Retrospect

It has been over a month since I stopped my experiment. I took such a long break before posting because I wanted to give you monophasic sort an overview of my polyphasic sleep experiment and I wanted to do it from a monophasic point of view. Actually I'm just lazy, but I like my excuse nonetheless.

There are times when I miss it, and there are times when I'm glad to be back.

I miss:	I don't miss:
The ability to hang out with anyone, at any time, with only an hour's notice	Needing to take a break every five or six hours, prevented adventures
Sunrises	The constant need to think about sleep, monophasic is more carefree
Being seemingly more efficient	Being a more efficient procrastinator
The vast amounts of time when nobody was awake to bother me	The vast amounts of time when nobody was awake to keep me company
An odd topic to converse with strangers and friends alike	Explaining why I need to go home and meet up with everyone in an hour

My job being the major obstacle, I'm excited about an upcoming opportunity to get a new one. Assuming I pass my CCNA exam this X-mas break, I hope to have a job in my field the following summer. In a perfect world, I will work nine-hour days with a one-hour lunch break. Going through the initial week of transition while having a new job isn't quite the impression I want to give, so I might have to wait until I am used to how it works. I'm not saying that polyphasic is best, but - much like beans - it is something that I want to take a closer look at before ruling out.

Blue Skies... (240 hours)

I have discovered yet another bonus to polyphasic sleep. I normally go months without a day off, and only get them near, but not on, major holidays; e.g. I work christmas eve and day, but two days later I'll get a day off. I normally prefer to work at night, it is when I am most alert and like(ed) to be awake. Since 08:00 and 20:00 are now basically the same to me, this difference went away. I worked an 08:30 - 02:30 shift recently, followed by a 17:00 - 23:00 shift (the next day). This happened on a weekend, so I didn't have to go to school. Most people would not call this a day off, but I do. A massive 26:30 between obligations is enough of a day for me. This day I was able to keep my schedule regular, no six to seven hour stretches of wakefullness, no two naps jammed into a four hour period, it was 4 or 5 hours between every nap. This was also the longest I had gone without oversleeping (70 ish hours, though it is true that it was less than 48 hours from a massive oversleep).

Over this twenty six hour period I noticed many things:

• I took five(ish) extra minutes to fall asleep, bringing me to about 10 which is still a far cry from my monophasic 30


• I woke up 10-25 minutes early half the time. No alarm, no noises, just time to get up.


• I woke up rested, every time


• I had another dream. It was less intrusive than the last one, ocurred after I was asleep. Less exciting too, just soaring through stars, but no less vivid.


• I was able to abandon my schedule. My body told me when it was time to nap. I still had to plan them in my head, to keep friends & family informed, but I could tell when it was time.

I had previously been pretty alert, 75% or so, but this was the first time I felt this alert. I was operating at 90-100% from 15 minutes after I woke up to the time I went back to sleep with the exception of my trouble time, when it is enough to say that I didn't oversleep.

I had been hoping that this was a new level of adaptation and was independant of my work schedule, but once the weekend was over I slipped back to the was I was before. This answered some questions, which reminded me of the reason I was doing this in the first place, to answer questions. I had been telling people who asked me "how long are you going to do this" that I would do it until I felt like going back. But experiments arent supposed to work that way, they are supposed to have a beginning and an end. They are supposed to have a hypothesis and a control variable. Of these things I have one, a beginning. So I set out to create the things an experiment should have:

Purpose:		To examine the effects of a polyphasic sleep cycle on M@ and to deduce if such a cycle would be flexible enough to incorporate into his every day life.
Method:		Devise and adopt a schedule that should fit around M@'s work/school schedule, allow two weeks for adaptation, and report on the results.
Hypothesis:		With a 5 hr. wake + 1 hr. sleep repeating schedule, M@ should be able to perform at or above his previous levels of efficiency. He should also be able to make this work his work schedule by slightly adjusting his nap times.

I chose a two week duration because, after my "day off" experience, no further experimentation needs to be done. So I will call this whole shindig to a close soon, but that's material for another post.

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.

Introduction (51 hours)

Inspiration

A few nights back I was about to work on my homework. It was 21:00 (the 24-hour time format will come in handy later, it's something I am trying to get used to). I thought to myself: "self, your girlfriend and friends, are going to call you later tonight with all sorts of nice things to say. If you plan to get some rest before embarking upon this paper, do so now or forever hold your peace." So I slept from 21:00 to whenever I woke up. With no external stimuli, I woke at 22:30, 90 minutes. That is significant - remember it for later. I slacked off for a while, and began the paper at midnight. The paper turned out to be a real killer. I spent some amount of time writing the paper, and four times that working out which tidbit came from which source and properly documenting it. I didn't finish until 06:30, but I am now an MLA guru.

Again I thought, "Self, you have to wake in 30 minutes, you had better get what little sleep you can." I failed to properly set my alarm, and ended up sleeping until 08:00, 90 minutes. The first clock I see when I wake is analog, so to a bleary-eyed M@ it seems as if I woke up on time, at 7. I strolled into my calculus class exactly one hour late, interrupting the teacher, and then realized that somewhere along the line I had made an error.

I only had time for two hours of sleep when I got home, then I had to go to work, so I took advantage of them. I was feeling surprisingly alert at work that day, but my mind was wandering. Here is a short record of its wanderings:

• "Most people on this planet sleep at night at are awake during the day, why?"
  
  • "Probably because primitive man thought that daytime was much more useful."


• "Is it still the case?"
  
  • "No, I don't need to hunt bison - I need to read Byron, which can be done at any time."


• "Is there any other reason? Is it genetic?"
  
  • "Probably not, babies don’t stick to it. It takes them a year to train themselves to the way this planet works."


• "If we were on a planet that spun faster, thereby having 12 hour days, would we adjust, sleeping 4 hours a night?"
  
  • "Probably..."

Then my mind shifted gears

• "Would an altered sleep schedule work better for me?"
  • "I think so, if you could nap during those times when you don't have enough time to get into your homework - you would have much more time for the homework."


• "What about work?"
  • "You would need to be able to fit 6-hour shifts into your schedule, that's all."


• "Frequently filling up with gasoline is annoying, could frequent naps be similarly annoying?"
  • "A battery that has been charged recently gives more power than one that is 3/4 drained. I think you would be more efficient."

Information

I decided that the least I could do was research the topic. As it turns out, I was not the first person to have this idea. The name for it is polyphasic sleep. I spent many hours researching this topic, if you are interested - do the same, but I have three links for you that I think will be very informative:

The Power of the Sleep Cycle

Sleep Stages

Sleep

My experiment aside, the first link has some information that anyone who has ever been sleepy could find useful.

My original intent was just to split my regular sleep (5-7 hours) into parts, thereby gaining access to every part of the day without loosing sleep. It seems that most practitioners of polyphasic sleep do it to reduce the total amount of sleep time in any given day. The most popular form of this is Uberman sleep, this guy has a nice description of the whole thing, and I really had to look for a nice description, most of the blogs you can find - and that's all there are, blogs - are filled with detailed descriptions of the hell that people go through while adjusting to such a schedule. Wikipedia is usually the most awesome source for information ever, but it only focuses on the Uberman way of sleep deprivation. As a self proclaimed authority on something that I didn't know existed last week, I'm here to tell you that polyphasic sleep is not about deprivation. Polyphasic sleep is the practice of sleeping more frequently than the norm. In this case the "norm" is a monophasic sleeping pattern (1 sleep/wake cycle : 1 day).

As I have said, blogs are the only form of information out there with regard to polyphasic sleep in human adults (it occurs naturally throughout the animal kingdom as well as in infants). Having a very limited set of information to make my decision with I decided to create such a piece of information and run my own experiment, which is another way of saying: I decided to do it. I have a plan, and I have faith in it. I do not, however, have a doctorate, or any authority on the subject whatsoever. I am doing this to myself so that I can see what happens. So far I'd like to ask that nobody try to follow in my footsteps until I know how it ends. Even if this lunacy leads to a better way of life for me, I still want to make it clear that you are reading a story, not instructions. I am not telling you to do anything, just what I did.

Theory

Most people's sleep cycle is 90 minutes long, the last bit of which is REM sleep - which is known to be the most important for feeling rested. This is the sleep in which dreams are had. I like to view the sleep cycle as a spring. There are people out there, Uberman sleepers, who can compress this 90 minute long spring into just 30 minutes. From what I've read there is a very low success rate with the Uberman schedule, I think this is because it is the smallest you can go - there is a point at which you can't compress a spring any further, the coils bind up and don't allow further movement. That point is 6 x 30 min of sleep per 24/hr. I have no desire to subject myself to such a schedule, it's inhuman. It is as if you were learning to ride a bike, took your training wheels off, and were suddenly forced to go on the tour de France.

Uberman has its positives though, 1/2 hour naps at 02:00, 06:00, 10:00, 14:00, 18:00, 22:00 every day. This schedule fits within 24 hours nicely, but it is said that you have to be very strict with it if it is going to work. This lack of flexibility would be expected if you were to compress a spring to its fullest extent. Imagine driving a car onto one of those tiny retractable pen springs - it's not going to be very bouncy. Uberman sleep is the same way (from what I read), the majority of the few who succeed work from home and make their own schedules. I have full time school (17 credit hours) and a full time-ish job (30 hours) - I suppose I'm going to need some bounce in my schedule.

I could add time to the Uberman naps to gain flexability, but since I frequently work six-hour shifts there would be no way to fit a shift between naps. 24 divides into four easily - four 90 minute naps would allow for six hours of sleep per 24, but the gaps between naps would be so few. In order to take a nap early, you would later have to take a nap late. Getting this to fit my schedule is unlikely as well. If six is to many, and four is too few, five is the logical conclusion.

"But five doesnt fit into 24" was my initial thought. I then realised that it didn't have to. The whole point is to be independant of the day-night cycle, so why worry about the hours in a day. With roughly five naps per day I could stretch the average 4.8 hour gap between naps to fit a 6 hour shift, assuming I could nap before and after that shift. The odds of me being able to make a steady nap schedule around a very fluctuating work schedule and a set of 5 classes?

Surprisingly good. I made a big list of the hours in a week, 0-23 repeated 7 times. I laminated it and I've been marking my nap times with a wet-erase marker. I usually schedule a nap two days in advance; I'm behind on the image to the right because I don't remember my shift on Monday. I try to schedule naps every four or five hours, six in the case of a six hour shift. Should a nap fall in the middle of a class or shift, I'll shorten or lengthen the previous nap-gaps so that it no longer does. Regular monophasic sleep can stay in cycle with 3-4 hour variations in bed time (in my experience), so I think that my pentaphasic sleep should be able to survive 2 hour fluctuations. This would not be the case if I was trying to compress the 90 minute cycle to 30 - but hour long naps should give me enough buffer room to allow for my wacky work/school schedule.

As you can see, the schedule stays pretty regular while still being flexible, and as long as I don't miss a nap or oversleep by too much I should be just fine. 5 hours of sleep per day was tolerable monophasic, but now that I'll always be freshly charged... Let's just say i'm optimistic about it. The above schedule starts on a thursday, when I had an anthropology test at 11:30 which explains the 3-hour-nap-gaps. Once I'm with the plan I should be able to avoid doing that.

Criticizm

note: if I attack something you may have said, please realize that I need to do this in order to move on with my experiment. Whether my logic is valid or not has little to do with my esteem for this experiment, I just need to believe it.

I have found two ideas that, if true, will cause me to fail to acclimate myself to polyphasic sleep. The first, which I got from a co-worker (and I appreciate), involves the magnetic fields of the celestial bodies nearby. She pointed out that the color of the sky isn't the only factor of earth that affects our bodies. I am all for alternative theory, but as a student of physics I find it all too hard to believe. I haven't read the book she referred to, but maybe I will one of these nights. Secondly, and more common, is a reference to ultradian cycles present in humans. This cycle repeats six times in the standard circadian (24 hour) sleep rythm and controls certain things like hormonal release and appetite. The Uberman sleep schedule is said to take advantage of this. I believe that once my body acclimates itself to my pentaphasic schedule, the ultradian cycles within will also adapt. If the circadian cycle for most people is 24 hours, and the ultradian cycle is 4. Assuming I succeed my circadian cycle will be 5 hours, and my ultradian will be just under an hour. This is not because I think my schedule is that great, it is because I think that the human body is pretty cool.

Experience

So far I have found the pentaphasic sleep schedule to work for me. It doesn't conflict with my relationships or commitments. I'm sleepy, but I expect to be for the first week or so. I have made two mistakes - both involving oversleeping. First by an hour an a half, and then by a half an hour. Each of these happened when I had a nap around 08:00. From what I read it is common to have a trouble time - why mine is in the not-so-early morning I don't know. One mishap was a alarm malfunction, though the blame was mine. The other involved me turning off the alarm and laying back in bed to "think." I have worked out a system to combat this oversleeping. The closer I adhere to the schedule, the closer I am (in time) to comfort.

Before I go into said system, I should mention another, somewhat amusing, problem. I had been using my cell phone primarilly to wake me up, with an alarm clock backup. The alarm sound is somewhere between some chimes, and some crickets, it could be more annoying - but it is not so comforting that it doesn't do its job. Around 30 hours I began hearing the alarm when it wasn't going off. I was on the toilet, I heard someone close a door, and somehow it sounded like the alarm. I had to check my pockets to make sure I hadn't left the phone somewhere and forgot to disable the alarm.

In order to fix these two problems I used my computer to record 60 minutes of silence into an mp3. I then got some earbuds - comfy ones that seal well enough to almost be considered earplugs. I edited the ID3 tags of those mp3's along with Linkin Park - Session.mp3 and made a faux two-track album to sleep to. I also got a timer/outlet for my electric teapot, so I can set what time it turns on. My naptime schedule goes something like this:

1. set timer and fill pot with water


2. put tea leaves in teapot (green or herbal, black tea has too much caffeine)


3. set ipod volume so that the intro barely rouses me, and the drum track finishes the job


4. make sure there is something (cardboard box for now) on my bed so I can't sleep there


5. turn out the lights


6. crawl into hammock

And that's exactly what I'm going to do right now. I'll keep you posted. I'm thinkin another chronicle at 100 hours.