Morpheus

Oversleeping has become a serious problem for me. I just overslept…. by 5 and a half hours. I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck. This is not from lack of will or tiredness, this happens in what i suppose is the high point of my day. My three alarms just don’t wake me. I’m not hearing them and switching them off or anything like that. They just aren’t rousing me. This is a disturbing development. If any readers have ideas, potential fixes please comment. This blog is about my experiance of polyphasic sleep and how that can help others so I’ll be looking for a solution.

I apologise for lack of posting, my social life has been demanding for the past few days. I’m doing fine with uberman, except for occasionally oversleeping. Never more than 2 hours (Only got this long ONCE) and usually only about 20 minutes.

Now, for those who have not heard there is going to be a Twilight MMO. Now as much as I hate Twilight, I’m ok with its fans having there own game, I can’t think of a good reason why not. I just think its interesting that an MMO was considered a good plan for a Twilight game as opposed to, I don’t know a dating sim or something. In my experience MMOs are made up entirely of kill x number of y for z or fetch this artifact and bring it back to me. How does angsty teenage romance fit with grind questing? “Kill seven over protective fathers and bring their skulls to me, so I can remove the curse on the girl I love who ignores me. In return you shall receive 200 Gold Pieces”? or “Fetch eight roses from the pits of darkmashymonsterness to leave on the doorstep of she who you admire. BONUS OBJECTIVE: Leave no note and watch her pick them up from an obscured vantage point amongst the trees?”

I’ve always wondered why MMOs take the approach they do with game play. If I was doing it I’d a plot and quests for a few months worth of game play. The game world would have a minimum of two factions players would be aligned to. So despite the training quests and a few small quests for the money/rare item the game play would be entirely focused on the shifting world made by how successful each faction was at doing the story quests. (One faction would try to stop the other and so forth) So the players would operate in small groups of probably no more than eight players and square off against other equally matched groups in quests where victory for one means failure for the other. Every week or so have massive territory battles that would win towns for one faction or another changing what smaller bonus quests were available as well as awarding bonuses to the faction with more area as well as bonuses for particular places of interest.

At the end of the campaign switch to a new one (These people are paying subscription after all, its only fair that the content be updated every six months minimum) and occasionally if old campaigns were particularly popular run smaller servers that play through them again. The campaigns may follow each other or may be entirely separate, the point of them is to have an epic world where the players are fighting against each other more than generic fantasy beasties and are fighting for more than XP.

So far I don’t know of any MMOs that have done this well, which is a shame cause I’d like to play something like I just described.

So  yesterday I did something stupid. I missed two naps while I was out and found that I could deal with that fine, it just became near impossible to stay awake so I had my nap after that about 45 minutes early. I also drank a couple of screw drivers, not even enough to get me tipsy but still. I fell asleep at about three my last thoughts being that I should set an alarm and then slept till five. I felt like complete shit from five until my 3.30 nap in the afternoon. So advice, don’t drink when you’ve missed naps. Just don’t. I’ll do some more experimenting with missing naps and alcohol on seperate days some time in the future to prepare any aspiring polyphasers about what they might expect to happen if they try either of these things.

Final thoughts: Sorry bout not getting round to doing the movie review thing, I’ve spent too much time on msn, learning magic and goofing off. I might post some reviews of obscure magic products in the next few days. I doubt anyone in my audience will be that into it but still, the single person out there who is both a magician and polyphaser other than some guy named Daniel who lives in reflective surfaces will appreciate hopefully.

Well all better. I no longer feel like crap. I’ve been speaking to a friend who’s a fellow plolyphase, apparently the going to sleep feeling alert and not waking up for a long time is typical. I seem to be adjusting fine, except that I don’t remember dreaming, or even going to sleep. I remember images and strange thoughts sometimes, but it seems more like some bizarre meditation than sleep. Um Im going to stop writing numerical sleep reports unless they are differant from how Im sleeping now, its gotten more or less persistent. Go to sleep, wake up feeling good, feel even better a few minutes after. Assume they are all like 2:4 unless stated otherwise.

Finally something interesting…. I overslept, by four hours in my final nap of yesterday. I ave no idea why this happened, I went to sleep energetic and on a sort of high. Now ofcourse after my first nap after oversleeping I fel like fried shit. I slept through my alarm…. I will fix that tonight though,it will be connected to surround sound speakers.

2:6 report:

Ease in Sleeping: 6

Ease in Waking: 1

Ick level after waking: 8

Ick level after 20 minutes: 6

3:1 report:

Ease in Sleeping: 5

Ease in Waking: 5

Ick level after waking: 8

Ick level after 20 minutes: 4

This is really interesting, I’m curious as to how I can feel so fantastically untired and wonderful and then crash for four hours. Any polyphasers out there or people adjusting who care to comment?

Final thoughts: What the hell?

If I didn’t know better I’d swear I was almost adjusteded or I’m doing something wrong…. I feel fine, my appetite is increased and occasionaly I’ll slump for a few hours and become a zombie; but aside from that, waking up easy, staying up easy, going to sleep -kinda tricky but I manage. Thats the one part bugging me, I’m having a hard time telling how much sleep I get in naps. Time goes funny, and when my alarm goes off I feel rested but I can’t recall being woken by my alarm once. It feels more like slipping into a trance than sleep. If the 25 hours I stayed awake through before I started napping count towards it then I haven’t been sleeping properly for a little over 66 hours as I write this. Earlier today I suffered an hour or two of emotional tenseness. But thats the only thing I can attribute to sleep dep so far.

I didn’t sleep at all in nap 2:3. Just lay there and got bored.

2:4 report:

Ease in Sleep: 6

Ease in Waking:6

Ick after waking:3

Ick 20 minutes after waking:1

Ive been running through the royal road to card magic while Chelsea is asleep, just general hanging with her while she is awake. I’ve noticed a slight drop in motor skills though nothing severe, this is perhaps because I spend alot of time doing stuff with my hands that requires control usually. I also just started FF7, personally I doubt it will be as good as FF8 despite popular opinion.

Final thoughts: I keep waiting to hit a severe brick wall. Am begininning to wonder whether a human being other than Sharif will read this. Lastly an apologie to any knowledge seekers who come my way to find the number of gaps in my posts dismaying. Honestly it is a little hard for me to pop on and write something along the lines of ’see previous’….

Sory for not posting, but everything has been kind of a repeat of my last naps. Im feling slightly more tired than before. No other changes.

Not much differant between this nap and the last. I slept solidly but only for  a little more than half my nap time.

1:5 sleep report:

Ease in sleeping: 2

Ease in waking: 9

Ick after waking: 4

Ick 20 minutes after waking: 6

Final thoughts: Sorry about the boring post. Will try to make it up with the next one.

I had difficulty getting to sleep for this nap, and when I did it only lasted for a few minutes. I spent the time trancing in and out of sleep, although more relaxed than I was trying to sleep back on monophase. Feeling a tad bit tired though nothing hard to manage, and am experiencing what appears to be an increased appetite. Surprisingly, I am consistently finding it is easier to rise than when I was monophasic. I am not tired or fuzzy feeling when I wake up. Also I have begun to feel detached from my body, as if I exist marginally outside it a tad bit closer than the camera in a 3rd person game such as gears of war but certainly not entirely 1st person either. I am starting to wonder at which point of the day I should shower, and what ritual I should use to signify the start of a new day as opposed to waking up.

1:4 sleep report:

Ease in sleeping: 2

Ease in waking: 10

Ick after waking: 2

Ick 20 minutes after waking: 6

Final thoughts:  I reckon that within the next 24 hours I’ll get to the bottom of the valley as far as sleep dep symptoms go. Bracing for impact.

Ok just woken up from my third sleep period of my first day. Apologies for not writing after my second, I didn’t achieve sleep even with the aid of a binaural beat sleep track, although it did make me feel amazingly relaxed. For anyone interested in binaural beats check out wiki and download SBaGen (http://uazu.net/sbagen/), I can’t guarantee they will work for anyone or even that it wasn’t a placebo or a result of the sensdep lying in the dark with pink noise creates or both.

As for my most recent sleep period it took me 5- 10 minutes to get to sleep and waking was easy.  I’m feeling a little tired but not sleepy. I am also developing a cold, but I also seem to have the vague memory of reading that Steve Pavlina (stevepavlina.com) during his adjustment period, proving it can be done even with illness on the way.

So here we go with my third nap comparison rundown:

Ease of getting to sleep: 6

Ease of waking up: 7

Ick level after waking up: 3

Ick level 20 minutes after waking up: 4 (I suspect at least half of this is from the cold)

So, so far so good. A few things: Firstly, Posts will now all be titled in someway involving their cycle/nap number so this post 1:3, my first nap of the next cycle or “day” is suppose will be 2:1. Secondly, every morning it is possible I will have my girlfreind, Chelsea, write a little on what dealing with my adjustment has been like for her the day before. Hopefully this will provide some information that may help the roommates/ significant others of adjusting and adjusted polyphasers cope with the changes in lifestyle this will have on them. Also she is my kill switch, and has the authority to pull the plug on what I’m doing if things get out of hand.  Lastly, I intend to watch and compose a review to a movie I watch while Chelsea sleeps and I’m feeling too wrecked to do much else. I might have seen it before, it might be a boring review try as I might to avoid that. But I’ll post one and perhaps even some rambling article on one thing or another if I’m up to it and can think of something to say. These will always be in a separate post of their own or put at the end of a sleep report. I want to write on something other than sleep or the time and this is my way to do that, and who knows it might be a way to watch my decline in cognitive capacity as this experiment continues.

Final thought: Anyone who knows any good webcomics in the spirit of smbc, nuklear power, xkcd, amazing super powers, dinosaur comics, darths & droids or questionable content please leave a coment with a link.