Polyphasic Sleep: Day 10

After finally killing off that 17 hour stretch of wakefulness with a nap cluster at 7 a.m., I felt normal throughout the rest of the day. Another nap before work, another after, skewed an hour later, mainly to accommodate #storytime rather than work.

During all of this I didn't feel especially energetic or sleep deprived.

I then had an idea which may turn out disastrous, or really helpful.

I resisted the urge to "reboot" my sleep cycle: just staying awake as long as I could, then crashing monophasically. Apparently many polyphasers have tried it once every so often. Unfortunately, most of them are no longer around the polyphasic community to recommend it.

Instead of rebooting, I simply set my alarm 25 minutes later. Lay down, get up at the alarm, and do something. Set alarm again, repeat. I did this until I actually fell asleep during a nap.

But, I noticed that my nap clusters have a regular feature: I experience four of these  45 minute nap+pomodoros before the zombie mode disappears. That's 180 minutes, three hours.

Three hours of zombie mode and naps, just to get 100 minutes of naps.

Clearly this is annoying the hell out of me.

There are a couple things I'm thinking of trying:

1. Simply man up. Either stay up normally til the next cycle, or set an alarm 3 hours later and sleep the whole way through. This way is basically wasting, regularly, one cycle a day. Granted, it's 3 hours of stumblenapping zombie mode, versus 8 hours of a monophasic hibernator. But still, the principle of the thing.

2. "Reboot" not into monophasic sleep, but the Everyman cycle. Simply remove the waking from a nap cluster and I've got a 3 hour core nap right there. This seems fishy though, because I will be replacing 100 minutes of low-deep-sleep naps with 3 hours of unregulated wild sleep. If I can guarantee that such a reboot once in a while won't exacerbate things, I may try it.

3. Try out Steve Pavlina's free-style naps. Ensure that each 24 hour period contains 6 naps, and leave it at that. This may initially distribute that sleep-dep zombie mode throughout the day, but then the naps may also migrate throughout the day as well. I don' t know about this.

I'll continue what I'm doing now until wednesday and the end of week 2. Then I'll decide what to do.