This blog will mostly be a recording of what I experience as I adjust to a polyphasic sleep schedule. Polyphasic sleep is any sleep pattern that isn’t just one period of core sleep, I won’t go into a discussion of what polyphasic sleep is in detail. There are plenty of people who have done that and if you are reading this then chances are you already know what polyphasic sleep is. If you don’t google and wikipedia are your friends, though I’d like to know how you ended up here without actually looking for something like this.
I have just woken from my first nap of the uberman cycle. This is my second attempt, the first having failed on the third day from me ending up in the arms of my half asleep girlfriend under a fluffy blanket in a comfortable bed. In my first attempt I only managed to sleep one nap over the whole three days, excluding the four or so hours of sleep that put the kibosh on that particular attempt. To combat the difficulty I had in getting to sleep this time I deprived myself of sleep for a little over twenty five hours prior to starting. I was able to achieve sleep in just over five minutes, a major improvement over my previous attempt.
However that was where my good fortune ended, a friend of mine who is crashing at my place and is charged with waking me (he himself has been polyphasic for three weeks) failed to do so ( he altered his cycle recently and is not quite back on his feet) , meaning I slept for a something a little south of an hour. I am hopeful that the rest of today will go better.
Something I found when doing research of my own is that most bloggers use words like “I woke up feeling foggy” and “I had a hard time waking up” and while these are fine one is often left to decipher what exactly they mean and how they scale compared to one another. I will attempt, at least for a few posts, to express some things with a numerical value. Basic 1 – 10 scale, nothing you haven’t seen before.
For example this nap:
Ease in getting to sleep: 8
Ease of waking up: 8 (once something got around to trying to)
Ick level after waking up: 5 (headache, drained feeling, general ick)
Ick level 20 minutes after waking :2 (just general tiredness)
Leaving thoughts: Always, no matter how sure you are that your primary system is foolproof have a back up. Murphy is a malevolent force that will not hesitate to push gremlins into your machinery if you haven’t looked for them.
