Polyphasic Sleeping: New Method?

[Redisbest]

My situation:
1. currently-restricted schedule
2. dream of being polyphasic for the 2007/2008 school year (I'm a uni student)
3. I am seriously concerned about the first few weeks of adaptation and how that would affect my grades if I started when school started (see quotes from the beginning of Steve's sleep log)

Concentrating is difficult, even just to type this update. I felt very zombie-like this morning, and it was all downhill from there.

At one time I spent about 90 minutes lying on the couch staring off into space as various family members drifted by. Some of them tried to engage me, but I can’t recall much of what happened.
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What about starting a few weeks before with this method (see bold below)? I would then switch to the proper-uberman sleep schedule when school started and hopefully have a mentally-easier adjustment than diving right in and perhaps adversely affecting my grades.

*Nap at lunch
*nap right after work
*Nap a whole bunch of times during the non-work hours but making sure to get up and move around between naps, thus ensuring that your brain still never has a chance to get to REM?

Is this realistic? I've never attempted it before and would appreciate any input.

[Jugga J]

you can sort of go half way, but you really have to try it out to see if it works. Uni isn't that demanding to start with, and if you do it properly, you can adapt within 2-3 days. However many people (95%) take longer than Steve did because they oversleep. Maybe you could do it after a couple of weeks after settling in? Best to ask people on the Polyphasic Google Group anyhow.

[Kaspian]

There's a wealth of information at the Google Group on Polyphasic Sleeping. There are some fairly recent discussions on various ways to adapt more easily, as well as huge archives, a few pages/documents, and links to blogs.

Before I went through my polyphasic sleep adaptation, I got in the habit of napping during the day and staying awake a lot at night. (My husband had been polynapping for nearly 2 months by that time, which made it easier.) I'm fairly certain that the semi-shift in the weeks before made the actual adaptation easier, though there were still some very challenging nights around days 4-6.

Good luck!