Now I have two assignments due tomorrow… so it looks like I’m doing another all-nighter-uberman thing… Eh, whatever. It’ll all work out. I just took a 3-hour after dinner nap, so time to work now.

After my first uberman night, I was really hyper the entire next day and had a lot of (unfocused) energy. I played in a violin studio masterclass with my teacher and played one of the best performances of Bach I ever have… Being one day sleep deprived is an awful lot like being tipsy. It’s hard to focus and inhibitions are low… Apparently that’s good for public performance though.

Last night, I slept very little so I decided to take a 3 hour nap after lunch. Soon images began to spin through my head. I had a very, very long dream that seemed to stretch for days. It felt longer than a typical dream during monophasic sleep. Then, All of a sudden, my eyes flashed open and I was awake.

Crap, did I sleep through my alarm? I have a midterm to study for! I got up to check my alarm, and realized that only 1.5 hours had passed. But the dream had been epic, long, and vivid. I went back to sleep and slept dreamlessly for the next 1.5 hours. The feeling was very strange and I’ve felt a little disoriented from it for the rest of my day. I kept thinking it was Tuesday or Wednesday, because it had felt like so much time had passed. Now it feels more like it is 1:30 pm rather than am.

The way the body responds to sleep never ceases to amaze me. The most unexpected things continue to happen even after I’ve been at it for a month.

I’m pretty sure that this curtain will destroy any semblance of a circadian rhythm that I have left… Yes, it is very weird. We get a lot of strange looks when people walk by our room. But screw normality! We’re in college, the only time in our lives when it’s socially feasible to erect a huge ugly sheet of black plastic in the middle of our living area. Life is good.

We spent about half a day buying the supplies and setting it up, but the final result is of pretty impressive quality. We anchored 15 feet of copper pipe across the ceiling attached to an emergency sprinkler fixture on one end and stuck through a cardboard box that rests on top of a wardrobe on the other end. We made a light-proof curtain using cheap roll-up black plastic, shower-curtain rings and some duct-tape. The curtain easily slides open to one side during the day, when we are both awake (sort of.)

One free-sliding 9×12 ft curtain-wall for under $50 ($25 each — totally worth it!) This should be a good investment for the rest of the year.

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.

While I’ve failed yet again to adapt to uberman, I have learned some interesting and useful things about hacking sleep:

1. Once you’ve trained yourself to take them, short naps can keep you functional on extremely little/irregular sleep.
2. There is a lot of time in a day. Seriously. If you think you don’t have enough time, the problem is probably that you sleep.
3. While sleep does play an important role on memory and focus, staying positive, energetic, and physically active plays an even bigger part. If you are working on something that really inspires you, you don’t really need sleep at all.
4. Sleeping at night is boring.

Now that I’ve had a complete reboot, I think I’ll start a more Uberman-like schedule, which to a certain extent will be necessary to complete all of the homework I’ve put off during the last two days.

My roommate and I have split the room width-wise so I now have the half nearer the door. We’d like to erect a tarp in the middle so that I can have the light on in the middle of the night without bothering him. Working in a lit room will also help keep me awake, and for daytime naps, I’ll be able to pull the tarp closed so that light from the window doesn’t hit my bed. It’s a winning plan all around. I should also look into a eye-mask so that I can sleep in really bright places, like outside in the sun.

Uveryman doesn’t yield the same insane amount of free time that Uberman does, because I currently end up totaling 4-5 hours of sleep per day, but it is much more manageable. I have flexibility to skip or delay naps, or add naps as I see fit. I’m taking short naps all the time, which I find relaxing and meditative.

I can’t give any more accurate a picture of what exactly the Uveryman schedule entails as I am still experimenting with it, but so far, it seems to be a happy medium between the healthy sanity of monophasic and the vampiric kick-ass-ness of Uberman.

For me, polyphasic sleep is becoming less about acquiring ludicrous amounts of free time, and more about finding a schedule that provides frequent breaks and avoids the daily disorientation and discomfort of stumbling out of bed after a long night’s hibernation.

I am no longer following uberman, but I’m also unable to be monophasic. If I sleep more than 5 hours, I feel terrible. The result is that my level of energy fluxuates wildly and unpredictably. I’ll be tired when I’m trying to work, and too awake when I’m trying to nap. Maybe I should go back to uberman. I may have felt tired and bored at night, but at least I had the structure to function during the day.

The other problem is that my uberman days trained me to waste a lot of time. Now that I’m sleeping more, my productive time is the time that gets cut, rather than my dawdling time.

Lately, I’ve been much more physically active. I’m taking Brazillian Jujitsu, Wushu (martial arts/dance awesomeness), and filling up my free time with DDR. I just ate a 1200 Calorie dinner because of how much I’ve been moving today. I’ve never really been active or athletic until now. The effects, both physical and psychological, are very balancing. I’m virtually unable to get stressed out because I have so many outlets.

Now, I don’t think I’ll really be going back to a strictly monophasic schedule either. I think what’ll work best is to keep taking short naps when I’m tired, and staying up if I’m doing something that inspires me, but when I feel super tired, I’ll actually sleep. I only slept 6 hours last night, but I feel great now.

The naps seem to be a great way to recover from an all-nighter, but I think I need some good long sleep — like 3 hours or so ;) — every couple of nights to stay sane. At this point, I think I’m tuned into my body enough to know when a short nap will do the trick. I’ve woken up without needing the alarm for about 80% of the naps I’ve taken in the last two days.

We’ll see what happens. I’m assuming I’ll go into a kind of Everyman schedule (consists of a 3-hour block at night with short naps during the day) on weekdays and sleep a lot on weekends.