Polyphasic Nap Log – Uberman Day 6

2:00 AM

I just had my frist dream during one of the naps! This is fantastic news, since it means I actually hit REM during a nap, which is what polyphasic sleep is built on. I’m not feeling 100%, but I’m definitely better than I have been before at this time of night. I was beginning to lose hope that this was even possible for me, so this came at just the right time. Now I’m excited for the 4/6 AM naps.

4:00 AM

In a haze of idiocy I set the alarm fo 5:30, not 4:30. Needless to say, I felt great. :)

6:00 AM

Overslept this one a bit too as I tried to stay in bed and coordinate my girlfriend getting up for work. I have no idea what I was hoping to accomplish, but it made sense to my sleeping brain.

10:00 AM

More dreams! Don’t remember what they were now, but I do remember remembering them… Yeah… Feeling good, although STILL not 100%. The mind is a bit foggy. Earlier, while a little sleepy, I reset my computer password and decided not to write the new one down. On top of that, I apparently thought ‘you’ was a good enough password hint. Been trying for quite some time to figure out what it is…

I’m getting pretty good at dropping off to sleep quickly, which obviously is critical for this working. I was never very good at that before, so even if this doesn’t work out, I hope I’ll retain that ability.

2:00 PM

I spoke too soon! I didn’t fall asleep immediately this time, but it worked out well since someone rang the doorbell when I would have been sleeping. Had another dream and woke up after about 15 minutes. I’m still a little tired, however. I guess that is just the norm for now. It might clear up after I get some food and am awake for a few more minutes.

6:00 PM

Wasn’t able to fall asleep during the 6:00, so I’ve felt kind of shitty this evening. So much for my little ‘good at falling asleep’ theory.

10:00 PM

Just finished my 10 o clock, and now I’m feeling kind of tired. Hopefully it clears up. If not I will probably take an extra nap, maybe it midnight. I have some pumpkin pies in the oven – maybe I’ll just eat pie all night.

Polyphasic Nap Log – Uberman Day 5

2:00 AM:

I am a master of oversleeping. I slept in my office this time so I didn’t have to deal with the finicky alarm clock in the bedroom. I forgot to pump my speaker volume though, so I didn’t notice the alarm in here and slept an extra hour. Supposedly oversleeping is the worst thing you can do, and I appear to be doing it regularly.  On a positive note, I’ve found a way to adjust the system volume programatically, so this problem shouldn’t happen again.

4:00 AM

Even though I just woke up at 3:30, I was way tired so I had my nap at 4:00. I solved the volume problem on the alarm clock – it now sets the sytem volume to zero while it is running, then full for the alarm. This should enable me to keep the speaker volume up high without getting dinged awake with random sounds (IM, email, antivirus, etc).

I had my nap and I’m still tired, although not as bad as last night. Stuggling to make it to 6 am and the daylight naps of easiness…

6:00 AM

I’m still tired, but not THAT bad. I woke up on my own with time to spare, so that could be a good thing. I’m still sitting here struggling not to fall asleep at my desk, but that might change after getting up and eating breakfast. I’m suspicious, but cautiously optimistic…

10:00 AM

The 6-10 block ended up being fine. I was tired, but nothing drastic, and I ended up doing very well on my mario kart account. Didn’t get as much sleep as I wanted for the 10 am, but still feel ok (the magic of daytime). Headed out to Jess’s family’s place – will probably be the first time I have to nap away from my little cave.

2:00 PM

Slept at Jess’s parents house with no real problems, although I don’t really feel rested, as is the norm. :/  Had a nice little bbq though .

6:00 PM

Back home. Fell asleep very promptly — I’m getting pretty good at that, which is a good sign I think. Again, not feeling that rested – I expect tonight to be hellish. I’m starting to feel like it isn’t going to be worth continuing unless I start seeing some progress soon. The extra time I have right now isn’t good time – I spend it all struggling not to fall asleep, and the normal hours are spent a little bit tired.

10:00 PM

Tried to nap together with Jess. Fell asleep alright, but woke up feeling very tired. Having strong desire to lay back down and have a full night’s rest. Still almost 3 hours to go until next nap and I’m starting to fight off the long blinks… Sleep deprivation is no fun. I’m annoyed that after 5 full days I’m still not feeling any progress. I was hoping to be on my way out right now, but I just don’t think that is the case. Cmon, body!

Polyphasic Nap Log – Uberman Day 4

2:00 AM:

I’m noticing a pattern that I feel ok during the day, but completely fall apart at night. I have never felt more tired in my life than between 10 pm and 2am. I couldn’t relax at all without drifting off, so I ended up playing guitar hero 3. While the music on the third one is mostly crap, it allowed me to survive until my 4 am nap.

I felt almost equally tired after the 2 AM nap and struggled to play enough guitar hero to last until 4 AM.

4:00 AM:
Did the 4 AM nap and feel terrible. Spent almost the entire gap trying to amend this blog post – over an hour just putting together some sentences. I just stare and re-read my last sentence over and over, or I pick my head up from what I belatedly realize is me nodding off slightly.

Again, this is the worst I’ve ever felt sleep-wise. Waking up after a bad nap and having to get up and move away from the bed is both brutal and masochistic. It is so damn hard to intentionally put yourself in this position and it destroys your willpower. I am constantly warring with the voice in my head that wants to quit all this nonsense right now. Sometimes it makes concessions like switching to everyman, which would both feel better and make Jess happier. I’m just trying to make it until daytime when I hope I can make a better decision. Sleeping the full 2 AM – 6:30 AM seems incredibly awesome right now.

6:00 AM

Almost no change. Psyche… breaking… Intentionally did another 30 min immediately. Now feel like shit, but not dying. Debating whether or not to stop this folly.

10:30 AM:

SO, last night I quit.  After all those naps in a row without getting any rest, it was just too much. It is kind of funny going back through those posts — I can tell what I was saying but the spelling is TERRIBLE. I originally spelled psyche as phyche, whether as wete, etc. I wish I hadn’t gone back and fixed them before it was too late.

Anyway, I’ve never been that tired before and it was hell. I literally couldn’t see straight. I couldn’t balance standing up. I couldn’t type. It literally took me a full hour to write just a few pooly crafted sentences. On top of that, my girlfriend was pretty down last night about not being able to cuddle with me or find me in bed during the night. So, I decided to quit.

Howerever, I woke up naturally this morning at 10:30, feeling pretty good. I told my girlfriend, and instead of being happy, she was sad for me (she did, however, support the decision because she said I had dark circles that looked like black eyes). The 7-10:30 is essentially an everyman ‘core’ sleep, so now, while I had no intention of continuing last night, I’m thinking I’ll try to just keep it going and use that 3-4 hour sleep as a reserve any time it gets dicey. I’m not sure what the ramifications will be — everyman works, so that is encouraging, but it might just train my body to feel progressively worse until that core comes along.

Either way, I feel much better now knowing I have a fallback plan I can resort too when the sleep deprivation breaks my world.  And now I break to ride my heelys to sunday morning donuts.

2:00 PM

Regular nap. It was nothing special. I slept, and felt the same as yesterday at the same time.

6:00 PM

Started a little late and got woken up prematurely by my good-intending watch dogs. Still, got a little rest. Feeling pretty good, if a little sleepy. Dreading tonight…

10:00 PM

Ate some cheese and a bit of cheesy potatoes before going to bed, and couldn’t fall asleep. I reset the alarm to go off at 10:45, and ended up sleeping until 11:00… It’s about time for a new alarm I think. I don’t feel like I got any rest, so I expect tonight to be another bad one. Time will tell.

I wanted to blog about the list I mentioned before hand, but it doesn’t fit very well into this nap-report. I feel such a range of things over the day that it just wouldn’t be that informative. I’ll try to touch on any subjects that have useful info, but I don’t think I’ll make a full list report unless it settles down one way or another.

Polyphasic Nap Log – Uberman Day 3

I’m already feeling the strange effects of uberman on my schedule. It feels like I’m taking a nap every time I turn around, and then nighttime never really happens. It is hard to explain — it gets dark and everything, but it gets light again too, and things move on. In monophasic, it got dark, I slept, and I woke up when the sun was magically up again. These things don’t really have any bearing on my schedule now.

Everything is all wacky now, so I don’t know when I should shower or brush my teeth. Jess suggests brushing before or after every nap, which will certainly promote good oral hygiene and make it easy to remember.

I want to post a bunch of little snippets throughout the day, but I want the blog to be navigable after the fact, so I am trying to keep it to one post per day. To make this work I am updating a draft throughout the day and will post it sometime in the evening. I expect to follow this format for as long as I’m in the transition phase.

2:00 AM:
Apparently the 2 AM nap is the hardest for me. I slept through the alarm again today, but luckily my roommate was there to keep me on course. I went to sleep tired, slept promptly, then woke up even worse than before. This was the worst so far – I’m so very tired and all I want to do is sleep like normal. I can’t even muster any internal motivation about it – I’m running purely on peer pressure and the idea that I remember wanting to do this… I recommend finding a good friend to keep you going – my roommate has been absolutely great, waking up to make sure I’m not sleeping off-schedule. Thanks Al!

4:00 AM:
I added another nap in a 4. After the 2 AM nap I really didn’t want to wait another 2 hours, and I didn’t think I could stay awake on my own while the rest of the house sleeps. Jess was awake looking for me, so I napped while spooning with her and it was great. I’m still very tired but it was definitely my best nap so far and I’m looking to repeat it at 6. Hopefully she is still game for it every night — it probably sucks to be woken up so often.

6:00 AM:
I jumped in bed and had a pretty good nap. I fell asleep quickly, and woke up on my own without the alarm. It looks like Jess’s presence makes a big difference – hopefully she’ll let it continue. As a side note, it is funny to have Jess back there sleeping 1/3 of the day. It’s like she never moves! I’m holding off on emulating pavlina’s bear metaphors until I succeed at this, but I’m enjoying it very much inside my head for now. I felt pretty good after waking up, but around 9 am ( another hour before next nap) the tiredness set in pretty hard. I’m following yet MORE of pavlina’s advice. Pavlina suggested approaching the sleep deprivation the way marines supposedly get through hell-week, by focusing only on meeting the next objective. In this way I am just concentrating on making it to the next nap, and I’ll deal with the REST of the sleep dep when I get there.

10:00 AM:
Jess was awake and in our bedroom so I opted to sleep in there with the regular alarm. Apparently I didn’t set it correctly and I ended up oversleeping about 10 minutes. Not great, but probably not too damaging. At this point I’m doing much better than I expected. I’m tired, but not devastatingly so. The 10pm to 2am stretch seems to be my weakpoint and I just crumble.

2:00 PM
Was starting to feel tired for this so I fell asleep pretty quickly. After waking up and coming back to my computer, however, I noticed I still had 9 minutes on the countdown… I tried to think back and figure out why I woke up, but the memory was already gone. It had been maybe two minutes, and I had nothing. This has been happening for most of the other naps as well. I wake up and can’t remember doing it. Then I have this little internal debate about whether or not I woke up or just laid there the whole time without sleeping. There are a couple where my girlfriend was there and she says I was definitely asleep, but I cannot for the life of me remember waking up. This is interesting and mildly disturbing to me. It also leads me to think the buddy system is definitely the way to go. It definitely saved me already so I certainly vouch for it. It requires a damn good friend though, since they have to break their sleep cycles pretty severely to make sure you are making yours (thanks Al!).

6:00 PM:
Pretty standard. Tried to sleep in the bedroom with Jess and the alarm didn’t go off again. Technically it went off but had the volume way down. Still, Jess woke me up on time and that should be sorted out now.

10:00 PM:
Ot ohs. Came up here and tossed around a bit then suddenly Jess is there. As usual, I don’t remember falling asleep, but this time it seems like no time has passed. I thought it was a tasteless joke until my alarm started going off moments later. Now I feel a little tired already, which is probably the worst thing that can happen. I was already dreading the 10-2am stretch, and now I feel like I didn’t get any sleep. I’m hoping to rely on Jess and Al to help me stay awake and wake up at 2:30.

Polyphasic Nap Log – Uberman Day 2

Urggggghhhhhhhh. I just woke up from nap number 11, and I feel tiiirrreeeeddddd. Woke up really isn’t the right term, since I wasn’t really asleep anyway. My roommate was standing in my doorway when I woke up, which scared the shit out of me, but he offered to be my alarm clock backup, which was really nice considering that I’ll be waking him up at 2 and 6 am.

I was inexplicably exhausted last night for 2 am. It was just a regular day, but I was so tired I was falling asleep sitting up at my roommates desk. I ended up oversleeping (fail!), but somehow awoke ‘naturally’ at about 3:30. It felt pretty good, but I know oversleeping is the worst thing you can do, so I’ve cranked up the alarm volume.

The naps this morning were pretty good – at least I slept. I’ve felt groggy all day, but better than a normal all-nighter, so I guess that is a good sign. I’m now in uncharted territory – this is the longest I’ve ever gone without real sleep. I’m a little concerned that this is the easy day and I’m already feeling the effects. Tomorrow is likely going to be much much worse – I’ll need to find a way to deal with this.

And now the list:

• Alertness — meh. Pretty standard 2-day-awake groggy
• Productivity — I really didn’t get much done today, but it was more a problem of motivation, so that might not apply
• Health — feeling fine, aside from my allergies which are still going strong
• Appetite — eating as often as possible, as usual
• Ease of sleep — no. could be the fact that we still dont have our air on…
• Clarity of mind / Mental chatter — foggy mind today, as expected
• Healing — N/A
• Physical recovery — no change. not sore from the sporadic pushups and situps that normally don’t make me sore
• Energy level / Strength — feeling sluggish, but not too bad
• Happiness — I’m fairly happy, but very impatient, as I get with no sleep
• Concentration — maybe 80%
• Time Dialation — none or negative – the naps sure fly by as if I didn’t get anything out of them