Polywood

Had an unavoidable hiccup today; my power went out and thus shut off my alarm clock.  What I find annoying is the fact that even though my alarm clock is plugged into the wall I’ve also put a battery inside of it for just such occasion. Battery FAIL. I’m considering buying one of those cooking alarms that runs off springs, the idea is fool proof.

Either way I didn’t oversleep long, I slept for about 40 minutes instead of 20. While asleep I felt something to be rather odd with the length I was getting and immediately woke up… this can only mean I’m adapting quite nicely. But this is all to be seen as it’s only the 5th day.

Also I am still mildly sleep deprived, so I know that my oversleep has not affected my adaptation. For all intents and purposes, and I hope you are taking notes here, it is best to just continue as if nothing has happened when mistakes like this happen. Meaning I will still do my 2 hour at 12 am.

I hear that it is a good idea to figure out something to do to pass the adaptation time that is not mentally taxing due to the lethargic zombie like state your in. I considered picking up video gaming again, but realized I really don’t need to. I feel great, not 100%, but good enough to do my normal activities.

A little about me: I’m 27 and graduated college a little over 2 years ago with two degrees; Business Management and Psychology. Both of which I do not use as I work as a graphic designer and a web developer of sorts. Nothing too serious, but skills I’ve learned on my own and ironically enough was just as efficient with when I had graduated high school as I was when I graduated college. I live in Hollywood CA and work in downtown Los Angeles. I’m originally from… well that’s hard to say as I moved around a lot. But I grew up in California.

I’ve built some sites, done some graphic design work as well making lookbooks / catalogs / designs and currently work for a company downtown managing some websites among a myriad of other things. My freelance work last month and December shot up like I have never experienced before and if it keeps going this well I will have hit my 6 figure goal.

I tell you this as I kind of want you to understand the type of person I am and the primary reason I am doing this polyphasic sleeping. I have been told that I am a very persistent and hard-working individual. I always went / go the extra mile in everything I did / do and someone telling me I can’t do something irks me to no end. On top of being that sort of personality I genuinely hate sleeping. I HATE it. Imagine if you live to be 99 years and slept 8 hours every night of your life… that’s 33 YEARS of doing nothing by sleeping! 33 years of being in a fetal, useless position 24 hours a day 7 days a week for 33 years! Not learning, not growing, not becoming better than you were the day of last that you were asleep still! UGH! Does that piss you off? Like even a little bit? It does to me… a lot! 33 years of probably the only life we have on this planet. Quite possibly the only conscious moment we will ever experience is this life. Before and after was dark as far as we as individuals are concerned and can prove. There was NOTHING, or at least we can’t prove anything from before or after the short time we are here on this earth… and your telling me that 1/3 of this short time I will be forced to have to spend snoring and tossing and turning all night to wake up groggy and pissed for the rest of the 2/3 of my life?! NO THANKS! If that alone isn’t a reason to do this then I don’t know what is.

I find wonder in everything this life offers, whether you spend it playing video games all day or spend it pursuing material or monetary wealth, or spend it helping others and being a moral compass for the human race wouldn’t you rather have MORE of it… of that time you enjoy? Contradictory, yes there are people that ENJOY sleeping for some odd reason, but those lunatics aside let’s enjoy what we have right now and say “F you sleep ya big JERK!”

There really is no difference between sleeping and death to me in my mind. I choose life.

ha

it’s almost my 12 am nap time. By the way I hate the word nap, it’s bothersome. I would make up and use an acronym but I hate using those too, unless of course it’s a curse word in print then I’ll consider it. Saying “it’s almost my 12 am sleep time” doesn’t work either. Vocalizing it doesn’t really flow… ya know? Joe? Bow?

I’m tired…

A particularly rough day of which had everything to do with the fact that a security guard interrupted my afternoon lunch sleep.

For the record I am on a everyman polyphasic schedule which consists of a 2 hour rest at 12 am, and 20 minute rests at 8am, 1:20pm and 6:40 pm.

My job is a rather hectic busy one… everyday I am just swamped with things to do, so being on an uberman schedule (which I’d much rather do) is just not feasible with my work situation. The Uberman schedule is taking a 20 minute nap every 4 hours amounting to about 2 hours of sleep a day. The currently schedule I’m on is 3 hours of sleep a day… not bad but I know I could handle the Uberman, just can’t fit that into the work schedule I have.

A novice may think that I could simply cut my 2 hour to one hour, which is possible, but I’m heeding the phenomenon that the more spaced out my naps are the longer a “Core” time must be. From most of my research it seems that the longer ones core sleep time is the longer one can stay up before having to have to take a nap. For instance, if ones core is 8 hours, then one can stay up the whole day. If the core is 4-5 hours one can stay up half the day, or something along those lines. Extrapolate that idea and you arrive at mine, the everyman, where I take a core of 2 hours and can stay up for about 6 hours before having to have a nap. The next one down from mine would be of course the Uberman, which is no core, rather 4 hours between naps.

I have done well so far, aside from the security guard knocking on my car window and waking me up from my 1:20 pm nap, I have kept to my schedule.

My 1:20 is by far my favorite, I wake up so refreshed but by 6:40 I’m normally having problems functioning. So the fact that my 1:20 was ruined today was rough. I had brief moments of blacking out, that sounds worse than what it was but for some split seconds I just went completely blank in my thoughts and action. Good thing I didn’t need to communicate with anyone else. Also when I’d move my head too quickly to the left or right it felt like the whole world needed a couple of seconds to catch up to where my focus was. That’s really the only way I can explain this experience but it all equates to sleep deprivation, but I’m sure I haven’t even experienced the half of it yet.

Ah cool aspect of my naps that I’d like to note is my perception of time that has past when I wake up. When I went to sleep for my 1:20 and was awoken by the security guard I literally felt as if I overslept or something and an hour had past. Looking at my watch I noticed I had only been asleep for 5 minutes. This is something I have experienced in my first attempts at polyphasic as well and are a good sign in my opinion. Good because that means my mind is starting to fall into REM sleep quickly, experiencing stages that are typically visited during later time periods of a full nights rest.

From all of my research with Polyphasic sleeping I have noticed that polyphasers tend to “fall off the face of the plant” in their blog/vlog writing/logging after a certain time period. Either because they failed to maintain their schedule or that they just ran out of things to say are both valid and probably the most frequent reasons this happens. I know it will happen to me as well, one way or another, more likely the latter, but I will stay earnest in this as much as I can.

And I thought this was a city that never sleeps.

Around 2 am when most of the bars close there is a slight rise in the frequency of slurred speak and shuffling feet from my peers wondering around in the dark outside my window. But after a good 2-3 hours I could probably hear the sound a pin drop.

I rather enjoy walking around outside during this time. It’s quite a sight to see Hollywood blvd so empty and desolate… almost as if the apocalypse happened overnight and I was awake and unaware during it.

This is my third day on Polyphasic sleep and also my third attempt. Yeah yeah, I know what you’re thinking, this will probably be another miserable failed attempt but if you knew the circumstances that I intend to relay to you I’d hope you’d cheer me on.

The first time I went for a good week on a Uberman schedule, sleeping for 20 minutes every 4 hours of every day. Accumulating 2 hours of sleep per day and 6 extra waking hours from a typical 8 hour sleeping night; I was able to do this due to my roommate being out of town ushering in a beautiful but oh so short moment of precious silence. As soon as he took flight I went straight into my first attempt hoping to be fully adapted by the time he got back… I did not adapt and his erratic drinking schedule along with my inability to refuse a shot of vodka got the best of me. FAIL

My second attempt had great potential as well; I started to fall into REM sleep quickly during my nap periods and adaptation was a smooth ride. Again my roommate ( a different one this time) was quite a dramatic, obnoxious, loud, annoying human being and ruined a few consecutive naps causing me to (one) fall in love with sleeping in my car in the mid summers afternoon of Southern California and (two) simultaneously giving me the epiphany that I just can’t do this having roommates.

So here I am… I moved into my own place on Hollywood blvd right in the center of tourism central. Kind of ANNOYING. If I see another foreigner taking a picture of me I will punch fast and hard with no regrets! I’m a little tired and I am not an exhibit. Yes my hair is crazy looking, no it has little to do with my not getting sleep, I simply like it this way.

err… sorry

These tangents, hopefully, will not become more frequent as my deprivation increases. Really wish I had started this blog on the day I had started my successful polyphasic attempt… yes this one, yes 2 days ago. As it would have given insight into who I am before I became insane. Or maybe revealing that I indeed had been insane already… one will never know. Although it is safe to presume that anyone trying this has to be a little insane to begin with.

I suppose this would be the best time to give a synopsis of what I’m going through and of what I’ll be blogging about.

Polyphasic sleeping for humans is the act of significantly reducing an individuals amount of sleep by dividing the typical 8 hour sleeping period into shorter instances preferable equidistant over the period of a day. As you may know the 8 hour period of sleep includes 5 different stages of sleep namely phase 1, 2 , 3, 4 and REM. We still aren’t fully sure what the phases of sleep do for us, but we DO know what happens when we don’t reach a certain one or are awakened during a certain phase. Wake up during phase 1 and you will have felt like you are falling, very unnerving, I’m sure you’ve felt it. Phase 2 is what the bulk of your sleep includes (proportionally speaking),  different experiences are felt during disruption of this phase. Phase 3 disruption is the hardest to wake someone up in, it’s what we mean when we say “you were in a deep sleep”… confusion soon follows with the roused individual. Phase 4 disruption is much like phase 3 and is considered a secondary part of the prior phase. It’s slightly inaccurate to refer to these sequentially as it is known that humans can jump from one stage to another almost instantaneously, which is an important observation I’ll reference later, but for the record most normal, healthy and rested people do progress in this order and then undulate through the phases throughout the night. The REM stage is the stage we hear the most about. Rapid Eye Movement, 20% of the total normal 8 hour slumber, the stage where we have dreams, and are said to encode into long term memory much of the days progressions.

So all the babble aside here’s the important part to understand, studies have been done that have shown individuals who were disrupted during the REM stage of sleep showing significant motor, cognizant, and comprehensive depreciation, MUCH more so than when these same test individuals were disrupted during the other 4 phases. On top of that, there is a positive correlation between the proportion of disrupted REM sleep and the EXPEDIENCY that the same individual fell back into REM sleep once they were allowed to go to bed again.

Basically, if you lose too much REM sleep your body is more likely to either skip or rush through the stages 1-4 and hit REM quicker.

We don’t really know what losing stages 1-4 does to us, but we do know that losing REM is crucial to being able to function normally, regardless of if it’s only 20% of what the total mind’s night includes.

Essentially, if one deprives himself of sleep just to a perfect amount, let’s say by 80% , the bodies mind will enter REM sleep automatically, everytime that mind is sleeping.

And thus the concept of Polyphasic sleeping is born. Well technically it didn’t really start that way, it was more theory follows form, but hey no one’s died yet so what better way to make whatever postulation you want with no repercussions!

So here I am, depriving myself of 80% of a normal nights sleep, training my mind and body to fall directly into REM sleep as soon as I take a nap. Trying to achieve the 20%  before having to wake back up. Obviously this is the hardest part of the whole idea as your mind being used to getting a good 3-4 hours of sleep before having to do any sort of REM NOW has to figure out that it needs to do REM immediately and only has 20 minutes to do it or the creature that houses it will probably die.

Here I am, it’s day 3. Nothing really seems fully real, it’s like the whole world is lagging. Countless journals and blogs on the topic profess that the adaptation phase lasts for about a week to 2 weeks, and full adaptation comes after a month.

If you don’t hear from me, my body is either somewhere on the side of the 101 freeway because I fell asleep at the wheel or I am laughing hysterically at the walls in my apartment because I think it is a sea of clowns.

Haha… It’s 11:50 I’m going to sleep for a sec. After, of course, this guy who just walked in makes me a balloon animal.