Powerstruggle (168 hours)

That "post at 100 hours" became post in 100 hours. I'd apologize if I thought I had any readers.

I have discovered that this 08:00 thing is not a problem with the time that the naps fall on, nor is it a problem with me (couldn't be that...), it is a problem with time itself.

The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
- Douglas Adams

There is something wrong with the period of time between 05:00 and 11:00 that prevents me from waking when I wish. Every day my body finds a way to make me oversleep. It is usually only by a half hour or so, but any oversleeping is going to slow my adaptation. Sometimes I awake without my headphones on (which is my primary wake-up method), so I learned to set more alarms than just my phone (which is unreliable). Sometimes I awake, turn my alarms off, and go back to sleep.

A major problem with the setup is that it isn't very portable. I tried my first nap away from home at 71 hours. My girlfriend falls to sleep with Friends on in the background, she had turned it way down for my benefit, but it wasn't way down enough. It took me twenty minutes to get to sleep, my headphones came off, and I overslept by 30 (because my phone is strange). Early attempts at sleeping in the car met with minimal success because I found it difficult to find a quiet enough place where I could have my windows down - otherwise I have to run the A/C or heater, and try to remember to turn it off directly before I sleep (it usually takes a bit longer to fall asleep). When I have an abundance of cash I plan to get some good isolation earphones, they're expensive, to block ambient noise but comfortably deliver whatever audio I cook up to sleep with.

After some thought on my own, and the theft of some ideas around the web I had previously ignored, I have adapted my methods to get me up more reliably:

• I now sleep blindfolded with the lights on. Before that I endeavored to turn the lights on right when I woke up, but forgot all about this brilliant plan when the alarms actually started going off. Now, I pull my blindfold off first thing (I never seem to have trouble remembering to do this) and Woah! its bright in here. I'd like to get another (more accurate) outlet timer so that I can have a bright light turn on when I wake, but for now the blindfold does it. It is more portable too.


• To combat the headphones-falling-out problem, I could get some speakers - but that involves money that I lack, painfully. Instead I went to www.luxevivant.com and bought a track of white noise laid on top of a track of a small fountain's babbling. This is the first mp3 I have ever paid for, and probably the least skilled work in my collection. I set this up to fade-in, run for an hour, and then cut to ten seconds of silence. I can put this in a playlist so that I can easily switch what I wake up to. For now it's Three Days Grace - Get Out Alive but if I ever really really need to wake up I'll set up System of a Down - Bounce, if that won't get me jumpin' nothing will (except my last resort timer: an electric tea pot boiling away and merrily threatening to wake my family and burn my house down).
  The odd thing is that the silence wakes me 70% of the time. I may be able to find a more calming sound to sleep to, but what's less startling than silence to wake up to. The aforementioned track is at 40% volume, so the track that follows it serves well to keep me awake. Good music has this wonderful way of sneaking into my dreams and slowly pulling me to wakefulness - a good song will have played 30 seconds before I realize that the music is not just a nice part of reality.


• I have further covered my bed in uncomfortable things - textbooks mostly - the ones that used to clutter my floor. This leaves me more open space for things like jumping jacks or pacing back and forth.


• I have learned to space my alarms out more than 5 minutes. If they keep going off all over my room when I am trying to turn them all off, I'll just get pissed off - which will make me more determined to turn them off and go back to bed. I space them out more, and I wake up a second time feeling like an idiot - the idiot that overslept, which gives me more of a reason to not do it again.


• I found out the hard way what I had ignored in my initial research: large meals before naps = groggy. If I'm going to sleep five times daily, maybe I should keep my day in proportion and have fifteen meals daily. While I'm at it I might just drop to 1.2 feet tall. -or- I will eat smaller meals five times daily (when I wake up). Food, in correct proportions, wakes me up; One packet of ramen on break on a sleepy workday perks me right up.

These methods are far from infallible, but they seem to work better. I wake with less of a jolt, and usually stay awake.

One problem I have encountered, my new cycle seems to be at odds with my stomach's rhythm. I very rarely have heartburn (only after consuming nothing but gatorade for more than 24 hours, or when I'm ill) but I began experiencing it sporadically after about 50 hours. It peaked at 60 hours, and seems to be becoming less frequent now. Without the time to properly log the event, I wrote myself a mini-blog to explain how bad the heartburn got. It had me reconsidering the entire experiment.

61 hours: I awoke sweating and very warm as well as more tired that I was when I fell asleep. My heartburn had doubled in intensity, and my bowels felt like they were a step behind me wherever I go. "Sick?" I said to myself. In response there was a great rumbling from below and I let loose the longest fart of my entire life. It started like grating stone in a cave - in 200 feet below ground. Then rose in pitch to regular voice tone. My girlfriend asked on the phone, "what is that?"
"What?" I said.
"That noise."
I thought for a second, embarrassed, "oh that's the hammock, it started creaking and I'm too lazy to fix it."
Then the fart stopped and I felt so much better.

That said, the endeavor is not without reward. Besides all of the extra time, I read that I should eventually begin to dream more as my brain adjusts how quickly I fall into REM sleep. It is said that the dreams are very vivid and intense, lucid is a word I've seen used, but I don't know what it means. I have only had one of these dreams. It started before I fell asleep, which seems impossible but I have found another account of this. The feeling of being in two places at once was... awkward. I was part of a large group, some not-so-intelligent creature. I think I might have been an orc. There were thousands of us, in a valley. The crowd disappered into the fog behind me, but something was driving us forward with a sense of urgency. We were being pushed by people who were being pushed by people who were... running for their lives? It didn't strike me as a comfortable amble. We were all headed towards a large opening in the side of a mountain. It didn't seem like we would all fit, even if the entire mountain was hollow, but as I neared I could see that the entry sloped downward. Mines. I was overcome by this driving force, I did not want to go in there. It looked to me like a great mouth, eating the masses. I had memories too, unusual for a dream, and I remember hearing that once you go down to the mines you never come back. I woke feeling almost terrified - but not. I knew it was a dream right away, so I didn't get the usual unpleasant fright, just a deep interest in the story and a great pity for my character therein. I want to know what was going on in the mines, and what was driving all of us down there. It was like glimpsing a good movie that was half over and having only that movie's trailer to go by. This may not seem like a plus to you, but I am looking forward to more dreams. If I bad dream is equivalent to a good account of a bad scene, an excerpt from a well written book, I can only imagine what a good dream will be like.

So, all this considered, I was feeling pretty good. I was tired, exceptionally so during my trouble time. I was loosing the battle with my brain, the powerstruggle over which of us is in control between 05:00 and 11:00, but I had high hopes. I woke at 02:00 one morning, plenty of calculus work ahead of me, and made the mistake of staying in the hammock and thinking. I was trying to figure out a way to regain control of the fight, maybe I should listen to my mom and sleep for as long as my body wants to and then re-assume the schedule. Maybe I should add a nap. Maybe I should schedule an oversleep somewhere that will disrupt the timing of the trouble time (it wouldn't get to me so much if the sun was up for it's entirety). While considering these factors I fell asleep. I woke up, groggy as hell, 8 hours later. I was upset with myself for being so dumb never stay in the hammock but was able to get to sleep for my next nap. I woke with a headache, groggy again. I have had this headache ever since (20 hours). I'm not feeling nearly as rested after my naps, but I'm sticking with the schedule in hopes that I can reassume my old ways without another transition like the first one. I can't afford to be that tired all the time again, even if it is only for 2 days.

Below is a picture of my last week. The days aren't separated, so you can see time like I do. The planned naps are red, the actual naps have a light-grey background. It looks nice until my last oversleep. I'm not sure how this will affect the experiment, but I'll be sure to keep you posted.