Posts Tagged ‘9’

3rd Polyphasic Attempt: Day 9, 10 and 11

Monday, April 19th, 2010

I really need to get around to updating this blog more frequently. That’s the thing about a polyphasic sleeping blog; it needs to be updated daily so that people can see how I am going currently, and so that I don’t forget what happened a few days ago. I suppose that I am taking a much less rigid approach to polyphasic sleep now. I don’t mean how I nap, or how serious I am about polyphasic sleep, just more on the information side. I suppose that I feel I can put this blog off because I already know what’s going on (and it doesn’t get that many hits anyway :) ). Also, I haven’t been keeping any records of how long I have been sleeping for, but this shouldn’t be a problem as my oversleeps are stored in my blog anyway.

Alright, so Day 9 got off to a very heart -crushing soul-wrenching start. I overslept to 6:30 am, which is now my worst oversleep in this experiment. I do have many things I could blame it for. Adelaide, which is the capital of South Australia, is where I reside. On my 9th polyphasic day, we had our first earthquake in over 20 years. The earthquake (more like a tremor) was only about 3 on the Richter Scale, so it was nothing serious.

However, it did make me rouse (I shouldn’t say wake up, as I sort of flopped around for a bit and started drifting off again) about 30 minutes into my nap. After the earthquake, which felt like a really loud train in my sleepy state, my dad came and talked to me about it briefly, and then a friend called me. So, by the time I went back to bed it was 20 minutes later. I think that this was probably the main reason as to why I didn’t wake up when my alarms went off. Additionally, I was exhausted from getting poor quality sleep the day before, so it shouldn’t be surprising.

Day 10 was fine, despite the fact that I was tired as all hell. As I found out in my Uberman schedule, once you oversleep, you feel so much worse. Essentually the theory is that the brain isn’t going to change how you sleep unless it 100% knows that you wont go back to sleeping normally. Until then, it will make up tired and sleep deprived. So, when you oversleep, your body detects that the tiredness is working, and then makes you tired for the next day to try and get the same result.

And here I am on Day 11. I had my 6:30 am nap about an hour and a half ago, and I’m feeling pretty good. Well, no, not really. I feel good because I got pretty much all of my holiday homework done in the early hours of the morning. Being productive is always a good thing :)

But now I feel really exhausted and sleep deprived, yawning and longing for sleep. Generally if I’m tempted to go back to bed again, I usually try to get me as far away as possible from any soft distractions… Oh god, I am starting to fall asleep now. If I can just get through tonight, I am sure that everything will be fire.

Until then, I really need to go. Apologies for my bad spelling.

Raap!d

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2nd Polyphasic Attempt: Day 9

Monday, January 4th, 2010

Well, one post away from giving you some actual data on how I am adjusting, and I’m feeling pretty confident on how I am adapting. Even if the data doesn’t show any significant improvement, I definately feel a whole lot better. Ontop of that, I’m finding it easier staying awake, until the late morning at least.

Today was an almost perfect day, with me sleeping about 140 minutes in total. This was caused, funnily enough, by me setting one of my alarms to am instead of pm. Luckily one of my backup alarms managed to get me up 20 minutes later, which is acceptable. I do have one concern about my napping, which is my 1am nap. Recently, I’ve found it nearly impossible to get any sleep at this time, with me getting about 5 – 10 minutes, and minimal REM. I am not too sure what is causing this, but hopefully it will go away. My last 1 am nap was fine, so I hope that it is just an abnormality, perhaps something that I ate which is hard to digest. I don’t really know.

Anyway, tomorrow I will be adding a whole lot more to this blog, namely my 10 day interval sleep data, and probably a tidy up of existing pages. Until then, there really isn’t a whole lot more to say. Sorry about this post being rather uninteresting, I’m just not really in the mood for typing.

Let’s just hope tonight is as restful as the last.

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Polyphasic Sleep: Day 9

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Here we are, day 9. I still can’t quite believe I am still attempting this, as most people would’ve given up at this stage, especially since I can’t stop oversleeping. However, today was an interesting day, and I feel somewhat better for it. Because I have resigned to the fact that I am going to do this for 31 days, it seems to have gotten easier.

So, I had my 1 am nap without much hassle. I find that the 1 am nap is quite easy in comparison with all the other early morning sleeps, although I am not too sure why. However, I crashed when I took a nap at 3 am (as I said previously, I try to take an extra nap about this time, so I can feel more awake, and counteract all the melatonin in my system), which was a huge dissapointment, waking up at around 7:30. While I do get some ‘rest’ in these unwanted core sleeps, I know that they are completely counterproductive. After I wake up from a sleep that is longer than about an hour, I find myself feeling groggy, horrible and wanting sleep again. I fell asleep again, waking up at 8.10 after parents left for various commitments in the day. As you can imagine, it was quite a rush to get to school on time at 8.35, especially since walking takes 15 mins minimum.

The rest of the day went more or less to schedule. I had my 1 pm nap happily, although I still find it frightening that I my naps only go for such a short time. I am not too sure if this is because I need less REM sleep (highly unlikely), that I am unaccustomed to it, or that powernaps that I took occasionally in my earlier years were too short (I did this for about a month or two religiously last year, each nap lasting approximately 15 minutes. I think this has probably helped my polyphasic sleeping no end, as I find I can fall asleep into a nap very easily [<5 mins]). Regardless, I wake up feeling fine, ready to move, and don’t really feel the need for sleep. I also have a feeling that if I do try and fall back to sleep after a nap, I might go into core sleep by accident, thereby giving me less, not more REM. I assume that when I get rid of my oversleeping my naps will become far longer, but I am also hoping for it (if I get at max 17 mins of REM from each nap, that is sleeping for only 1.7 hours per day MAX. This doesn’t sound that healthy).

My 5 pm was good, not as great as it usuallly is, but perfectly fine. However, my 9 o’clock nap (which I took less than an hour ago) was suprisingly restorative (I feel about 9/10 on the alertness scale), if not a little worrying. I have gotten used to me not getting very much sleep at all from naps, but usually enough REM to keep me awake till the next nap (oh, I should mention that I know when I get REM sleep, because I almost always dream, and can recal most of the dreams when I wake up, which I find to be an added benefit). In this nap I slept for about 14 minutes, which feels alright. The strange part is that while I dreamed normally while napping, I woke up before finishing the dream. I assure you that I am not kidding, nor was this a lucid dream (well, I don’t know about that, I don’t think I have ever had one). I awoke, and felt my body, but with my eyes closed, my dream continued. My original dream was about trying to kill invisible enemies with a shotgun (ok, that is really terrible, but hey, I bet you have had some embarrasing dreams. And yes, this was from a computer game, proof that I play them waay too much), but it changed dramatically when I woke up. I was looking at a white computer terminal, and it started to print quotations (I don’t remember any now, but they were poems and riddles). It wasn’t long before I started writing things back, and promptly realised that I was having a conversation with myself. Perhaps this is what lucid dreaming is, but I don’t think so, because I could still feel and potentially move my body. After a while, I decided I should stop talking to myself, and opened my eyes.  My room was fine. I closed my eyes again, and there was no computer terminal screen to be seen. I was awake.

After this, I got up. This is probably the most weird thing that has happened to me while sleeping, but it wasn’t unwelcome, just strange. I realised that I could end the dream at any time, by simply moving. And now I feel very awake and lively, even if a bit heavy-eyed. Perhaps another one of these dreams will happen soon, and I’ll be able to document it better next time for all you readers.

Speaking of which, thanks for reading this. Page views have been mainly among friends, but I have now found that I am starting to recieve some traffic from Google and other sites. Traffic is blooming, far more than I expected, which makes me pleased (yes, I am one of these people who pride themselves on people visiting their webpages =D).

Well, thats about all for today. Overall I feel that I my naps are now really starting to hit the spot, which should probably help with the prevention of oversleeping. Stay tuned for next post, because I will upload graphs of my sleeping behavior over the entire course of the experiment.

Oh, and to all of you who think that you should try this, see if one of the patterns could fit into your life. After all, it gets pretty lonely in the early mornings on Facebook and Messenger, and I could use the company =)

 

Jimmi.

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