina's advice and tried to keep my sleeping ambiance as constant as possible. I turn off the main and keep a small lamp on while I sleep. I tried utter darkness and didn't really experience any difference, yet I just felt more comfortable with a tiny light.

And to end my little rant, some advice to TheHulaQueen. I'm still only on day 8 so I am not really an official polysleep-counselor, but I have found that one of the main factors in determining the speed at which I fall asleep and quality of my sleep is my sleeping position. I have sort of found a "groove" in my bed/pillow and once I am there, its lights out. It may be completely different from how you usually sleep, so try different positions. After a couple of experiments, I found lying on my stomach with my arms tucked under my chest and my head off to the side is quite a lovely nap position. Oddly enough, when I was monophasic, I could only sleep on my side...

Best of luck to both of you!

[Xeno]

Hi all!

Well, here I go! I'm off to try out the Dymaxion schedule. I saw the posts when I was doing some research on the technique. I think I'm sold on the idea, so here I go!

Also, I was trying to find out if anyone had success or failure regarding exercise intermitten with the Dymaxion schedule. Does your body have enough time to rebuild itself if you are working out regularly?

Wish me luck!