During ludumdare, the topic of polyphasic sleep came up and I got very interested in it. Basically, the idea behind polyphasic is that you can train your body to go into REM immediately, sleep through one cycle of it, and wake up. One of the more popular schedules is called the Uberman, which has 6 naps per day of 20 – 30 minutes each. For you math wizzes out there, that is 2 -3 hours of sleep per night, with supposedly no side effects. I’ve read some very interesting blogs about people doing the schedule, this one by steve pavlina being the most thorough and useful. Steve did it successfully for months, but eventually came back to regular monophasic to get back in line with his family and friends. Most of the other accounts I’ve read online are failure stories – people not liking it or just not being able to swing it.
There are a few common threads amongst people writing about polyphasic sleep schedules: heightened awareness, lucid/vivid dreams, and ‘the long term effects of polyphasic sleep have not been studied’. :/ It appears to be true, however, and I guess in the land of the lawsuit you really need to cover your ass.
I’ve been reading what I can find on the subject and it appears to be true there are no long term studies out there. There is one negative paper that I saw, but it was really poorly done and amounted to nothing more than ‘nuh-uh nuh-uh, humans have adapted to sleeping over thousands of years so that is the only good way’. This kind of crap opposition was exactly the same kind of thing that made me switch to Dvorak — I want answers people, and if you can’t give them to me I’ll get them myself. Also, I’m enticed by the cool/weird factor, as before.
So I’m interested in doing it and I’m trying to gather a group of friends. I figure a couple people doing it together can make a huge difference with motivation and support. Unfortunately, across all my friends I get responses like ‘I like sleep too much’, ‘You’re going to kill yourself’, and ‘I would be bored’. Also, most of them have jobs, so that makes it really hard to pull off. My other self-employed buddy said he was in, but has been slowly backing down as we approach what we deemed the ideal starting window (May 23). His main complaint is flexibility, which has led him to the everyman sleep schedule.
Everyman is also polyphasic, but you have a ‘core’ sleep of 3-5 hours, then multiple tiny naps during the day. This is a great blog about everyman — the author did uberman for 6 months then switched to everyman and has been doing that for almost 2 years. The information there is really good, and she is writing a book about uberman, so that may prove interesting.
Among the quitter blogs I’ve read (all of them), they all say essentially the same thing: “Uberman is great and I couldn’t say which one is better, yadda yadda”, but the fact is that EVERYONE switched out of it… This doesn’t fit right. Yet another example of info that isn’t info, making me want to find out for myself.
So here I am, deadline fast approaching, no teammates, and no real information other than everyone quits and most people fail. On the flip side, I’d LOVE the extra time, I can probably find some australian and european communities to be part of, and it has potential for more shirts (“Ask me how I sleep 2 hours a night”, “Uberman”, “In the last year I lived 91 days more than you”, “I don’t sleep, I nap”, “2 Hours a Night – Genius or Madman?”, etc).
Ok, so the shirt ideas are one of my biggest motivations… 
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