Keeyai.com

And so we begin.

Last night was my last night of regular sleep, and it really wasn’t that good. I woke up a couple times, and ended up waking at 6. I almost got up, but decided to go back down for a 30 min nap segment since I’m going with a 2,6,10 schedule for now.

For posterity’s sake, let’s go over the basics again. If you’ve been following my blog prior to this, you can skim this part.

This is my first day on the uberman sleep schedule, which is a form of polyphasic sleep. Polyphasic sleep is the idea that you can function on just REM sleep, so you train your body to hit REM immediately (instead of after about 90 min of sleep like normal), then wake up after a 20 minute cycle. Uberman completely eliminates core sleep, providing all your rests via six twenty-minute naps every four hours. This is probably the most famous of the polyphasic sleep schedules since you end up sleeping between 2 and 3 hours a day, and supposedly are fine (or better than fine). Another common schedule is the everyman, which has a core sleep of a few hours (it varies depending on how many naps you want) and a few naps throughout the day. Everyman is MUCH easier to adapt to but doesn’t provide nearly the extra time as uberman. Still, people with real jobs can swing an everyman schedule, while uberman is going to be very difficult for someone with a standard 9-5.

Naturally, the worst part of the schedule is switching over from 8-ish hours to blocks of 20 minutes.  Your body doesn’t drop into REM quickly, so until you train it via sleep deprivation, you essentially stay up the whole time. I’m not a very good napper as it is, so I’m a little concerned about this. I’ve never lasted more than one all-nighter, and this is likely to feel like 2 or 3 in a row. We shall see what happens. My biggest concern is staying awake — I bought Age of Conan, but it doesn’t work on my computers so it is downstairs on the roommate’s. Not as accessible as I’d like, but better than nothing. I also still have Kart, although I only have 2 or 3 more golds to get. I also plan to play team fortress 2 a lot. I might do some coding projects, but I don’t think those have the oomph to keep me awake.  I tried to get friends to do the conversion with me so we could support each other, but nobody’s schedule works with uberman, so I’m on my own. Ken is doing everyman - he started last night - so that will help, but I’ll still have a big block of solo-will-power time in the middle of the night. Another friend, Chris, finally caved to my peer pressure, but is out of town this week. I suppose I’ll be able to laugh at / share any wisdom with him next week when he tries it for himself.

So here we are, 8 am day one and I’m already tired from a bad night’s rest. This isn’t that uncommon for me, so I’m hoping a happy side effect of uberman will be that I never suffer through that again. Granted, I’ll be suffering pretty heavily over the next few days, but hopefully it will be worth it.

I wrote a tiny program that functions as a countdown alarm clock and plan to take my naps in my office, which has our old bed in it. Right now the alarm just plays ‘Time to Party’ by andrew wk, but I’m planning on mixing up an MP3 soon with 20ish minutes of silence then a fading in series of things to wake me up without being really invasive. I plan to also put that on my mp3 player (ipod since my mobiblu appears to be broke), which should free up a way for me to sleep when not at home. Don’t know if I can sleep with earbuds in or not - we will see!

In preparation for this, I have cut down on meat in my diet and completely given up caffeine and alcohol. I’ve read that keeping the 4 hour schedule is critical to  succeeding in the transition, so I didn’t want any sleep-altering substances. Also, Steve Pavlina, probably the most famous internet uberman-er, is a vegan and preaches it pretty hardcore throughout his blog. He claims the all veggies, or even all raw food, really helps you not need as much sleep, so I figure it can’t hurt to trim down the red meat intake for now. I still have a box of hamburger helper in the pantry calling to me though, so we will see how long this little gig lasts.

OK! This post has become exceedingly long! Thanks for reading this - I hope you follow my daily escapades through the transition. Feel free to grab me on MSN, Skype, or email at any time that isn’t within 30 min of 2, 6, or 10 and I’ll be glad to shoot the shit with you. If I don’t know you yet, leave me a comment and I’ll email you if you like. Any human contact I can get, particularly in the middle of the night, will help me survive the transition.

Until tomorrow!