Post your polyphasic sleep logs here

[vuurstorm]

It is now my 9′th day on polyphasic sleep. Yesterday after 23:30 is was getting so tired that I couldn’t do anything and just fought against sleeping until my next nap time. I took my 2:00 AM nap but this did not help in restoring enough energy. After my 6:00 am nap I was so tired and did not get up directly and fell asleep again, my wife woke me after half an hour.

It seems that keeping to the current 2,6,10 schedule I decided upon does not work for me.Staying awake form eg. 22:00 till 2:00 when I am tired takes to much effort and is currently doing more harm than good.
I am now going to try a more versatile schedule.

Steve Pavlina started a more versitile schedule in post 12-18, I just didn’t notice it until now looking for a solution.
Steve Wrote :

I’ve found that polyphasic sleep is much more flexible than I initially expected. I no longer take naps at fixed times. Now I just allow my body to indicate when I need to nap, and this is working well for me. As I mentioned previously, I tend to experience the onset of the need to nap as a gentle pressure during the day and normal drowsiness during the late hours of the night. That hasn’t changed. As long as I get about 6-7 naps per day at semi-regular intervals, I’m fine. I often go 5-6 hours between naps during the day and 2-4 hours between naps during the night. I also vary the times from day to day. So perfect symmetry isn’t required.

My new schedule:
I will sleep at 06:00 , 12:00 and 18:00;That will be before , once during and after my working times.
Then I will sleep using the following rules:

Sleep rules:
Sleep when feeling tired.
Never sleep more than 25 minutes at a time.
Stay awake for at least an hour between sleep cycles.

My body has become used to the 25 minute sleeping cycles, now I just have to find the correct sleeping pattern. Hopefully I can adjust 6 to 7 sleep cycles per day which is what I am aiming for.

[taylor]

I'm interested how this new schedule works out for you. I'm surprised that you're still having so much trouble at that one time slot. However that really seems to be consistent with my experience as well. My drowsiness intensifies terribly at certain times of the day. It feels like it's going away though.

[taylor]

164 hours since I slept an eight-hour stretch. That's around 7 days.

I have made a few mistakes.
1. Midweek, I fell asleep during my toughest drowsiness period between naps and woke up an hour later.
2. One time I unconsciously got up, turned off the alarm, then went back to sleep for another 20-30 minutes.
3. Another time the alarm clock went off, and I set for 15 minutes more and went to sleep, then I woke up from the new alarm setting and reset the alarm again and woke up again 15 minutes later. My body clumsily made the rationalization that I hadn't gotten the full sleep time out of my nap and wanted me to get 15 minutes more.
4. (Maybe) I have unaccounted for time of about an hour. I simply don't remember anything about this time period.

And so I adapted my plans. My computer speaker with the volume knob is on the floor against the wall under my desk. I hide the keyboard behind my monitor to prevent Alt + F4. I turn off my monitor, forcing me to wait for it to warm up so I can click to stop the alarm. My whole goal with these games is to increase my alertness, reducing the possibility of me falling back into the bed and falling asleep. I still have another alarm, set to full volume, and to come on approximately 40 seconds after the first alarm goes off.

I feel pretty decent right now during the most difficult part of the day. 8.5/10 which is actually normal for me about this time of day. I can function and perform at a reasonable level. The only thing I'm concerned about now is stability. My naps still feel highly unstable and I could oversleep given the right circumstances. I don't see much use in changing the schedule now. I stopped thinking of my goals as I fall asleep because it was too exciting. I let the mind wander.

I have data entry work to do tuesday. I hope I don't fall asleep during work.

[vuurstorm]

Taylor, it is nice to see that you are still hanging in there, after reading your last couple of posts it was difficult to determine how things are progressing.

Good luck on Tuesday, data capturing requires a lot of concentration. I have to start work Tuesday as well and are just as worried.

[taylor]

I think my workday got pushed back by one day.

I was doing this experiment at my parent's house. Now I'm back in my apartment. The setup I have now is very effective and most likely overkill. Two alarm clocks on opposite sides of the room and my computer with the speakers turned at my head on the pillow. These all go off at the same time.

It's havoc.

I lock my computer before a nap and I changed my computer password to something really complicated. I have to get out a sticky note with the password on it to turn off my computer's very loud alarm. When the room goes from silence to the blasting of three very loud alarms, I immediately want to shut them up. I am getting intense alertness from this frantic darting around the room and searching for a password, so oversleeping doesn't feel like it will be an issue anymore. Waking up is kind of exciting now as well.

I'm still tired, but functional. In about half of my naps I am remembering dreams now. I'd say that's a good sign.

[vuurstorm]

Taylor, it sounds hilarious. Best of luck to you ... you defiantly put a smile on my face this morning.
If I'm not mistaken you are now on day 7 or 8. For me those where the worst days of them all, especially the 01:00 session. Best of luck, I hope you come out on top of things.

[vuurstorm]

It is now my 12th day on polyphasic. I woke up this morning at 3:00 AM fully refreshed and ran 10 km at 04:30 in under 50 minutes, still at one of my fastest paces.For the first time in 12 days I feel really energetic and refreshed which compares if not better than my monophasic sleeping times.

The new schedule
I changed my sleep schedule three days ago and since yesterday started feeling much better. My new schedule is much more work friendly as I, like most people work a 9 hour day.

The schedule is as follows:
Fixed times:
Because of work I try to always sleep at the following hours
06:00 AM (before work at home)
12:00 PM (when I will take my lunch time)
18:00 PM (after work, at home)

Flexi times:
I more or less sleep every 3 hours, depending on how tired or busy I am, keeping to a total of 6 naps per day. My usual times are:
21:00 PM
00:00 AM
03:00 AM

Current workday experience
Today will be a bit of a challenge as it is my first day at work and I will have to go and take my 12:00 PM nap in my car; never slept in my car before.
So far I am halfway into the morning, almost time for my midday nap and I haven’t felt any drain on my energy levels.

Sleeping experience
I am now always falling asleep within the first 5 minutes of my nap and getting lucid dreams very frequently. With the exception of my 00:00 AM nap I don’t wake up groggy and 3 out of 10 times wake up after 15 minutes, realise the time and then go back to sleep for another 10 minutes.
My 00:00 nap is still a challenge, when I wake up I am still very groggy and it takes my about 15 minutes before I can focus, but it seems to start getting better the last couple of days.

Physical exercise
My feet are a bit sore but that can be as expected as I ran my first 10km this morning and I did not run last week because of feeling very tired and rain on the days that I felt better. This morning my pace was the same as my last 8km which was also done while under polyphasic sleep, these two sessions has been my fastest times so far.

Family and friend and social adjustments
My family and friends are getting used to the idea and are even reminding me when it is my time to go to sleep and always offer to double check that I don’t oversleep. With the new schedule going two sessions of 5 and a half hours I think that I will be able to cope with most social gatherings, just juggling my sleep sessions around before hand. My wife and I don’t go out a lot as we have a 7 month old baby thus making it much easier for me to keep to my planned schedule.

Helping others
I am considering writing a guide for others thinking of trying polyphasic sleeping mentioning things to do beforehand, what worked and what don’t. Maybe we can add even add it as a sticky in the forum. Everyone’s experience is different so for the guide to work I will need a lot of input from other successful polyphasic sleepers.

Thanks
I feel I have now adjusted and that it is in order for some thanks.
I would just like to thank my wife most of all for supporting me at what we all thought was a very crazy idea and bearing with me through the times where I was very tired and not very pleasant company.
I also want to thank my friends and family for supporting me always offering a bed when needed.
Lastly I want to thank Taylor and Steve’s for their posts for motivation and reference when help was required.

[taylor]

I'm so happy it's working for you! It's great to see people succeed with this.

I'll offer any advice I can for your guide.

Once I feel as good as I did monophasically, I plan to see how it reacts to intense weight training exercises. So far, no one seems to think that it negatively impacts exercise. I'm curious if that is the case.

Right now, I feel pretty normal most of the time, but there are certain times of the day when I cannot read a book or sit still. My eyes keep closing and I get dreamlike thoughts.

[vuurstorm]

I'm happy to hear that things a getting more normal, It sounded like things started getting hectic with your whole alarm setup. I was really wondering whether you will pull through.

I'm seriously considering of changing back to my original sleep every 4 hours or maybe even stopping the whole polyphasic sleeping expereiment. My body seems to adapt to my current schedule with ease but I'm having a big problem with my eyes.
I'm a software developer, thus I spend my whole workday concentrating in front of a computer. I wanted the extra hours so that I can put more effort into my Blender (3D graphics application) hobby. It's starting to look like I'm putting way to much strain on my eyes, spending all that time in front of a computer.

I spend my morning session just lying in bed trying to give my eyes some rest because at the moment they are burning like crazy and very red.I noticed that because I'm still adapting to the new schedule, some days are good and some are bad, much the same as a monophasic sleep cycle, it's just a bit more erratic because I'm still adjusting to a new sleeping schedule.

I'm hoping that it is just a bad day that put so much strain on my eyes,but if my eyes don't get better soon I will have to terminate the experiment.

[vuurstorm]

When getting to tired take a core nap
This morning because of my hurting eyes I decided not to get up after one of my sleep sessions and without noticing it I must have fallen asleep an woke again after half an hour.
After my slight oversleeping I notice that I felt way better. Previously I had the problem that being tired all the time I could not sleep normally as this would ruin the whole schedule. Taking a 2 hour core nap in you last sleep session before the day starts - my 6:00 session - seems to help reset the system while not ruining my sleeping schedule.

Read up on techniques for reducing eye strain
Most of us try polyphasic sleeping because we need more time working on the computer or reading. I have a problem where working on the computer puts to much strain on my eyes. After reading up on eye strain on computers I adjusted my screen’s brightness, refresh rate and lifted my seat so that my eyes are above the top of the screen. I could instantly feel the difference the changes had on my eyes. I can but hope that this is sufficient in helping my eye problem.

Crazy sleeping experience
After updating another post I realized that I haven’t mentioned how crazy my sleep is getting. After my lucid dreaming started my whole way of falling asleep changed.
When I go to sleep I close my eyes and tell myself that I have to sleep and have to wake up after half an hour. Then the craziness starts.
After about two minutes of closing my eyes I a lucid dream starts. As I lay there I start seeing and hearing the dream, then I just relax and watch my dream almost like watching a movie. The crazy part is that I can even alter things in my dream as I am fully aware of what is going on. After a couple of seconds of relaxing and watching the dream I will drift into sleep.
This is by far the weirdest ever as before my polyphasic sleeping I could never remember any dreams, now I am even partaking in them.

[vuurstorm]

This morning I was very tired after waking up at 2:30. As usual I started washing the dishes but had a lot of trouble trying to focus and kept walking into the door frame. After the dishes I decided to rather put in an extra half hour’s sleep; so I sat down and started setting my phone’s alarm. While trying to set the alarm clock I dosed off only to be awaken by someones voice mail who I dialed while trying to set the alarm clock.
Now that I think of it, it’s very funny, don’t think he will be so happy when he comes in to work though.

This morning was now the second morning where I slept an extra hour before getting up at 06:00 AM, and I am starting to worry that I am getting dependent on that extra hour which may have been what caused my tiredness at 03:00 AM. I also switched back to my normal 25 minute naps every 4 hours to help in combating my eye problem which seem to work for now, I will retry my new schedule as soon as I can go a couple of days on the normal schedule without being tired.

[The Probabilist]

My polyphasic experiment as of January 1st 2007:

I've created an excel file of my weekly schedule anyone can use and alter if the want a glimpse of idea of how one can go about and create a polyschedule. The whole entry can be found here. If you just want to see the file, get it from here. The only change I've made so far is that I watch 3 hours of TV per week instead of the planned 6 hours. I've felt no need to use that much of my time for fun & recreation.

Polyphasic Sleep, Day 1
Polyphasic Sleep, Day 2
Polyphasic Sleep, Day 3
Polyphasic Sleep, Day 4

Let me know if you want to have the full texts here on the forum instead of links to my entries. I'm averaging 1/12th of sleep time compared to the overall active time although I had a minor oversleeping incident.

What's notable about my experience is how easy it has been. I hope that this can serve as inspiration to those who get the impression that it's too much hard work to do. Long story short, in the past 104 hours I've never experienced sleep deprivation tougher than level 2 on a 1 to 5 scale. About 85% of my waking time has been on level 1, no fatigue, no dizziness, no aches in the body or eyes, only total alertness and a high level of energy. At the end of this experiment once I'm fully accustomed I'll write a list of hints & tips that may help you accomplish the same.

[pmonco]

I just thought I would throw my Day 8 experience on this thread where it actually belongs. Today has been going great and I am especially relieved since I was told this was the hardest period. No oversleeping or drowsiness at all.

And there is one development that I have been very excited about. The last two naps I have taken (one at 12:00 PM and one at 4:30 PM), I set my alarm for 25 minutes and then went to nap. Naturally, I woke up about 10 minutes before my alarm went off, feeling more energized then any previous day, including oversleeping incidents. I feel like I have made it over a hump as I am truly starting to reap the benefits of the schedule. I am still wary of tonight's problematic hours (4:00 am to 8:00 am) but I think if my nap quality stays where it is, I shouldn't have too much trouble.

School, here I come!

[Causalien]

Hi all, because of my professional life, I can only do a triphasic sleep pattern. I've documented it in detail here.
Ultracrepidate » Triphasic Sleep

[vuurstorm]

I started noticing that even when I take my 25 minute naps and fall asleep almost instantly I don't feel refreshed at all when I woke up, instead I felt more tired. I added an extra nap at 21:00 but this did not help at all.
After 23:00 I feeling very tired. I can remember sitting on the couch and turning the tv volume down a bit. The next thing I know I woke up 6:00 AM in my bed. I don't have a clue on what happed after I turned down the tv volume, this morning the tv, computer and all the lights was still on and I don't recall going to bed at all.

I'm actually glad this happed, my eyes wasn't coping all that well and this reset - if you can call it that - should help a lot.

Why was I so tired? I am on day 14 on my schedule and should have adjusted by now. I think this is mainly because I kept changing my schedule and did not stick to my original times. This coming weekend and the week afterwards I have nothing planned and my wife will be visiting her parents leaving me with no interruptions so stick to the schedule I will.

I seem to be getting a flue as well. This comes at a really bad time as my running started to pick up very well. I wonder if this may also have contributed to me getting so tired.

[TheHulaQueen]

I'm three days in now of sleeping a core block of 2-5 am, with three 20 minute naps. I wake up from the naps refreshed however the wake up from the longer one is much harder. I do wake up though after a bit and am working on keeping busy to stay awake. My eyergy in general is high and I'm sparkly (people have notived this).

Things I've learned...
1) No lying down to read when I'm tired
2) Drink water on waking
3) Try to keep the same areas for napping during the day (my off site naps haven't been nearly as good)

I find myself wondering why I am doing this, but have committed to one month and will see it through.

[The Probabilist]

It's getting interesting. Regarding my oversleep, I'm theorizing that it occurred due to a culmination of both heavy food digestion and some sleep deprivation. I normally haven't eaten much on the block before the noon polynap. This time however I made that change because I had something external planned for the block after the noon nap that wouldn't include a meal when I woke up. So much for that plan. :P Secondly, I've noticed this particular time frame as the most difficult one to stay awake in. So I won't make this mistake again.

However, it was very close of happening again. This time on today's 4 pm nap I got out of bed, shut off both alarms and went back to bed again. Fortunately I had someone wake me up immediately after this. I was told that I had again done this while normally speaking and discussing a matter, which I had no memory of happening. This time however, I noticed afterwards a letter appointed to me on my keyboard. This is the first one I've gotten since I moved to my new apartment and suddenly I remembered that I did discuss this letter when I "was awake". So what does that tell me? My subconscious mind tried to take control over my actions and conscious mind, and make me forget what I had done to serve its own purpose of getting more sleep. I wasn't behaving unconsciously, I did those things consciously, but the subconscious mind took control and decided to give me a treatment of amnesia. Weird stuff.

Why would it do this? I have no clue, because during the prior 24 hours before this incident, I was all the time on a level 1 alertness. Additionally, I only got some sleep on 4 of the 6 scheduled naps. So here I am, facing no forms of dizziness, disorientation, fatigue or loss of cognitive thinking already after 4 days of this adaptation, but I'm still getting some kind of revolts from my subconscious mind. I'll just cope with this fact for now and remind myself that some people require up to three weeks of adaptation until they graduate from Polyphasic U.

Final verdict: 1 on a scale from 1 to 5. There's nothing difficult in living by my polyschedule. Something's just not right from a standpoint that doesn't concern sleep deprivation symptoms. I've decided to use my mp3 player in every single nap now as a possible solution to this. It's not the most comfortable position to sleep in because one of the ear buds gets pressed between my ear and pillow. (I have trouble falling asleep lying on my back.) If push comes to shove and this doesn't help, I'll think of alternative and more radical solutions. There's no way I'm dropping out from this since it's been so easy for me to do, while the benefits that come from it are simply superb and don't know of any other substitutes.

[pmonco]

Last night, I went to bed at 12:00 AM, feeling great and planning on sleeping only 20-25 minutes.
I remember waking up at 6:45 AM for a second only and then falling back asleep......until 12:00 PM. I have absolutely no idea why this happened or anything. I was feeling great and felt I was through with oversleeping. Oh well. Keep on pushing.

[The Probabilist]

I've found myself following a 48 hour pattern. Two times now I've overslept for about two hours in an interval of two days. This has left me feeling very refreshed and alert, so instead of being able to sleep for 10 naps in between the core sleep times, it's been closer to 6-8 naps. This sums up to 4-5 hours of sleep for every two days. Although it could already be considered as a successful adaptation, I'm not fully satisfied with that. And it might not be a sustaining and continuous pattern.

Initially I wanted to feel as if I'm living in a 12-hour rhythm as my polyschedule shows, not in a 48-hour rhythm. With the current way things have come about, I'm feeling great for the first day and unable to sleep well on my nap times. By the end of the 2-day cycle I can already feel that there's a nap coming up, from which I'm not waking up after 20 minutes of sleep. I've actually never fancied the 24-hour pattern as I wished that a day comprised of 28 hours instead. This could explain why the roughest sleep deprivation period gradually shifted from night time over to the morning and noon periods instead. Planetary movements may have more force behind them than me, but I'm not letting them run my life.

Still pursuing the original plan of always sleeping 20-minute naps every four hours might be against my nature since my subconscious mind hasn't fully agreed upon following it yet. I'll still attempt to see it through though, but in the end, what comes naturally to me is a better solution than foolishly wanting something that my higher self knows that I don't really want. I'm driven to reach the most optimal solution I can discover, so I've started to make some minor tweaks and adjustments that could possibly help me to reach my goal of no more than 2 hours of sleep for every 24 hours and a constant level 1 alertness.

Final verdict: 1.5. I felt moderately tired between 4 am and 8 am so my 8 am nap was the one that went overboard. So far the periods that I've felt most tired in have been night ( ~16 hours after I left monophasic sleep behind), night (~24 hours after previous period of tiredness), morning/noon (~28 hours after previous period of tiredness), afternoon (~28 hours after previous period of tiredness - first oversleep), morning (~40 hours after previous period of tiredness - 2nd oversleep). When I look at my sleep from this perspective I'm feeling optimistic though since it could mean that I eventually don't need the core sleep/oversleep at all and my normal 20 minute naps always hit home.

[Causalien]

I guess it'd be fun for people to sum up their results so far. I am writing as of January 6 2007 on a Triphasic pattern, a subset of polyphasic.

Stats:
Day 15
Nap time: 6:30PM~7PM, 12:30AM~2AM
Core sleep: 6AM ~ 9AM
Total sleep: 6 hours
# of time not abiding by schedule: 4
# of extremely refreshing naps: 2
# of groggy waking: too many to count
# of time I failed to wake up properly: 1
# of hours I overslept in total: 2

I am quite happy with it, after I managed to segment the sleep schedule to 3, I was able to slowly reduce the time to 6 hours from the normal 8 hours.

[vuurstorm]

This weekend was so busy I wanted to post an update but even on polyphasic I did not have enough time. With my wife visiting her parents for the week my smaller brother is staying over this weekend. We have been playing network games until 2:00 AM in the mornings. After 2:30 when I get up from my nap I watch movies until my 6:00AM nap; this is the first time that I can watch moves without falling asleep since my polyphasic sleeping started.

I overslept on Thursday but had just continued my normal 2-6-10 schedule without any hassles except from being drained of energy on Saturday which I didn’t notice until I attempted and failed at my 12km run. This morning I was to lazy to get out of bed and slept an extra 2 hours. Seems that taking a 2 hour core map every now and then does no harm to the schedule and boosts the energy, I just feel terrible for about 10 minutes after waking up from one.

My 25 minute sleep schedule usually consists of two 10 minute sleep sessions as I usually wake up after 10 minutes look at my watch and fall asleep for another 10 minutes and waking up 3 minutes before my alarm.

[vuurstorm]

I am now on my 18th day on polyphasic sleep and have ran 8km and 10km before but only twice a week.
For this week I am going to try and start the first week my running schedule by running 10km on Monday,12km on Tuesday,10km on Wednesday,8km on Friday and 14km on Saturday while keeping core sleep sessions to a minimum.

So far I did my Monday morning 10km without any problems.

[vuurstorm]

I am now just over a month on polyphasic sleep (started 22 December)

Poplyphasic sleep has become my normal way of sleeping. I am not tired when I wake up after any nap and can usually get up from bed and start doing any activity almost instantly with no grogginess at all. Even after being on Polyphasic sleep for a whole month it still takes a lot of self discipline. Many times after waking I want to lie in bed a bit longer and it usually leads to oversleeping.

Core naps are a big no-no. When I am tired and take a core nap I seem to require more core naps after two days and struggled to kick the habit. The best solution I’ve found to being tired was to just add an extra 25minute sleep session between 02:00 and 06:00.

My eating habit does not seem to have a big effect on my sleep or energy patterns. I usually eat raw fruit 4 days of the week, cooked meals 2 days and meat only once and don’t feel any different after eating any type of meal.

The only change I am experiencing after changing to Polyphasic sleep is that I am now a lot thirstier than before. Usually I did not drink a lot of fluids but now I need to take 3 to 4 cups of fluids in each of my wake sessions. I usually wake up with a very dry throat and have something to drink as soon as I get up.

Socially my wife and I are not very outgoing due to our 8 month old baby making my sleep pattern much more acceptable. My family and friends are now accustomed to my sleeping habits and even at work it has become part of my normal pattern to go to sleep twice a day in my car.

Sadly I have to admit that I did not make my exercise goals due to problems with my running shoes leading to an injury in my foot. Hopefully I will be able to restart next week.

[CoryLehan]

I'm adapting to an Everyman schedule right now. I started 6 days ago, and have overslept twice. If I have no reason to get up early, I go back to sleep out of boredom. It hasn't had any effect on me so far (no tiredness from oversleeping, Uberman oversleep made me feel terrible for two days), but I'm trying to quit oversleeping altogether. I'm hoping to fix that today by taking a walk or trying something else new (nothing on TV at 6am but the A-Team). My current schedule is:

3am - 6am core
20-minute nap between 11am and 1pm
20-minute nap 8pm - 10pm
20-minute nap midnight - 1am

My schedule requires really radical times for sleeping (6,8,2 hours between), but I've been changing my sleeping schedule to see what's best for me. I really like the flexibility of Everyman.

I'm gonna try to move my core to 2am-5am tomorrow,
keep the noon nap where it is,
move the next to 5:30pm,
and the next to 10pm. My schedule won't always allow that with a part-time job, but it's so flexible that I can move a nap 2-3 hours or skip a nap with little side effects.

So on Sunday I can skip my noon nap (work),
Friday skip my 5:30 nap,
and Monday move my core to 1am (hopefully), and the noon nap to 9am.

Anyone considering polyphasic, but has a conflicting or changing schedule, should REALLY try Everyman.

[vuurstorm]

I just woke from the weirdest sleep ever. I went to sleep in my car at 10:00 as any other workday. After closing my eyes I fell asleep quickly but from the beginning I was totally aware of not just my dream but also my body. During my 25 minute sleep I could control my consciousness becoming more alert at will and when my leg got stiff, move it a bit and then at will let go of more conciseness to continue dreaming. At a time during my sleep I got more conscious and wondered whether I was maybe oversleeping, then consciously agreed that I would have heard the alarm and then decided to let go more of my consciousness and continue dreaming. After my alarm went of I felt totally refreshed.

This was by far the weirdest and most wonderful experience ever. Sleeping like this will mean no more stiffness and never oversleeping.

Did anyone experience this before and if so how can I pursue this in happing more often?

[JSampsoN82]

I am now on day 3 of my sleep experiment, Iv been keeping a log off line for the first 3 days to see how every thing went before posting and possibly wasting every ones time, I have copied my offline logs for days 1 and 2 below, and will write a log for day 3 (today) later today.

Monday 01-29-07

Jeremy’s sleep experiment.


Before I begin my sleep logs I thought a little back ground info on me would be appropriate. I discovered this extraordinary web site about 8 months back, it popped up while using the stumble upon plug in for fire fox, apparently I chose self improvement as a category of interest while setting up stumble upon. Prior to that day I had little to no interest in personal development, but after reading a few of Steve’s blogs I was hooked for life. I clicked on the polyphasic sleep link not knowing what polyphasic sleep was, and after reading about Steve’s experiences I was fascinated to say the least!

Since then I have tried migrating to a polyphasic-sleeping schedule 6 times. Each time failing to make it through the initial adjustment period, usually oversleeping on the 3rd or 4th day, then hold out another couple days only to over sleep again never truly adjusting.

After reading through this thread and in the spirit of not giving up, I am once again motivated to give this polyphasic thing a shot. After failing so many times it would be foolish of me to imitate my previous attempts, which were modeled off Steve’s blog. So I spent this past weekend thinking “how can I go about this differently, in hopes of a new out come?” and right or wrong, I came up with a game plan.

For the first week, well 5 days any way, I am not going to sleep polyphasicly, instead I am going to sleep for 2 hours once a day. I hope to get my body used to running on 2 hours of sleep every 24 hours, along with the symptoms of sleep deprivation; and by removing 5 of the six naps I hope to cut my over sleeping opportunities by 5/6. In collage I was forced to sleep this way during finals week, so I know from past experience that I can function this way for 5 days. At the end of this phase of my experiment (Saturday 02-03-07) the polyphasic phase will begin by dividing the 2 hour block into 6 20minute blocks spaced 4 hours apart, 2:00, 6:00, 10:00am & pm.

The Experiment begins in 6 hours when I begin my first 2 hour block of sleep at 6:00am 01-30-07. Wish me luck!

[JSampsoN82]

Tuesday 01-30-07

Jeremy’s sleep experiment. Day 2

I am torn between considering today Day1 or Day2 of my experiment; my last full night of sleep was Sunday night. On Monday I decided to begin and did not sleep Monday night, but instead set my alarm for 7:30am, then went to sleep at 5:30am. Although this is my first day running on only 2 hours of sleep I have decided to call Monday day one because staying awake Monday night was part of the experiment.

So how did it go? Well staying up Monday night was easy, I’m used to staying up all night on the weekends, and this was no different. I spent most of the night/morning playing Xbox. Waking up at 7:30 was pretty easy; this is my normal wake up time and I felt groggy, but no more then I usually feel at 7:30am before a shower and cup of coffee. I only live 8 miles from work so I had no trouble getting in by 8:30am.

I think I should now mention what it is I do for a living. I am a mechanical designer, I work for the transmission department and spend 90% of my time each week in front of a computer, working in Pro/Engineer “a 3d CAD package” The morning started out good I returned some emails, and even made some progress on some Technical drawings. At 10:30am I had a meeting notice pop up in outlook, so I gathered my things and went to the boardroom. This is when the trouble began, about 15 minutes into the meeting; I started head bobbing and decided to drink a couple cups of coffee. That helped.

Now I am back at my desk and I feel a little zoney, but as long as I keep busy it seems to be manageable.

Tonight I have plans to go to my girl friends volley ball game. After words we are all going out to the bar for some drinks, I’m not sure if any one has reported the effects of drinking alcohol in their logs, this should be interesting.


That is the end of my offline logs, the experiment is still on track, Im to busy at work now to write about last night and this morning. I promise to report back when i get out of work tonight.

[Causalien]

Originally Posted by vuurstorm

I just woke from the weirdest sleep ever. I went to sleep in my car at 10:00 as any other workday. After closing my eyes I fell asleep quickly but from the beginning I was totally aware of not just my dream but also my body. During my 25 minute sleep I could control my consciousness becoming more alert at will and when my leg got stiff, move it a bit and then at will let go of more conciseness to continue dreaming. At a time during my sleep I got more conscious and wondered whether I was maybe oversleeping, then consciously agreed that I would have heard the alarm and then decided to let go more of my consciousness and continue dreaming. After my alarm went of I felt totally refreshed.

This was by far the weirdest and most wonderful experience ever. Sleeping like this will mean no more stiffness and never oversleeping.

Did anyone experience this before and if so how can I pursue this in happing more often?

Hey Vuustrom

I have experienced this very early in my triphasic experiment. Although it faded away after a month.

[openeyes]

Originally Posted by vuurstorm

Did anyone experience this before and if so how can I pursue this in happing more often?

Your description sounds very much like the average nap for me, at least since I studied lucid dreaming 8 years ago. I lay down, close my eyes, and start dreaming within a minute or so, while at the same time usually being somewhat aware of what's going on around my body. By being very still I can go deeper. In the average 7 to 15 minute nap I have at least one to four dreams, most fairly lucid, and generally I "wake up" before my alarm goes off, even if only by half a second.

To get better at this I'd recommend studying lucid dreaming. As you lay down to sleep and close your eyes, observe your body for as long as you can. Feel your feet, calves, thighs, buttocks, abdomen, chest, arms, neck, and face. Starting off you can progressively tense and release all of these parts, going from one to the next, then just watch. Another thing to do is simply put out the intention as you relax into sleep what you want your experience to be: waking up after a certain time, remaining conscious, and so on. What you put into practice now can be automatic later.

[TheMalkavian]

About 3 weeks ago I decided to try and go biphasic sleep and I was really determined to work something out so I basically told myself that if Ive managed to wake up, there is no excuse to staying in bed and that If I have a sleep plan I will rather pass out than go to sleep. That self-programming helped a lot (also - never negotiate, tell yourself when youre going to wake up and what youre going to do, find ways to stimulate your mind when on the edge).

But an interesting thing happened. I wanted to go for 2-5am and 3-4:30pm or smth like that. But I was very groggy in the mornings, because I had never been awake at that time. Still I persisted for several days, while I was trying out some Paraliminals. And I found out they really do replenish my energy a lot and that maybe Ive never learned how to sleep properly.
I couldnt fall asleep lying on my back if my life depended on it. So I decided to learn to sleep better - lying on my back, fully relaxing every muscle and releasing all thought. And 2-3 times I fell asleep during a Paraliminal session and woke up in 20mins, probably because of some pretty heavy self-programming.
And then I realized that a core sleep + 2-4 naps a day would be way much better than biphasic. I tried it out and surprise, surprise, it works without effort.

What I improvised finally is core sleep till 5am, starting when im really tired (usually 2am). Then 3 naps, giving me clean 5hour periods and 40mins for the nap. I usually get up 10-15mins in advance. This is soooo flexible and cool. I might not take 1 nap the whole day and it will result in me being very tired around 10pm probably so ill just go to bed then and get up at 5 like usual.
Sometimes if ive been very relaxed and strict I might go to sleep at like 3:30-4am. But usually I go to sleep at 2:45 or something, turn dreamplay or something on and relax.

I think several things helped me make this thing much easier.
-Heavy self-programming - have a plan for every situation, journal a bit to understand what your subconsious drives are, eliminate negative self-talk and any plans of escape. Paraliminals help tons as well. Also develop your emotional control and stay positive all the time, this way youll never avoid the waking world.
-Strict diet - I had the bad habit of overeating occasionally, due to anxiety mostly. Ive annihilated it now I think and going for ultra light eating - Ive been vegan for some time anyway, now I go mostly fruit and dont eat before a break. When I did eat a bit more I noticed I needed more core sleep.
-exercise - I exercise lots now, but make the effort not to overtrain in any way, I stop at the first sign of real tension, which is recommended if you want to achieve better results anyway. And surprise, surprise - it doesnt make me tired, but energized.

I've never felt better in my life physically or emotionally.
And now I saw at least 3 ppl trying the same thing, I guess this thing does work.

And its kind of logical - if people are able to sleep both core style and polyphasic, its probably best if we used both in the best way possible.

I guess I sleep on avg 4 - 4:30h. And Im really not strict with my naps or anything. If I do perfect them Im sure I can lower this significantly. I think this is a skill everyone should develop - learning to get the maximum out of his sleeping time.

Btw my schedule is this way:
5-10, (40max), 10:40-15:40, (40max), 16:20- 21:20 (40max), 22-02, (varies) 5-->

I sleep about 20mins or so usually, but ive decided to give myself plenty of time which I use for thinking and relaxing mostly. Somewhat often I dont even quite fall asleep and still feel quite refreshed.