I’ve been following an uberman schedule for the past 40 hours. Today at 5:30pm, I was especially tired and decided to take a 1.5 hour nap. I turned the alarm off in my sleep and at 7:30, my girlfriend came to wake me up. I had been sleeping so soundly that I confused the dream world and the real world. For the first 15 minutes after I was up, I was pretty sure that Transformers or some similar intelligent machines had taken over the world.
The only other time I’ve suffered a delusion that powerful was during a fever (which resulted in me sleep-walking and dialing 911 in my sleep — good story) I think the delusion is a direct result of getting really deep, high quality restorative sleep. After I woke up and figured out what was going on, I felt pretty refreshed and relaxed.
I assumed that an occasional 1.5 hour nap would be more refreshing than a 20 minute one, but maybe it’s not a good length. I’m sure that if I repeatedly force myself to get up after 1.5 hours that it will become more natural — after all, repetition is how I learned to take 20 minute naps. I’ll experiment with taking short core sleeps during the day when it’s harder to oversleep, and when I can have my friends check up on me.
2 Comments
I have never heard that 911 story. Pray tell!
1.5 hours always does seem a little disorienting to me–in fact anything between that and, say, 5 hours always seems to leave my body totally confused as to what it’s supposed to be doing. Have you tried naps lasting 45 minutes or so?
yeah. anything between 20 minutes and 3 hours leaves me tired and grouchy