Polyphasic Sleep: Day 4

I spent the morning reading, went to a book sale and got a shit ton of books, worked, and skipped all my naps.

I figure that it doesn't do any good to lay down with my eyes closed and pretend it's adjusting my sleep schedule. I may get one REM nap, that way the entire day.

Since I started, the only consistently deep naps were in the late morning. Between 8 a.m. and noon, it seems, I can consistently take a 20 minute nap whenever I want. I can also wake easily from them, do things, and then take another nap.

Since this is my sleep center I'm hacking, I'm going to try something. I'm not tired at all now, despite having had maybe 6 hours of sleep in the past 96 hours or so. I've drastically cut my caffeine consumption since the beginning to one coffee before a shift of work. At this point, my only source of sleep is a few naps in the early morning, totalling about 2 hours.

Well, it's obviously possible. I may not be distributing those naps around the clock as I want, but at this point it's just a matter of waking from one nap, doing stuff for a few hours before the next, and thus distributing them around the clock.

Surprises: a few. I noticed that I really can't distinguish the last 4 days from each other. I have to check to divide them. Today, right now (12:48 a.m. on a Monday) feels indistinguishable from last Wednesday. This doesn't interfere at all with work, except that I'm completely unable to make sense when talking about recent events. "I don't know, it was either yesterday or 3 days ago."

My eyes have a bit of a problem adjusting to new light levels. Today (there it is again) I stepped outside for a cigarette, and came back in to find the indoors sheathed with a veil of darkness. This isn't just a matter of my pupils being constricted, taking in less light. It wasn't like going into a dark room and feeling the initial blindness gradually recede. I could see perfectly fine, but as if through a black filter. It felt, in fact, exactly like that scene in the Dark Tower where Roland and company have a disturbing sensation that underneath a bright spring day the world is darker than it should be. I was forcibly reminded of the neuroscientific studies on how the mind re-calibrates under different lighting conditions to provide the illusion of consistent colors. I have no idea why this should be so, and I plan to experiment with this.

As I mentioned before, I've long had an odd sleep schedule. I know what sleep deprivation feels like. Have you ever noticed that sleepiness can pass a threshold beyond which it suddenly disappears? Stay awake long enough and you'll pass through a period of utter tiredness, which then disappears. You'll find yourself completely unable to sleep til the next period.

This now happens every few hours. I'll be hit with a sudden sleepiness which passes just as suddenly. A few cycles ago, this happened about 20 minutes before a nap. I looked at my alarm, content that this time I'll sleep like a baby (literally). By the time my nap alarm popped up a window "naptime. See you in 20" I was back to normal alertness and entirely unable to sleep. Since this seems to occur every 4 hours or so, it might be worth it to drop timed schedules and simply set an alarm when they occur. I note that this is what Steve Pavlina did; at some point he simply began napping when he felt the urge rather than follow a strict schedule.

Motor skills. My typing speed seems the same, and I haven't been falling over. In fact, I seem to have slightly faster reflexes than usual. Today I dropped a mug and caught it with the same hand. My reading speed seems the same. I haven't noticed any of the usual severe sleepdep problems like rereading a sentence over and over. problems like rereading a sentence over and over.

By the end of the week I should be consistently achieving REM sleep on each nap. And, each nap should be spaced by hours of alertness. I'm definitely seeing this through. I've already probably outlasted a large percentile of bloggers who attempted this; the distribution is almost certainly a Poisson distribution with a very long tail after maybe 2 days.