Diary of a Polyphasic Sleeper

Around the time I began experimenting with polyphasic sleep, I began keeping a log of when I was actually going to sleep.  Since days were blurring together, a record of my naps was very useful in trying to translate how my waking hours mapped onto days as the rest of the world experiences them.  The blue areas represent time I went to sleep.  The dark blue represents time I recalled dreams upon waking (and therefore know for a fact that I had achieved REM sleep).

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I believe this log was also helpful in formulating the hybrid schedule that I am attempting now.  Looking at this graphic, there were a few things I noticed right away.  I was struggling to staying awake in the wee hours of the morning, while having almost no difficulty during my traditional waking hours.  I also noticed that I remembered my dreams upon waking most often at 8am.  Sometimes I would recall dream in the earlier hours of the morning, but never during the day.

I combined this information with the subjective observation that I wasn’t accomplishing anything useful or entertaining during the early morning hours that I fought to keep my eyes open.  It was pretty intuitive, then to imagine getting a sold chunk of sleep from midnight to 4:30am (estimated 3 or maybe 4 REM cycles) and hang onto a couple of naps.  8am is an obvious choice because of the known success I’ve had hitting REM.  Noon was chosen as the second nap time largely because it is easy to slip out during lunch when I am at work.

Note that the dark blue areas are almost certainly not the only times I reached REM sleep.  Those are simple the times I remembered a dream upon waking.  Particularly in the stretches where I was asleep for several hours, I’m confident I had one or more REM cycles.  It’s likely that some of the 30 minute stretches that appear the lighter shade of blue covered areas of REM sleep that I just can’t verify.

Polyphasic Hybrid

I’ve been thinking about an idea for a hybrid somewhere between the Uberman schedule (the specific polyphasic schedule I’ve been trying) and regular monophasic sleep.  As I was easing into polyphasic sleeping, I was taking two naps during the day and then sleeping for a modest chunk of the night.  I remember that didn’t feel too bad.

I’m picturing a core sleep from midnight to 4:30am with naps at 8:00am and noon.  The 4pm and 8pm naps are the ones that I’m the most likely to stay awake through right now anyway.  And from midnight to 4:30 I seem to have a great deal of difficulty staying awake. 

I think this alternate schedule would give a little more flexibility.  If social stuff was happening, I think I could stay up past midnight and shift my sleep a little later without being blown out the next day.  It gives me a wide chunk of time to naturally be awake from 12:30pm to midnight every day, which seems ideally suited for social engagements, even when traveling out of town.  (And truthfully, I think I’d have a little more flexibility on when those naps occurred.  If 9am and 2pm were the times sleep was available, I expect that would work since I would have stored up some energy from my core sleep.)

It still gives me the advantage of “stealing” a few extra hours out of the day in the early morning when the rest of the world is snoozing.  I’d be sleeping 5.5 hours a day and should get 5-6 REM cycles.  (6 being the target of the Uberman schedule, and 5 being what I think I got on a monophasic schedule.)   The only question is if my body would be smart enough to jump to REM sleep for the short daytime naps when I was sleeping for a longer period each night.  I think it might, based on what’s been happening over the past few weeks.

Since I’d still be getting up and going to work by 5:30, I’d still be leaving for the day at 3 (which I really like).

I think I could adapt to this pretty easily, since it’s very close to what I’m doing now.  If it does work, than I would be getting some of the best elements of polyphasic and monophasic sleep.

(Re)Set Polyphasers to Stun

It is in the wee hours of the morning as I write this, and I am wide-awake.  Why?  This past weekend we visited with my wife’s family and my adherence to a polyphasic sleep schedule was haphazard.  I truly expected this meant that I was starting from scratch with my attempts to adjust my sleeping patterns.  If that’s not the case, then why?

I think the approach that I took last week, might not be the best one for me.  I took a week off from work and attempted to make a complete switch to the new schedule.  The problem was, I had so much time on my hands that I ended up being bored.  When I'm bored, the attraction of sleep is astoundingly amplified.  I repeatedly overslept in the early morning and couldn’t make much progress.  This week I am going to work everyday.  Since so much of my time is eaten up at work, I don’t have quite so much time to spend at home running out of things to do.  In about an hour I’ll start getting ready to go to work, and I still have a healthy list of things I’d like to work on. 

I think this alternate approach is going to make it much easier to adjust to the schedule.  Viva la polyphasia.

My Weekend At The Labor Camp

The primary reason I got into a career in computers was to sit at a desk all day and rely on email as my default means of communication.  Imagine my surprise this past weekend when I spent 12 hours on Saturday and an additional 12 hours on Sunday carting computer equipment punctuated with running and patching cables and telephone lines.  I work for a company that moved to a new building this weekend.

When I arrived home on Sunday at 11pm, I was hobbled through the doorway to the sympathetic (but still highly amused) laughter of my wife.  She subdued her chuckling just long enough to give my legs a much needed rub down and make me a late dinner.  (Poof!  You’re a late dinner.) 

I closed me eyes that night with the comfort that tomorrow morning would be relatively painless as our entire organization hit the ground running with little to no interruption from the move…

Only now, on Thursday, four days later have we settled into any kind of equilibrium.  I truly believe some of my coworkers really were able to come in Monday and start doing productive work.  None of those people were in IT.

I’d be lying if I said the compensation for all this hard work isn’t a little cool.  I would have been satisfied getting paid time-and-a-half.  I’m even happier, though, with what actually came to pass.  For each hour I worked over the weekend, I earned 1.5 hours of vacation time.  That means I added just shy of a week to my bank of time off.  I’m certainly not anxious to do it again anytime soon, but a week of vacation is really a nine day weekend.

Maybe everyone else would rather have the extra pay.  Feel free to hit the comments and speak your peace.