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If you are sleepless...

October 23rd, 2009

20:00 - Last thing I remember was getting into an argument with someone in my kitchen (I think it was a friend from childhood, who will remain nameless) which ended up in a little bit of a violent scuffle. Followed immediately by me squeezing ketchup into a glass full of water by accident and the person I was arguing with and another friend of mine and myself all having a good laugh at how silly I was to have put ketchup in there instead of whatever I was supposed to put in there.

October 23rd, 2009

12:00-12:20 - Good nap, no snooze, no dreams.

17:00-17:20 - Restful, but didn't fall asleep for very long. There was some noise from someone stopping by in the living room, followed by the dog coming into my room and deciding to make some random dog like noises.

So it's official. I've hit the last three naps and each time had vivid dreams and woken up on my own before the alarm goes off...

... And I've been setting the alarm for 22 minutes. I still feel tired, a bit foggy headed, and a little bit goofy but emotionally I feel great! Which is a big damn plus. Each nap has been a "long" nap - I felt like I've slept way more than a mere nineteen or twenty minutes (which in reality is more like fifteen minutes or less if you count the time it takes to fall asleep). Long naps are great! Even if it's just subjective. If all my naps are like this from here out, I can really get behind some uberman sleeping.

Mike, unfortunately, is having the exact opposite time of it. He confided in me that his noon nap felt like five seconds, and his four o'clock nap, when I asked him how his nap had been, was related with, "I don't know..." and a shrug. It's a little disheartening to tell you imaginary readers the truth. I hope that he'll come around sooner, mostly because tired, slightly grumpy people are no fun at all.

But also 'cause it sucks to be tired and slightly grumpy all the time; I should know: I spent the first three attempts pretty much feeling like that. It certainly doesn't help that "all the time" includes an extra six hours a day.

So, the hat trick is in the bag. I hope it continues but somehow this felt like a significant milestone and needed writing about. If it does in fact continue, I sense that my energy level will continue to rise along with my mood, and as a result so will my productivity. I'm very excited about how the next twenty four hours will play out.

It's late, or early, depending on how you look at it.

I thought maybe I would write something since it's been a while without an update on my part, but I'm finding my brain is rather clouded right now. I'd say I feel about like the second day or third day into the sleep schedule adjustment - probably due to some oversleeping. Let's see if I can't think about what we've discovered so far.

I guess first and foremost is that oversleeping is the worst thing you can do and the thing you want to do most. I do not think there is a single more powerful force that I've experienced in my entire life than the urge to hit snooze when waking up from a nap. Through trial and error we discovered that it's more than just the twenty minute nap length that helps adaptation.

In order to try and alleviate exhaustion, both Mike and myself ended up trying to take a cluster of naps, each twenty minutes in length, within a few hours. More like a cluster fuck of naps. While it felt good to get the extra sleep, it eventually ended with both of us oversleeping by several hours, since it's hard to focus long enough to set an alarm for twenty minutes in the future when you're super groggy, much less do it several times successfully.

I'm starting to think that the extreme exhaustion that comes with holding strictly to only six (maybe seven) twenty minute naps is not just an unwanted side effect of adapting to the sleep schedule but in fact the very device that makes adaptation possible. It definitely makes the switch a very potent test of will power and resiliency in the face of failures and mistakes, usually in the form of oversleeping or say, getting blam-hammered at tailgating.

To that end, it would seem that each time I oversleep I'm only extending the period of exhaustion and delaying the adaptation to the uberman schedule. It's strange that I've been aware of this idea for some time, but writing it out definitely reinforces the soundness of the concept and as I type I feel a strong need to redouble my efforts to hold a strict schedule in order to more quick break through the exhaustive adaptation.

Both of us have also discovered that naps can be readily characterized along two polar opposites in terms of effectiveness, restfulness and rejuvenation.

On one end is a nap that feels like it didn't happen at all. It seems in nature as if I lie down in bed and instantly am awoken again. Sometimes it just seems like I'm awoken without having laid down or slept at all. Invariably when this happens I wake up confused and disoriented, of foul temper and extremely tired.

The opposite end is much rarer: a nap that when awaking feels like I've overslept by quite some time, but often is in fact shorter than the twenty to twenty five minutes we've been giving ourselves before the alarm. I awake alert and energetic, and it seems like I've slept a matter of hours rather than minutes. In my recollection these naps are always accompanied by vivid dreaming, and if I do remember correctly, waking not from slumber but as a natural transition from an active dream state.

There is then two archetypal naps: one which felt like it didn't happen and which leaves you exhausted, often worse than you felt when you laid down, and one which felt as though it lasted for a long time and gives a tremendous rebound in energy and mood. Naturally, there are naps which fall somewhere in between.

It's my nap time now, since Merps just got up. We've been sleeping in shifts to try and minimize the oversleeping, since the times where we've overslept by hours and hours has always been when we both went down for naps.

I'll finish with a little speculation: it seems to me that polyphasic sleep works as an edge condition. It may be required that you are pushed to the limit of exhaustion where staying awake seems no longer possible and there find yourself on a plateau. This edge plateau requires rigidity in sleeping since to push any further into fatigue would result in completely involuntary collapse as per regular extended sleep deprivation, and to relax away from the strictness of the sleep schedule results in constant torpor, such as when one goes for a long period when getting little sleep on a monophasic schedule. The key seems to be that with the disciplined sleep patterns you can walk the edge between weariness, fatigue and a necessitated large period of recovery sleep while avoiding all the ill effects that would normally beleaguer someone only receiving two or three hours of sleep per day.

To be geeky, it's like many strange edge conditions that exist in physics: Bose-Einstein condensates, super fluids, super conductivity or other weird things which I could think of a second ago while writing the previous paragraph but now escape me.

To wit: It's nap time! Huzzah!

Ding! Your nap is done! Or at least that's what my nap felt like tonight at midnight. I thought I was having trouble getting to sleep, lying there, but I refused to open my eyes and look at the time - that always discourages me. So instead I kept lying there, and just relaxing. At some point I must've dozed off, 'cause I remember a strange dream (which has slipped away now). The cool part is that I woke up all on my own, just 18 minutes after lying down, feelin' fine and quite refreshed.

It was like toast popping out of a toaster. Apparently my brain said, "Ok, you're done. Get up nao." And I did. I can still hear Merps snoring in his bedroom, along with the beeping of his alarm going off. I'm going to finish this post and then wake his ass up.

Once again, waking up on my own is quite encouraging. We'll see how I feel when the next nap comes around - whether I was well rested enough, or if my natural night owl tendencies are just keeping me more alert and more awake later at night.

So we're into day four now. I can definitely say that today felt the best so far. The exhaustion that we fought (and failed against) during day three was virtually non-existent through the rough night time hours. That may be due to getting a couple longer naps in: I slept about 40 minutes in the car at about 2:40 on the ride back to Ames, and ended up accidentally mis-setting Clocky, which caused me to sleep for about 45 minutes at 6am.

I think, however, that it might have also been due to getting my naps closer together. So to test that theory, for this twenty four hour period, I'm going to be taking my naps every three hours instead of every four hours. But, I'm going to make every effort to hold strictly to no more than twenty five minutes of sleep, since I believe the having the short sleep periods is what matters most in forcing adaptation. I don't know for sure, but that's why I'm testing. I'll be getting eight naps instead of six, but we've also been taking extra naps at night when we've been totally exhausted to help make it through the night without oversleeping through the morning.

So we'll see whether or not having more frequent, but shorter naps helps me adapt quicker. I'm really hoping that it'll: a) help me get to sleep faster and b) wake up less groggy. I've yet to repeat the alert readiness that I had waking up from the Sunday/Monday midnight nap, but I hope that'll change as time goes on.

And now it's time for a nap!

I'm only writing at this point 'cause I actually woke up from my 12am nap without an alarm. The last thing I remember is having a strange dream where I was standing in our darkened kitchen and the refrigerator door was open. I closed it, turned to go outside, and suddenly I was awake.

I had a quick moment of panic. I thought I had overslept, badly, and I immediately checked the time to find that I had woken up at 12:29am. I was shocked. I double checked. And in the moment it took me to get my bearings, Clocky started going off upstairs.

I can safely say this is the first time I've felt great after having a nap. I literally awoke wide awake, refreshed, and in a good mood. If this is what polyphasic sleep can be like, I'm getting quite excited to see how things go the next couple weeks.

Right now, I'm just having fun taking advantage of the fact that my day has been incredibly full of doing things I enjoy doing: watching Hitman Reborn, Sunday Football, [a two hour car trip], playing disc golf, eating a huge dinner, Sunday Night Football, and getting to Stumble quite a bit. All before the midnight nap. Now I have all night to get work done at my leisure.

I'll say it again, Huzzah!

P.S. While I feel alert and awake, my brain is still functioning on a 2nd grade level. This post took quite a while to write, since I kept making typos. It's only been about 60 hours though, so I'm hoping that'll improve. I've also notice I have trouble making rollie cigarettes, where before I could do it with my eyes closed.

So we're something like 50 hours into the Project Sleepy reboot. We started on Friday afternoon. I have to say I'm not sure whether it's going better or worse than before. I'll let you know how it's going and what we've been experiencing this time, along with our plans. To sum it up: adapting to Polyphasic Sleep is hard. And I'm dead tired.

To say that I'm tired right now is a vast, vast, understatement. Vast like oceans. Vast like the uncaring, cold, emptiness of space. Vast like yo momma.

I've actually only failed to get to sleep two or three times in the past two days, but I can't say I'm feeling rested. In fact, it's been almost universally the opposite: By the time a scheduled nap rolls around, I'm usually feeling alright. Not 100%, mind you, but I'm OK. Then I lie down, and after five or ten minutes, I sleep. I dream. And when I wake up - or rather, am woken up - I feel like ... well, like I've been awake for 50 hours straight.

Like the Boy Scouts motto, we're working hard to be prepared to start this thing off right. It turns out there's quite a bit of effort that goes into getting everything lined up.

Right now we're primarily trying to arrange a meeting with a physician and a sleep lab to get some more interesting (and accurate) measurements of how this unique sleep schedule affects us. Hopefully we will be able to get some input from a psychologist in the field also. If you are someone, or know someone who may be interested, please contact us at projectsleepy@gmail.com.

We're still also looking hard for sponsors to help fund our independent film making efforts. We greatly appreciate any and all help in that area.

As with all things, you can do them right, or you can do them quickly, but (usually) not both. So please bear with us as we try to do our best to get this crazy adventure started right.