Uberman Sleep journal
5:46 Thursday Dec 11, 2008
Today my uberman sleep schedule begins. This consists of sleeping only 20 minutes every 4 hours. I’m not yet sure when my classes will be next quarter, but I think I’m going to set my sleeping times for 2:00 am 6:00 am and 10:00 am and again 2, 6, and 10 pm. I think this works out well because I sometimes have violin concerts at 7:00.
My sleep schedule lately has been particularly disorganized. Between Tuesday and Wednesday, I pulled an all nighter and this afternoon at 12:30 I woke up to find myself on the lounge couch after watching a movie last night. However, I think this will help the transition, because I will have to get my body used to being awake at night. I take my first nap in 10 minutes. I’m actually really tired from sleep dep but I doubt I’ll be able to fall asleep quickly enough. I’m going to set alarms for 25 minutes so that gives me 5 minutes to fall asleep. It usually takes me half an hour to fall asleep — I hope to change that.
I’ll also be keeping a planner with nap times and I’ll keep track of how awake I feel throughout the day.
Currently I am pretty tired, a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 means I could pass out at any moment, 10 means I feel perfectly alert.) Throughout the day, I’ll rate how I feel two dimensions (physical, mental)
Time to go take a nap :)
6:26 pm Thursday Dec 11, 2008
yep, no luck. I have to get faster at falling asleep.
3:48 am Friday Dec 12, 2008
oh man… tonight’s gonna be difficult. I am very tired – I think I’m still messed up by sleep dep from Tuesday’s all nighter. I realized that with the time change, if I want to sleep at 6:00 in Colorado, that is gonna be 5:00 here. so I’ll adjust my next few naps to an hour earlier. That seems like pretty good news currently, cuz I really can’t wait for my next nap :)
I have a plane to catch tomorrow… today? yeah, I guess I’ll have to start drawing a line somewhere for the change of days. Anyway, I hope I don’t sleep through any alarms and miss my flight… my mom is actually really worried about it – she said to call her when I wake up.
Anyway, sleep dep is kind of a good thing because it brings about the change faster so that my REM-starved body will start getting into deeper sleep more quickly, I just never expected to be so tired so soon.
5:26 am Friday Dec 12, 2008
Alright! The fun starts now, I just tried to take a nap. I was within minutes of passing out when my alarm went off. Now I feel pretty groggy, but I’m definitely awake. So far I haven’t really fallen asleep during any of my naps, it just takes me too long before I’m out. During my 10:00 nap yesterday, I was almost catching some dreams. I was awake the whole time, but my thoughts were starting to turn into vivid images. When the nap was over I felt pretty refreshed. Similarly, now I kind of feel refreshed, at least mentally, even though I don’t feel like I slept at all. I wonder if I’m catching some sort of rejuvinating “pseudo-sleep” just by relaxing for a while, even though I am still conscious.
I’ve heard of gurus in India that are able to replace sleep entirely by simply meditating for a few hours. Perhaps they have mastered some technique that is similar to the “conscious sleep” I’m feeling.
9:40 am Friday Dec 12, 2008
I feel much more awake now that the sun is up. at 5:30 I got really hungry and ate a plate of rice and chicken with my hands (I forgot to get a fork from the dining hall… but it was fun anyway.) My 9:00 nap was almost successful, I fell asleep for maybe 5 minutes and the alarm went off, but it was very shallow sleep. As of right now I feel fine, as normal as any other day, not 100% but not nearly as sleep deprived as I expected. I just ate an entire waffle (those things are huge!) and had some fruit. not sleeping definitely causes me to eat more. Other people who have tried uberman report craving weird foods like grape juice… I haven’t had any powerful cravings yet, but I was very happy to eat 3 oranges. (not unusual for me.)
Steve Pavlina on his uberman blog (this is the guy who did it successfully for 120 days) is vegan – I wonder how much of an effect not eating meat would have — apparently meat takes a lot more energy to break down. I wouldn’t be surprised if I start craving veggies and if meat stops being so delicious… a small price to pay for 6 EXTRA HOURS EVERY DAY!
time to pack… my plane leaves at 2:25. I wonder how sleeping in the airport will be…
11:11 am Friday Dec 12, 2008
I’m on the train to the airport. This morning has been full of highs and lows in energy. I felt fine two hours ago and now I’m super exhausted — maybe it’s because I’m finally sitting still. I’ve been moving around since 5:00 this morning. It’s amazing how much I can get done when I don’t sleep. Normally, I would have had to pack before hanging out with friends and then leave first thing in the morning. Instead, I hung out with people till 5:00 (at which time everyone else passed out) and then did laundry, packed stuff, ate a meal, and even got in some practice time on violin — It’s like I had a whole extra half-day to get ready for the trip while the rest of the world was sleeping.
Man, I can’t wait for my next nap.
12:27 pm
BALLS! I got to the airport super early to account for Moore’s Law and now the plane is delayed an hour and a half… so now I have a lot of time to kill. also, on the bus ride from Santa Clara to San Jose airport this guy got on who reeked of pot – he smelled up the entire cabin… either he is drug trafficking or he smoked 15 joints and didn’t change clothes or shower… it was bad.
It looks like whenever I sit down or hold still for a while I get really drowsy, but as soon as I get up and move around, I feel great… this is probably my body telling me that what I am doing is very healthy. :)
2:35 pm
The 1:00 nap was not successful. I couldn’t fall asleep in the back-bruising airport seats… however my foot managed to fall asleep. Still, I’m feeling short energizing effects of the relaxing… It’s almost as if my body were on a schedule for awake 1 hour, nap 5 minutes. It takes me about 5 minutes of closed eyes and then I get into this kind of meditation where my mind just starts making random connections.. Occasionally imagery becomes so vivid I can see it for a second… its like I’m having vague fragments of a dream while I’m still conscious. Then just ten minutes later, I feel physically energized and want to get up.
5:30 pm (6:30 in Colorado)
I just took a nap in the airplane. I thought I wasn’t going to be able fall asleep properly sitting up. Next thing I knew, my alarm was pulling me out of heavy sleep. Waking up felt like crap, but now only a few minutes later I feel much better and I’m no longer tired
7:54
I am now in colorado. Feel very mentally alert – a 9 out of 10… but I don’t know how coherent I actually seem to others. Sometimes I feel great but then realize that I can’t even formulate a sentence.
3:01 am
I went blues dancing after my 10:00 nap, and I kept up all right. After midnight I started having trouble seeing strait. My 2:00 nap was the fastest I fell asleep and the deepest sleep yet, but still no REM. Right now I feel fine, but half an hour ago I could barely move… this is wierd. I guess, when I’m getting my naps in such short bursts, there’s no cumulative drowsy effect — for example if I wake up after only 4 hours of sleep I feel like sleeping for the next two hours, but now I’m getting less than that but can stay on my feet.
On the airplane I made a list of things to do with my time over break… among these are: learning piano, learning German, drawing with charcoal, and learning to read lips. I can start doing some of this stuff tonight… at some point I should also unpack and clean my room.
7:50 am
I just had my first slip up. I somehow managed to sleep through all three alarms on my cell phone. fortunately my mom came to check up on me and woke me up at 7:10 as I was still in bed. I’m tired as hell and much more irritable than usual. I’m gonna try to clean my room but I really can’t function right now… I can’t slip up again, I’ll have to set my computer to play loud music, apparently my phone is too soft. Also my bed is super comfy I could try sleeping on the floor or without a pillow.
blech
10:20 AM
yay! I had my first dream — it was an anxiety dream. I was in a hotel and all my things disappeared so I was like wtf? I saw all my stuff dematerialized, I need it back, this can’t be happening. then I’m like… oh this is a dream to get my stuff back I need to wake up — so I woke up after only 10 minutes and I felt pretty refreshed. I tried back to sleep in the next ten minutes to see if I could get back into a dream. I fell asleep but did not dream.
The wierdest part about the dream is that the hotel looked enough like my room that when I opened my eyes in the real world, nothing changed except the color saturation. From the dream to being awake, it felt like my eyes were open the whole time, only suddenly everything became more colorful… cool
I feel good now. I’m still tired, but now I can think and I don’t feel like punching kittens like I did only 20 minutes ago… fucking kittens
11:46 AM
man I’m really tired again, I wonder if it would be ok to take an extra 15 minute nap at 12:00. I think that would really help, but maybe I should just tough it out. I think that today is going to be the worst and then I’ll get used to clicking into deep sleep quickly, but I need sleep dep for the transition otherwise I’ll just be back were I was yesterday. OMG I’m so tired.
My appetite has gotten substantially larger. Last night we went to Dennys and at 5:00 this morning I ate all the left-overs. It would be fun to learn to cook… I could make stuff every night! I haven’t gotten any unusual cravings except for oranges (but I always had cravings for oranges)
2:24
In my 2:00 nap, I kept being about to fall asleep and the I would have some delusion that lead me to think that I had slept through the alarm again. I think these “delusions” were fragments of dreams, but I kept waking myself up to make sure I hadn’t slept through, so I didn’t sleep very deeply. In my previous nap, I slept on the floor (I thought that maybe the cause of me sleeping through the alarm was due to the intese comfy nature of my bed here at home. So I slept with a comforter on my back on the floor and it worked really well. I replaced my cellphone alarm by loud death metal timed to wake me up by my comp.
This nap, I kept the death metal but tried sleeping in my bed again. It’s way too early in this process to start experimenting, but it looks like the floor is better because I’m paranoid about sleeping too long on my bed. Man I can’t believe how long I’ve been awake today, this is usually about the time I wake up, but I’ve already been doing stuff all morning.
I’ve been practicing violin, but I don’t have the concentration to be thorough about my studying. I start playing the piece and next thing I know, I’ve gone on for two pages and I can’t remember a single thing I’ve played.
Time for lunch.
3:37
I made spaghetti. It was delicious. I feel SO awake right now. It’s so wierd. I don’t know what to do with all this free time… I guess I’ll finally be able to finish all those books I wanted to read. Maybe I should start drawing tonight; I could try a still life of something…
4:08
I was sincerely surprised that my toilet didn’t flush automatically
5:22
OMFG I’m so tired… the highs and lows I was experiencing yesterday are on steroids. I think another dependent variable I could measure is how easily I get pissed at my mom. Honestly overall I’m still ok, but I feel a new zombie Francesco rising up from the inside to strangle and replace me. If it gets worse than this, its going to become a serious trial of willpower.
and I say: BRING IT!
9:27 pm
I am so far beyond tired that I’m back at awake… My 6:00 nap failed as tired as I was I couldn’t get any satisfactory sleep, I’m too paranoid about oversleeping that I end up not sleeping at all… but I’m feeling luckier for this next nap. After that I hang out with friends… that should be fun (note: as long as I’m sleep deprived I am not operating heavy machinery so I’m having my friends pick me up.)
My brother is giving me so much crap… its funny, I would’ve thought this sort of thing right up his alley.
3:04 AM Sunday Dec. 14
so much sleepy. I watched Peter Pan at a friend’s house, but I had to retreat into another room for my 2:00 nap and missed the very end of the movie. I slept through my alarm again and Staci had to wake me up. She drove me home, and I was really close to nodding off the whole time.
I have never been this tired for this long in my entire life. maybe I’ll add an extra 20 minute nap at 4:00. On a scale of 1-10 for fatigue I am at a 10, but I still feel like I am somewhat functional. I’ll try to practice some tonight and hope I don’t pass out on top of my violin.
5:08 AM
I can play the spOOns!
6:30 AM
this nap was much better. I feel refreshed. I set this music to go off really loud when I needed to wake up and I actually woke up half a minute before the music and I was thinking, “it’s gonna go off any second now.” I was napping on the floor in front of my computer, and in the space of 2 seconds after the alarm went off, I bolted up into a sit up and disconnected the wire tot eh speaker. I’m sure it would have looked really funny from the outside, cuz I was passed out. I learned how to play the spoons! It’s really fun and cool and remarkably easy to learn… it kept me entertained for a couple hours at least.
10:31 AM
Ugggghhhh. In the name of all that is sacred…. It’s so cold. I think I’m more sensative to cold because of the sleep dep. I forgot how spoiled I am by Stanford weather.
Every minute of my life is a battle not to fall asleep. If I close my eyes for more that 4 seeconds evculpsycology exerimemt (wtf? I’m reading back over this text in hindsight 5 hours later and I’m not sure what it means… I must’ve been pretty f-ed up)
2:37 PM
I took a nap and life is temporarily clear again… I feel like I’m a druggy who can only afford one small low quality hit at a time. I’m living most of my life experiencing withdrawal symptoms.
I’m not as cold anymore. In the past after pulling all-nighters I’ve noticed being more sensitive to cold, but this was ridiculous. I had my coat and gloves on inside IHOP while ordering. As I’m writing this I’m starting to feel the zombie pull come back. It doesn’t help that we’re cleaning our dusty basement so I’m sneezing a lot and have a runny nose. I hope this is just allergies and not an actual cold. I’ve had a minor cough since 2 days before the experiment started and I’m starting to lose my voice — this is definitively a very healthy thing to put my body through.
Days last really long. It’s so weird to look at how much has already happened this morning and how much longer I’m still going to be up and running (maybe up and stumbling)
On the topic of health, I’ve noticed that my back is a bit more relaxed than usual. I always wake up with minor back pains and really tight muscles in my back, but now I feel fairly relaxed all the time. I did some yoga and that did wonders. This morning I felt kind of nauseous. I’m hungry all the time, but the prospect of eating is kinda gross. I wonder how my eating schedule will figure in once the sleep cycles have been established. I know that when traveling to other countries, eating at the right times really helps jet lag. Maybe I should have figured out the “right times” before starting this thing. Right now I’m having four meals a day. including a large breakfast and a full meal around 4:00 am. Perhaps it would be best to have six small meals each right before nap time… but then I would be eating most of the time. At least this way I might establish a regular rhythm that would condition my body to expect the nap times.
There are so many bedtime and morning rituals that we do unconsciously. It’s weird to do things like brushing my teeth or taking a shower completely independently of the time of day. Consider for example: when do I charge my cell phone? (I usually charge it over night) when do I put my retainer in? I keep changing into pajamas when I take my naps so I end up changing in and out of the same pair of pants several times during the same day.
5:30
John asked:
what would happen to the expression, to “sleep on” something? which makes me wonder about your work productivity. i’m sure that you’re getting numerous things done, but what about quality productivity? you said you can’t even keep focused to learn a song. i wonder if this type of mechanical and non-cognitive work was the type of the work that the original experimenter of the uberman sleep cycle was doing too.
are you able to read a book, or do something that requires less physical and more mental activity?
It takes a lot longer to get used to… I don’t expect to be as productive as a normal sleeper for a few days. Currently I’m keeping track of my physical and mental fatigue every couple hours so that I can eventually chart it out. Currently, naps greatly decrease my physical fatigue and somewhat decrease my mental. I’m fine when it comes to mundane tasks, such as learning how to play the spoons, but I have tremendous difficulty studying violin or reading a book. I’m starting the book A Scanner Darkly… PKD is wierd in the first place, but on sleep dep it gets even stranger.
my goal — and apparently this happens after about a week of adhereing to the schedule strictly is for both my physical and mental awareness to equal (and some would argue surpass) my pre-uberman levels.
As I write this, I feel completely coherent for the first time in days. I do not feel sleep deprived and I’m sure I could manage a book. The problem is at night, because my internal clock still tells me to sleep when it is night time. Trying to read at 5:00 AM for me last night would have been more difficult than beating Deep Blue at chess while heavily intoxicated.
If I could feel as awake as I do currently at every hour of my conscious day, only then would I consider myself an uberman.
[part 4]
6:33 Sunday
I wonder if after all this time sleep deprived, I register perhaps a 70% level of cognitive functioning as fully awake. Perhaps I feel more awake than I really am, just by relativity. This might be another explanation for the euphoric and heightened senses that some people report after getting used to uberman.
Starting about 15 minutes before my last nap, I started getting seriously tired. I was fine and the fatigue hit me like a brick wall (a brick wall which I have come into contact with briskly.) Other people on the sleep cycle describe a “gentle pressure” to go take a nap around the conditioned time… but this wasn’t exactly subtle.
I hope I’m having dreams and just not remembering them, because otherwise I’ve only had a total of about 20 minutes in REM since starting the experiment in which case I shouldn’t be alive. This past nap, I woke up a couple seconds before my alarm went off and I felt like it was easy to get up.
hypothesis: I would attribute the increased sensitivity to cold as a result of lower pulse and metabolism (two processes that I assume my body is not able to maintain without sleep.) Supporting this hypothesis, I don’t feel cold after taking naps, but instead I do approximately feel more cold when I feel more tired. I haven’t taken down any tangible data, so I can’t prove this… this is just the feeling that I get about how it works.
Another thing I’ve started noticing today is that it feels good to just zone out throughout the day. Early today, I was so tired that zoning out would have put me to sleep, but now, after a nap, I’m mentally tired, but I don’t really feel like sleeping; I just feel like zoning out and staring off into the distance. I assume the brain uses less energy when zoning out, like when sleeping… I wonder why my body rewards this zoning out behavior (I assume it feels good because of dopamine release or something similar) Why does the amount of sleep effect the amount of energy my mind can use? shouldn’t I just be able to eat and get my energy from that? Apparently there’s something else going on (if there are any bio people out there with some insight into what’s going on, I’d be curious to hear an explanation.)
I also hope that the zoning out isn’t a crucial part of the end product schedule – for example I might need to make up some sleep by zoning out for a few hours every night… this is not what I had in mind.
Sunday 10:51
I can’t believe it has only been 3 days since I started this thing. It feels like a week. This is gonna be a looong break. My nap at 10:00 was somewhat unsuccessful. I didn’t feel very tired and it took me a few minutes to fall asleep and I didn’t sleep very heavily. definitely no REM. Looking back on my chart, it looks like I’ve been more awake between 4 pm and 8 pm relatively. I think that this used to be my most productive time for homework, and indeed, I rated my mental alertness higher on these days.
Because this nap wasn’t very good, I’m probably gonna crash in a couple hours. I already feel my mind juices draining into the belly of Zombiecesco. I’ll have to make sure to set loud alarms tonight. Today I had no trouble getting up for my cell phone alarm for every nap. I’ll set regular cell alarms with a loud death metal backup alarm.
alarm marmalade alarmalade!
5:35 AM Monday
I ended up taking an extra nap at 4:00. I was watching the Big Labowski and interrupted for the nap. I woke up seconds before my alarm failed to go off. (I set it incorrectly) But I woke up confused and angry… maybe it was the movie I dunno, but until now I can’t shake off this feeling of being pissed off but too disorganized to understand why. At this point I think I’ve adequately broken down my day/night rhythm. I hope that as I adjust to this new cycle the drowsiness will subside and the naps will get deeper. I haven’t had any vivid dreams in a while and apparently they are supposed to happen a lot on this schedule… I hope I start remembering them as I get more accustomed to the pattern — I’d love to have a lucid dream, I think I’ve only had one or two my entire life.
At this point I feel functional pretty much all the time. I’d say that on average I’m feeling about as awake as I was feeling at school when I was staying up to study — which is certainly functional, but quite short of 100%
I’ll probably need the extra nap at 4:00 for a few days. At this point I don’t need the extreme sleep dep to make the change, I just need the repetition to condition myself to the new cycle as I would for jet lag.
This morning I’m visiting my highschool. I groaned when I remembered that classes start at 8:30, but then thought “oh. right…”
[part 5]
11:41
I improvised a nap quite nicely. I just slipped into the library, and fell asleep in one of the chairs in the corner. It feels strange to be able to fall asleep so readily; I’m just so exhausted all the time. I need to learn how to fall asleep rapidly without the sleep dep.
I’m feeling the cold really bad again. I’m wearing two sweaters over a t-shirt indoors and I still feel cold. I’ve been really tired since two this morning… looks like today’s gonna be as fun as yesterday.
On the up side, Last night I was mentally coherent enough to practice and actually get somewhere.
5:52
ugh. I slipped up again. I went to bed at 2:00 without setting an alarm because I figured someone would wake me up. I woke up after 25 minutes as usual, only then I stayed in bed because it was super duper warm and fuzzy (apparently there is an negative correlation between sleep and the warmth and fuzziness of inanimate objects.) I’m so out of it. I’m tired of being so… tired.
anyway, in the name of doing strange things to natural biological processes, I will persevere.
I ate a burrito and it was delicious. Now I go to bed.
6:00 pm
sleeping moderately restful. played hour+ on spoons. mom walks in and tells me I should play violin. uhhhhhhhhhhhhhgggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…….. .. .’. ….. …. …. . . …….. … … … .. … …. …. .. . I’m gonna eat an orange.
8:36 pm
Ok. It’s really easy to get bored when you have 20 hours of free time a day. This is going to be a really really long break if I stick through with it, but oh man, it would be so cool to have this much time when school is in session… I really need to play more violin, but I’m never awake enough to do it. Instead I end up playing piano and spoons (by the way. I am making incredible progress on the spoons. I shall come back and be a spoon clicking master!) Now I have another trick to show at all those parties I’m gonna be going to (yeah right.)
I need a project to do during break, but I’m too tired to do anything interesting.
3:57 AM Tuesday Dec. 16
my bonnie lies over the ocean
my bonnie lies over the seaeeeeeee
If I shut my eyes I’m going to fall asleep. After my 2:00 AM nap, I layed in bed for a bit too long an kept falling back asleep. Consequently I’ve been really groggy. I can barely even tell what I’m typing as I’m typing it.
My brother said that an external measurement of how sleep deprived I am can come from how many errors there are as I write.
TV would keep me awake, or maybe I should start a drawing. I need my dreams!
Someone had the idea that I should take pictures of myself and have them with the log.
8:16 AM Tuesday Dec. 16
son of a fucking bitch. I slept in again. I was passed out as the alarm went off and I didn’t even hear the death-metal backup, and that was f-in LOUD. They probably heard it downstairs. ugh. I’m really frustrated; it seems that the only way to enter REM sleep in only 20 minutes consistently is by pushing myself so that I’m even more tired than I thought necissary. All of last night I was a 1/10 on physical tiredness, but now I think I’m a 0/10. Perhaps I’m gonna have to extend my graph on this one to include negative numbers.
This is absolutely awful, but I really believe that this is possible just several orders of magnitude higher in pain than my previous expectations.unpleasant.,,,,,,,
The sleep dep effects my body mind and emotions. The fact that I’m about to pass out at any moment makes it so that I don’t understand what people say to me unless I think really hard about it. But grogginess also makes me irritable and very impatient, so just talking to people just makes it worse.
I start losing track of really obvious things, like whether or not there is someone else in the room with me.
I think TV is my only option at this point. everything else is either too mentally involved or puts me to sleeeep.
-meehhhhhhhhhhhh
11:10 AM Tuesday (pic 4)
According to how quickly I lose it when talking to my mom, I’d say I’m a 1 or 2 on alertness. But trust me 1/10 is way higher than the 0/10 I had a few hours ago.
It seems like the waves of cold come in the same bursts as my alertness. I’m starting to feel some of the beneficial results of my 10:00 nap and I’m likewise starting to warm up. The reason I was so groggy in the first place was my earlier sleeping in. I think from now on when I’m so tired that I can feel that I’m probably going to sleep through an alarm, I’ll take multiple short naps. Any nap longer than half an hour feels like a shot of tranquilizer.
Also listening to music helps. maybe I should have an alarm that goes off with one song that I like followed by a really unpleasant noise
It’s probably really obvious, but I have trouble remembering things that happened when I was particularly tired. Already this morning was really foggy, like a forgotten dream, but I remember parts of last night clearly. In short, being tired is like being drunk, and I’m getting brown-outs and flashbacks.
This morning I’ve been watching episodes of Lost ‘cuz it’s the only thing that wont put me to sleep.
Man even when I don’t sleep, I still hate mornings.
12:06 AM Wednesday 12/17 (pic 5)
I don’t understand how I can sleep through really loud noises and not even remember it. Just a cell phone on vibrate 6 feet away used to wake me up. Now a 16″ subwoofer to the face is completely inneffective. Tonight at 2:00 I’m bringing out the old alarm clock I used to use the first couple years of highschool (the one I stopped using because it was too loud and scared me) and then I will set a backup alarm with the sound literally turned all the way up. If I don’t hear that, It’ll probably wake my mom up who will come up and hit me with a shovel until I get up.
I am not a that deep of a sleeper and I don’t fall asleep quickly, but apparently if I’m tired enough I can sleep through an air-raid.
Ugh. This is really frustrating, but I need to teach myself to hit REM without sleeping that much.
The other problem is that I was sleeping in my bed with the comfy pillow. For the rest of tonight I’m going to sleep on the ground maybe I’ll even leave the covers off.
[part 6]
Wed. 2:51 AM (6)
I just read, at the recommendation of my concerned mother, a scientist’s review of polyphasic sleep.
Here is the article, but it’s really long and I honestly didn’t read most of it
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm
He states that it is impossible to alter the circadian rhythm and “trick the brain” into entering REM quickly. The article seems quite biased and facts are stated as dogma without evidence. I’m trying to stay skeptical myself of either view — perhaps polyphasic sleep is not tricking the body into entering REM, maybe it works for different reasons; maybe it doesn’t work, or as most people hypothesize, maybe it sort of works but with a sacrifice to creativity and memory.
The best counter-argument I can find is a single case “study” of a man who adapted to a strict polyphasic sleep cycle successfully with no reported negative health effects. Unfortunately this case is casually self-reported and can hold no scientific merit.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/02/polyphasic-mutants/
What bothers me most of all is that there have been no wide-scale scientific studies conducted to test claims on either side of the argument, but people still state their own opinions as if they were the voice of Truth. I guess that this is a common frustration that can be found with almost any conflict of interest from politics to education (with the exception of math — for Professor Simon is the voice of Truth.)
Anyway, I can see how my mother is concerned. I look like shit, I’m coming down with a bad cough and runny nose, and I’m abrasive and confused most of the time she sees me.
Still. I think that over-all the experiment is working. Right now I feel fine, as good as I’ve ever felt at 3 in the morning. It’s weird how quickly I switch between this state to being a stumbling zombie who can’t drag himself out of bed. I think at this point it is just a matter of conforming these states of ups and downs to line up with my nap times so that I get to nap whenever I start feeling tired. Occasionally it works really well, In the past couple days there have been 8-hour stretches where I was coherent and functional, although a bit out of it. But when it doesn’t work it really doesn’t work.
[part 7]
4:12 AM
The wierdest thing just happened: I decided to take the extra nap. I was sleeping on the floor with a comforter. I’m trying to fall asleep and next thing I know, my eye-lids literally flash open as if someone injected me with adrenaline. I think I was dreaming, but not in the story kind of dreaming. I remember the figure of a person and then I’m awake and well.
7:18 (7)
I think it’s working for real. I feel awake and I think I’m past the worst of it. The hardest part was waking up after the 6:00 nap, but I forced myself to get up and not fall back asleep and now I’m ok. I think from this moment on it’s going to be easier not to slip up. I’ve hit rock bottom but I think that it all goes up from here. I’ll keep taking naps on the floor when I feel especially tired, cuz I think that helped a lot, but at this point I believe I can say that uberman works… the real test is to see if in a couple of weeks my brain functions at a level comparable to my level before switching over to the schedule.
In hindsight, I should have taken a series of reaction, memory and IQ tests before starting this experiment so that I could compare.
8:42 PM
I took it really easy today. I’ve been watching episodes of Lost back to back for several hours. I think I’ve seen 7 already and I’ll likely see a few more. Now that I’m getting over the sleep dep, I think I can get over this cough if I relax. Right around 7:45 PM today I had a moment of “heightened perception” I was feeling great, like a 10 out of 10 for alertness. I started noticing small things around me that had previously been a blur. Perhaps after living in a constant state of zombie, suddenly being reasonably awake feels super-human to me; regardless, I think I’ll be able to adapt completely within a few days provided I don’t crash one of these nights and sleep in by accident (I heard that really screws everything up.) I’m gonna keep things low stress for the rest of tonight and tomorrow (no more gun fights and masochistic sex) to try to get over this bug.
My eyes aren’t really red anymore. If a total stranger saw me right now I don’t think he would ever guess that I’ve had less than 8 hours of sleep in the past three days combined.
This is really exciting!
1:07
I’m still going pretty strong. I have moments when I’m dead tired but they typically only last several minutes and if I get up and move around it goes away. Overall, during my moments of non-tiredn I feel much more normal, indeed at times fully alert. I’m going to continue my Lost binge now.
2:23
ok. so much for it being easy here on out. I can’t focus my his is eyes on the computer, s zs
7:00
Man, I passed out. Judging by the previous entry, I must have fallen asleep while typing. I woke up at 6:30. I feel great now (I just got more sleep in the past 4 hours than I have in days) but I’m worried that this will set me back. I can’t keep slipping up like this. I’ve almost gotten my naps worked out during the day, but my body is still demanding some core sleep at night.
During my 2:00 nap I had a vibrant dream, but now I forget it. In the dream I became partially lucid and in the dream I had to wake up to do something urgent, so in real life I woke myself up and ten seconds later my alarm went off. It’s weird how much that keeps happening.
[part 8]
11:44 AM
I’ve always been a deep sleeper and it has always taken me a long time to get to sleep, but on a polyphasic sleep pattern, I fall asleep after having closed my eyes for just a minute or two. During my 10:00 nap, I immediately fell into a dream and woke up within 5 minutes. Realizing that it had been so little, I went back to sleep and had another moderately restful ten minute nap, then woke up. After going to sleep a third time, the alarm woke me up.
I joke with my mom that I get up in the middle of a nap because I need to go to the bathroom like when people regularly wake up in the middle of the night, only my “night” is only 20 minutes long.
8:41 PM 12/18
I’ve been remarkably awake all day. This is actually really disappointing. I think my 4 hour sleep last night put me back on a primarily monophasic schedule. I was not very tired when it was time for my naps and I was hanging out with friends so I couldn’t always find a quiet place to lay down. When I did, I only fell asleep for 5 minutes each time. I get the feeling that tonight it’s going to be really hard to stay awake again. Maybe I’ll do something more active than watching TV. I should do something physical… right, I’ll just do like 6 hours of yoga tonight.
2:38 AM Friday 12/19
I took an extra nap at 12 but made the mistake of sleeping on the bed. The alarm didn’t wake me and the computer wasn’t plugged into the sound system for the screamo metal. The problem with adapting to this sleep schedule is that I’m too absent minded when I’m tired to be as strict as is necessary. Anyway. yesterday I slept 4 hours straight, Today 2, and tomorrow nothing.
My body keeps tricking me. I tried sleeping the 12:00 nap on the floor with the lights on and I couldn’t fall asleep, but as soon as I move to the bed, BOOM! I do think that it is a good thing that I woke up at 2:30 in particular. That means that I have conditioned this to be a wake-up time, not all hope is yet lost.
I know I can do this. From this moment on, absolutely no slip ups. I will no longer be known as Slippery McChuck. I have dropped that name and moved on to greater, grander things.
[part 9]
5:13 AM Friday 12/19
another theory is that perhaps only certain people have a predisposition to be able to adjust to uberman. After all, people do change drastically in their sleep needs. Some people sleep over ten hours every night, others feel wide awake on 6. Some woman in Sweden is rested with 2 hours a night and there’s some guy in Vietnam who hasn’t slept in over 30 years. Steve Pavlina (the guy who did it for a while and kept a blog) said that once adapted, he was able to shift around his naps up to an hour in either direction, while I’ve heard other reports say that if you miss a nap by more than ten minutes, you crash for the next day.
Adapting to polyphasic sleep is undoubtably easier for some people and perhaps impossible for others. I believe that I will be able to adapt to it because I’ve never really been comfortable with monophasic sleep. For as long as I can remember I’ve never really been tired when I go to sleep. In fact, I’m most productive for doing homework and such past midnight simply because there are less distractions. I also hate waking up in the morning. Sleep frequently feels like someone hit me in the head with a rock and it takes two hours out of my morning just to get over the grogginess and nausea and sore back. Water always tastes bad and I have to unwillingly cram food down my throat just to jump-start my metabolism (maybe I’m pregnant?)
Anyway, I’ve found that with polyphasic napping, all of this goes away. My back has been more relaxed than ever (although I’m also not carrying a backpack and don’t have academic stress) and after a good nap, I feel like I can just get up and start doing whatever.
5:31
I’m craving juice right now
10:29 AM
10 o clock nap was fantastic. It took me a little bit longer to fall asleep but I had dreams the whole time. The coolest thing is at one point I was completely aware of my real body on the bed in my room, but also conscious of a dreaming body. It was like being in two different places at the same time. I could feel what was happening to real me but I could see through the eyes of dream me. Here’s the really interesting part: in my dream I was still in my room, just a different place in my room, so depending on which body i was paying attention to, I felt like I was in one part of the room or the other. Really cool stuff for sure.
After my 6 AM nap, I’m really surprised that I didn’t fall asleep. I was just sitting on my bed and I was super tired (1/10) I finally managed to force myself to play violin, and then everything went great.
When I started this, I was kinda half-awake all the time. Now, it seems I’m either wide awake, or on the verge of passing out. Throughout a monophasic day, I would slowly wake up over several hours after sleeping and then slowly get tired before going to bed (depending on how excited I was about doing HW I might be more or less tired.) Now I have 6 mini-days (minays?) where I feel the same progression of waking up and going to bed but 6 times faster. So 20 minutes after getting up, I feel great, and 20 minutes before taking a nap, sleepiness hits me like a fish if someone were to hit me with a fish. Because I haven’t completely adapted, some of the fatigue cycles are still quite a bit off with my sleep cycles. For example, last night between my 6:00 and 10:00 PM naps, I felt fine, but suddenly around 9:10 I got freaking tired. At 8:00 I rated myself 6/10 for physical alertness and 9/10 for mental alertness. By 9:30 I rated 1/10 physical and 3/10 mental. By the time 10:00 finally came around, I had started waking back up and was at a 3 physically and 3 mentally
MY NAME IS NOT SLIPPERY MCCHUCK
3:32 PM
been watching Lost most of the day. I practiced a bit and now I’m gonna practice some more. I feel surprisingly normal. I didn’t really manage to sleep for my 2:00 nap. My mind is clear and I feel like I have my coordination back. If I can manage to keep to the schedule tonight then I think I’m mostly there.
11:50 PM
I’m starting to feel how hard it is to keep up a social life while on this schedule. It’s really awkward to be at a friends house and just go nap on his/her couch in the middle of hanging out. Plus, because I’m doing stuff before then, I’m not tired for the nap, and I don’t end up getting my sleep.
Tomorrow I have a concert at 2:00. I have a rehearsal before then so there’s no real way I can get a nap, unless I can run off to some room and pass out. It’s a Christmas concert and I hate xmas music, maybe I’ll come up with some lame excuse like “sorry I can’t make it to the concert, I accidently impaled my cat with the telephone and now I have to rewire the house.”
I’m getting pretty tired. I think it’s because I didn’t get a good 10:00 nap. perhaps I should take a short 5 min. nap at 12:00
4:20 AM Saturday Dec 20
The night was going fine until now. i took an extra nap at 4:00 and now I can barely stay awake. I’m doing to try some light exercise while listening to music.
3:19 PM
I haven’t slipped up but I’ve been feeling tired and cranky all day like I went back to where I was on the 4th and 5th days… This sucks. I just finished the concert. I managed to sneak out to the car and get a restful nap 20 minutes early. I’m starting to think that adapting might be particularly hard because I’m still young enough that my body is growing. I need more sleep to function 100% than does a 30-year-old, so perhaps I need a schedule with extra naps, like 3 naps during the day and 5 at night instead of 3 and 3. Regardless, I’m going to tough it out. Before I try to make any modifications to the schedule I want to be sure I’ve adjusted to the real thing. I’ll continue sneaking in extra naps when I’m so tired that I feel I will sleep through an alarm, and I’ll keep taking naps on the floor (my bed is made of Francesco-magnets — fragnets? or magnescos? — and it’s impossible to get up if I’m sleepy.)
Earlier today I went out to get some art stuff: charcoal, and woodless pencils (I’ve never tried them) so that I can end this week-long procrastination streak and actually do something creative with all my extra time. I’m sure if I do something that I’m excited about then I will naturally have more energy. In fact now that I think about it, I think this has been my greatest hindrance. All I do is slough around and occasionally get mad at my mom. Even if I weren’t trying to adapt to a crazy-low sleep quota I would be tired all the time, because I have nothing to do!
I’m gonna try to change this. Remember the two nights I learned how to play spoons? I had energy then and I didn’t fall asleep even though I was dead tired. I have got to stop watching so much TV.
And so Slippery McChuck became an annoying optimist.
I really want fruit right now — I’m definitely craving it more than I used to.
[part 11]
9:27 PM
I just ate a navel orange the size of a small SUV. The thing looked like a grapefruit. I’m wide awake — so awake in fact that I was unable to fall asleep during my 6:00 nap.
We went to the supermarket to by a hell of a lot of fruit – my mom is worried that we wont finish it before we leave for Chicago on Tuesday, but I assured her that I will eat it all in a couple of nights.
4:05 AM Dec 21
four o-clock hit and I’m awake enough that I’m not gonna take the extra nap. I’ve been drawing pretty pictures and playing piano most of the night. Now I’m gonna eat and play violin. I feel good, according to the chart this is the most awake I’ve felt at 4:00 in the last three nights. I assume I’ll feel like crap between 6:00 and 10:00, but I think I’m starting to narrow down the amount of my day spent feeling like crap from a majority of the day to a couple hours.
*huuuuuhhhhgh* (that’s the sound of me drooling over the prospect of eating delicious fruits)
6:33 AM
I tried taking the 6:00 nap on the floor without covers seeing as at school I’ll probably be taking many naps in places where I won’t have a mattress or covers. Consequently I didn’t sleep as well and my dreams were so confused that I had forgotten what time it was and that I was trying to fall asleep. I don’t feel rested at all so maybe I’ll take an extra nap at 8
A common misconception of what this cycle does is that people believe it is designed to get the minimum amount of sleep so that you can be awake all the time, but only barely alive. One would expect me to be tired all the time. Instead almost all of the time I feel either wide awake or really tired. Whereas on a monophasic schedule, sleep deprivation made me just a little tired all of the time, polyphasic sleep is black and white — when you’re awake, you’re awake. When you’re asleep, you’re asleep.
1:49 PM
still remarkably awake. After my 10 AM nap, I was talking to Staci and literally fell asleep in the middle of the conversation. She said something, then there was a five second pause, and she’s like “Francesco? did you fall asleep?” This happened like ten times, and each time I was having the beginning of a dream. It was really weird, like I was living in the combination of the dream world and reality. I couldn’t tell when reality ended and the dream started and sometimes it took me a couple seconds after waking up to figure out when I had dosed off and to realize that dragons don’t exist.
7:06 PM
Again, I’m not having any trouble falling asleep today, but I also feel more sleep deprived than yesterday. We were out shopping all day and we weren’t going to get back until about 6:30 so I decided to sleep in the car, and it worked! Tonight, we are finally celebrating my birthday, only instead of cake, we are having brownies!
1:00 AM
I’m really cold. Guess I’m sleep deprived again. The entire day I’ve felt pretty crappy yet still been able to move around. In terms of activity, this is the most awake I’ve been of all days since starting the experiment, but I’m nowhere near 100% in terms of how I feel. Being tired all the time really sucks. During school there have been weeks at a time when I feel like this, but then there was always a weekend where I could sleep in and recover for a day or two. Now, not only have I been sleep deprived for a week without reprieve, but it feels like two weeks.
Anyway,
I’m done complaining. My mom says I get more whiney when I’m tired and as much as I hate agreeing with her, she’s probably right. Reading my complaints can’t be much fun… so here; read this limerick instead:
I drew a picture last night
paying attention to shadow and light
I copied a tortoise
while listening to technoise
And all shall tremble before his might
note: technoise = bad techno
[part 12]
7:06 AM
domn! I slipped up again. The wierd thing is, I wake up without ever remembering having fallen asleep. It’s like someone hit my force restart button without giving me a chance to save what I was working on.
12:33 PM
A friend told me that recent research points to the other (non-REM) phases of sleep as important for developing memories. I have found that I’ve been really forgetful lately and there are entire parts of the last couple days that are a blur and others that I can’t remember at all. I don’t know if this is the sleep deprivation or if its a last effect of living on uberman. Also It could just be because I’m awake so much longer that I have trouble recalling events from two days ago to the same degree that I’d normally have recalling events 4 days ago. because I’ve been awake for 4-days-worth.
I finally feel normal. All of last night I was dead tired, but after my slip up (it was only an hour and a half of sleep) I felt a lot better. Perhaps I will have to adapt to the Everyman sleep schedule instead (It’s like the uberman, only with 2-3 hours of sleep a night and fewer naps during the day) For the time being I’m gonna keep toughing out uberman.
The last couple of days I’ve been functioning as if I were a monophasic chronic nap-taker. I’m awake all the time, and I’m normal during the day (whenever I’m not napping) but at night I’m so shot from lack of sleep that I might as well be sleeping. During the day I’ve essentially adapted to the schedule, but I expect it to take a lot longer before I feel the same at night as I do during the day. I need to convince my body that nightly melatonin secretion is a thing of the past. “Go secrete your melatonin somewhere else! …sicko”
Francesco’s limericks suck
If selling them, he’d have no luck
When he writes at night
His endings are a fright
But this one is worse
[part 13]
2:25 AM Tues 12/23
A priest came to my house and baptized me for a second time and Christianed me Slippery McChuck (who was apparently a martyr during the crusades) I took an extra nap at 12:00 and after waking up (and feeling refreshed) decided to relax for 15 minutes rather than get up immediately. I woke up an hour and a half later. grrr. At least I’m slipping up at different times each night so that I’m not conditioning myself for any one time for core sleep
5:06 AM Tues 12/23
Still truckin. As long as I move around I feel fine, but if I stay still for a couple minutes I get really tired. Tomorrow I leave for Chicago. The time there is an hour later so my nap times will be 3, 7, and 11… 3 PM and 7 PM seem highly inconvenient if we do anything that involves leaving the house. Perhaps I should switch to a better time once I figure out what times we’ll be doing stuff. I’ve been doing a fair amount of drawing; I hope to keep it up in Chicago. It’s really fun and relaxing without baking my brain like TV does. Most importantly, I stay awake when I draw and I don’t have to tire myself out by moving around.
I managed to break my alarm clock. When the death metal on the computer hit I started freaking out and tried to unplug the speakers. I grabbed a wire a pulled and yanked the alarm clock out of the wall socket and I saw a flash of sparks. At the plug of the alarm the wires are bare and seem like they might be close enough to short. I think it’s about time to toss it out.
12:35 PM Tues 12/23
I’ve been getting kind of discouraged. I just feel subpar all the time. Upon closer reading of others experiences this is normal, and I can expect it to take a another 4 or 5 days before I acquire the legendary boost of energy and automatic waking up. I don’t think I’ve ever been this determined to stick with something so difficult and unnecessary. I feel pretty proud of myself. I’m debating whether I should let myself dose off during the flight to Chicago. I assume a long nap during the day isn’t as detrimental to the adaption as a long nap at night.
[part 14]
3:31 PM
I’m at the airport now. 2:00 nap lasted about an hour in the car. I’m getting way too much sleep and its making me tired :) I didn’t set and alarm because I told my mom to wake me up. I don’t know why she didn’t but now that I got my long nap I’m gonna restrict myself to 20 minutes on the flight.
Muffins are delicious but did you ever notice how gross of a word it is? muffin. Its like a combination between mold and some vernacular term for genitals. gross. Whoever made up that word is a sicko and should stop excreting melatonin on me at night.
I have no idea how I’m gonna make myself wake up at night in Chicago. I’ll be in an apartment with 4 others so subwoofer-to-the-face tactic would wake everyone else up as well. My best idea so far is to put headphones on but I might take them off in my sleep… duct tape? Maybe vibrating-cell-phone-to-the-crotch would work, too.
5:31 PM 12/23
Yay! our flight is 2 hours late. Maybe I can break out the spoons and lay down a hat and get some dough for college. I decided I’m going to use the flight to organize my entire music collection. It’s gonna be a blast.
I’m still in the grog. I think whenever I oversleep I feel crummy until the next nap. Its counterintuitive – you’d think my body would appreciate the extra sleep and use it to make me less tired. No instead it wastes all my extra nap time on useless non-REM cycles… what a brat.
DIA wifi leaves something to be desired… but after the internet at school I think I’m a bit spoiled (7 megabytes/second I downloaded a 4 gig file in under ten minutes)
5:48 PM 12/23
so apparently my mom did wake me up in the car. After 45 minutes she told me to get up, to which my tricky subconscious replied that I hadn’t slept at all so she let me dose off again. I remember none of this and I obviously had slept for a good 30 minutes when she woke me. Man, I’m so smart I can trick myself — in my sleep!
8:00 PM 12/23
wooooooooo. Still stuck on the plane. We still don’t know if the plane can leave tonight, but we get free cocktails in the air (the entire cabin cheered when that was announced — hilarious)
I’m finally starting to wake up. I was completing a sudoku with my mom and I was going pretty fast… however one of us messed up so we had to start over therefor my cognitive capacities may or may not be functioning normally.
I’ve become a lot better at waiting since starting this schedule. When I have nothing to do I’m tired enough that I can just zone out. The two hours waiting to board the plane went by surprisingly fast even though I wasn’t passing the time by doing anything. This has been happening most nights – instead of being more productive with my time I essentially just sleep with my eyes open.
11:27 PM 12/23
I’m on the plane now. I feel good! Even though it’s late I feel pretty fully awake (9 out of 10 both physically and mentally. I’ve noticed a pattern that whenever I slip up and sleep too much I feel like crap for the next 4-8 hours, but then after that and into the next day I feel more awake. Looking back on my chart, this is the most awake I have felt at this time since starting the adaptation.
I said this a few days ago and it probably wasn’t true, but now it seems accurate: it’s all getting easier and if there is a hill between monophasic sleeping and poly, I believe I am on the other side of it.
2:08 AM Wed. Dec. 24 (chicago time – 1:08 in Colorado)
Wow, plane landed but we’re waiting to get to the gate. I think we’re over 5 hours late. I spent the flight reading and organizing my music collection (I only got through a fourth of it.) This is the first time I’ve read late at night without being on the verge of falling asleep. I actually understood what was going on!
These next couple days are going to be weird. I don’t know how I’ll sneak in my naps if we leave the house, but I get the feeling that we’ll be home and warm most of the time. My brother knows how to relax. The weird thing is going to be getting food. I can’t really raid the fridge like I can at home… I’ll have to discuss this with them.
I’ve noticed an unattractive bulge around my tummy, but I’ve also lost a couple pounds. My disorganized eating isn’t very healthy. There’s a gym in the apartment my brother lives in – perhaps I can get a key and work out at night. I should start regular eating habits and I should get healthier food – perhaps I can’t process fat as easily when awake. Realistically, I don’t really expect this to happen over break, but if successful, I’ll definitely plan out a regular schedule for school:
I will need a fridge and microwave – every time I go to the dining hall I’ll get an extra tray to warm up later – I’ll try having 6 small meals either right before or right after each nap. I’ll also start getting more veggies and hitting the vegan stuff.
Also, with my current class schedule I’ll need the 9, 1, 5 time schedule (which, with time zone adjustment is what I’m currently on) and occasionally I may have to scoot naps over 15 minutes or so to make time to come back to the dorm, otherwise I’ll just find places around campus where I can crash.
4:54 AM
We arrived! I had a snack with my mom (the water tastes terrible here) and she went off to bed. The whole time she had this confused look like “so you’re just gonna stay up? where will you be?” Marie (wife of Klaus, my brother) made the couch with sheets for me, but I tried it out and the couch is too comfy to sleep on at night, I would never wake up, I’ll have to use the floor instead at least for nights.
We were at the airport waiting at baggage claim when 3:00 hit. It was really crowded and people were moving everywhere and bumping into me. I sat down in a corner cross-legged and hugged my backpack and violin and fell asleep nodding my head forward. I’m really surprised I fell asleep, cus it was noisy and I was not comfortable in the slightest. I slept through my cell phone alarm and my mom woke me up once she got the bags.
part [15]
7:56 AM Wed 12/24
Wow the 7:00 nap was an adventure! First of all, I forgot about taking it until 11 minutes late. The main problem is that sunlight was already filtering in through the window and I’m used to taking the nap at 6:00 when it’s still pitch dark in CO. I was pretty tried so for fear of oversleeping, at first I tried sleeping on the floor which didn’t work. Then I switched to the couch without covers which didn’t work. Then I switched to couch with covers and the cellphone alarm two inches from my ear. The last time, it took me about ten, maybe more minutes to fall asleep, so I didn’t get my full 20 minutes of sleep.
I woke up immediately at the sound of the cell phone vibrating and caught it before it even rang, but I was really tired. After forcing myself to get up, which was really hard — I think Klaus custom-made his couch out of fragnets and magnescos — I felt tired for about 15 minutes and then suddenly foom! I have energy. I actually feel hyper, like I have more energy than usual but my eyelids still feel a bit funky like I could go to sleep if I wanted to.
It’s weird, yesterday I was actually considering giving this up, and suddenly today it seems to have clicked in. I wouldn’t consider myself 100%, but probably pretty close (another 9 out of 10)
5:49 PM
Today has been full of slipups because I don’t have a good alarm clock. I slept through it at 11:00 and didn’t wake up for my mom calling me after. I was pissed — I feel like I’m so close to adapting completely. Anyway, I think I only slept and hour or an hour and a half. Then for the 3:00 nap, I tried slipping the phone near my crotch, and that didn’t wake me up either (maybe I’m too used to it?) However, I automatically woke up after 30 minutes of napping feeling totally refreshed which was cool.
I forgot to bring underwear so we just went out to get some. It is outrageously cold and windy and slushy outside.
2:26 AM thurs. 12/25
yay Christmas!!
I had to shift my 11:00 PM nap a full hour earlier because we were at the midnight mass and I couldn’t just dose off in the middle of a sermon. It took me a while to get to sleep, but I finally did. Now I’m really tired though because it’s been over four hours since my last nap.
I ws considering being the grinch and stealing christmas by taking the tree and presents and hiding them when everyone was asleep, but I don’t have any good place to put them that isn’t immediately obvious, as we’re sharing a two-bedroom apartment. Anyway, I’ve put off packing presents until tonight (uberman gives procrastination a new meaning.)
[part 16]
12:56
crap. slept all night, this’ll set me back a while. I need a stronger alarm.
8 fucking hours!
12:59 AM Fri 12/26
I’m sick of taking data all the time and it hasn’t really been useful. Instead once or twice a day I’ll try taking reflex tests. I just took one online but It’s late and I had half a drink.
3:00 AM
I am back at square one. None of my naps have been successful. This is total cock-shit.
6:53
just played fallout 3 for about 6 hours strait (with interruptions for unsuccessful naps)
uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…. Now I remember why I don’t play video games.
[part 17]
7:27 AM Sat 12/27
Wow. This really is like starting over only I’m not as motivated. I didn’t sleep for about two days. Finally my last nap I managed to sleep after tossing around for 10 or 15 minutes. This night I felt totally out of it, but I was able to keep myself awake. The hardest part was peeling myself off of the couch after the 3:00 nap.
I finally found a method that works for waking me up. I’m using the phone as usual with the backup deathmetal on headphones and then I sleep with headphones on. If nothing else I think the experiment has taught me to survive on no sleep.
In the last 4 days I think I’ve slipped up 8 times… so I’ve definitely regressed a bit in my adaptation, however I feel miles ahead of how I felt the 3rd or fourth day at this time. I’m not gonna give up, but damn, I’ve ruined my entire break. Additionally my entire family is discouraging me from sticking to it. They believe it doesn’t work, it’s unhealthy, and immature. But damn it, my eyes are on the goal; this is gonna work.
I’ve stopped taking data and I keep forgetting to take my naps so I started a couple of them as much as 30 minutes late. I’ll try to shape up my game from here on out.
4:16 AM Sun 12/28
Another flop from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM yesterday. This is falling apart… I think for the following reasons:
1: It’s been so long that I’m losing interest
2: Taking the trip to Chicago messed up my schedule so that I have less control over where I can nap and occasionally things come up that I have to go to that interfere with a nap.
3: Everyone in my family is telling me over and over that this isn’t going to work, that I’m ruining my body and that they are worried and I should stop. After I hear the same message repeated 20 times a day from 4 different members of my family it starts to get to me.
Right before my massive flop I was feeling good though… I don’t know if it was the mini flops before then, but I was still feeling ok on about 3 hours of sleep a day. I really need to get through a week without flops and then I think I’ll be set.
[part 18]
8:48 PM 12/28
For whatever reason I just can’t make myself adhere strictly to the schedule. I keep forgetting.
9:13 AM Tues.
I’ve been skimping out on updates because nothing that interesting has happened. A few more slip ups… I’m making one last ditch effort to adapt before school starts. I’m going to adhere strictly to the schedule and my mom said she’d help me wake up (even if that involves dumping water on me.)
I managed to fall asleep sitting cross-legged again — this time in a museum.
I’ve been playing a lot of Wii because my brother got one for Christmas. Now I’m really sore. Also, I rock at bowling.
Right now I’m at the airport heading back to Colorado. I think adhering to uberman will be a whole lot easer back home.
10:34
I’m in the airplane right now and on the verge of passing out. People have been emailing asking me how long I plan to continue this madness. Well, The whole idea was to adapt over the break so that I can come back and be on the schedule for school. I would never do something this sick just for the fun of it during a break… I enjoy sleeping just not when there’s work to be done.
If I don’t keep typing I’m gonna dose off… I need to write something, anything…
limerick!
(number 3)
Some of us pick our noses
Others like to strike strange poses
When standing in line
To sample good wine
Some like to beat me with hoses.
…that was not good at all… I’d almost erase it, except I’m not erasing things just to see how little they make sense later.
limerick number 4…
If they say time is money
and it takes time to make honey
Then a form of dough
is BEES, yo!
…but then cash would be kinda runny
hey! that was pretty good… perhaps my best. limerick. ever.
!!
I’ve never met a dude named Susan
If I did I bet he’d be boozin’
We would play some Wii
You know, him versus me
At bowling he’d totally be losin’
Awesome, now I’ve finally woken myself up with crappy rhythms and beats and I bet I wont be able to sleep for my 11 o clock. I was really tired too… ooh man, this is gonna be an interesting week.
Alright Ktttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttansas!… Missouri. We are landing in Kansas, Missouri… oh well I guess Kansas *city*, Missouri… and it is finally time for my nap.
12:09 PM
oh man… I keep falling asleep. I think I ‘m primarily nocturnal at this point… cool except Ii’s por the tired the entire day.
7:08 PM (Colorado time)
I’ve been forcing myself awake all day which is really hard when I’m strapped into a vehicle. My mom helped a lot going through such extremes as spraying me with water
4:52 PM 12/31
Last night after waking up from my 6:00 nap, I decided that I didn’t want to continue. I pulled a white flag and went back to bed and slept until 1:30.
Now I’m furious. I feel like I’m just giving up after a moment of weakness. I can’t stand that everyone who said I couldn’t do it was right. I really wanted to just once, show everyone up by doing something considered impossible. But I don’t think its impossible, and I’m sure I could’ve done it and I still could do it.
I’ve sacrificed the last two and a half weeks of a vacation so that I could get something that I really wanted: to adapt to uberman by the time the quarter started. The problem was the uberman schedule is extremely inconvenient for a winter vacation. There’s nothing to keep me awake and the things I have to do during the day never follow a consistent schedule that I can develop a rhythm off of. In that sense it might be easier to adapt to this crazy thing while at school.
So this is my conflict: I can’t keep up uberman because I pass out from sleep dep and/or make myself miserable, and I can’t stop it because I’m too thick-headed and can’t stand the idea of my brother being right… again.
The thing that really makes me think that it is possible is that the day before christmas I was feeling good. I had slipped up a couple of times before then but in a week I hadn’t gotten more than 3 hours any one day. Then that night I passed out and slept a full 8 hours and everything went downhill from there. But if I had kept it up, I’m sure I would have shifted over to polyphasic sleep in a matter a 2 or 3 days.
The other solution would be to give up for now and learn to walk before I can run. Maybe I need to learn how to organize a productive schedule around 8 hours of sleep a night, before I can adapt to a schedule that has so much external pressure to become disorganized. Again, it pains me to write this out in words because it sounds like something my mom would say and I am SO sick of people telling me what to do (I’ve just spent a vacation with my family, and every time sleep gets brought up someone has to put in his own two cents)
so yeah… does anyone else out there believe that I can actually do this?
[part 19]
1:43 PM January 1
And with the new year I revert back to a monophasic life. My problem was certainly not lack of determination but lack of discipline. And in this respect perhaps it’s true that I’m immature — I assume that as people grow older they gain discipline and wisdom at the expense of determination and later intelligence.
For now I’m going to stay away from uberman – I’m not gonna mess up the beginning of the new quarter. Yesterday I was really angry with myself in a pretty childish way (I’m sure the sleep dep didn’t help.) I’m missing the point – this isn’t a chance to show people up, this is an experiment with a drastically different lifestyle, but I before I can successfully change my basic daily rhythm I’m going to need some more experience living out a regular rhythm.
If my problem is that I don’t have enough time, the first thing I need to do is make my time more efficient. Once I’ve done that, adding more hours to the day will be much more beneficial.
I plan to try uberman again once I feel like I can handle my current academic load on 8 hours of sleep a night — maybe next quarter, maybe next year.
so what’s it like sleeping at night again? Well my back is really sore, and I have that nasty morning taste on my breath and my head feels fuzzy, but mentally I’m much more relaxed…
So this is the end, and the end of my updates. This has been a good learning experience. I learned how to stick to something difficult in the face of discouragement… and how not to. I learned considerably about how my body handles sleep dep, which will be very useful during any all-nighters in the future. Hopefully I’ve taught myself to take deeper naps and to fall asleep more quickly. So yes, I’m going to try this again, but only once I’m ready for it psychologically. And for now I’ll just grumble every morning about how much I hate circadian rhythms. :)
I have typed 23 full pages single spaced and the experiment lasted from 5:30 PM Thursday Dec 11 until 6:30 AM on Dec 31: 19 and a half days.
have a great end of break!