Monday, June 28, 2010

Polyphasic Sleep: Reboot Plan

I'm resetting my day clock, but I'm not going back to monophasic or even Everyman.

No, this reboot affords me a little freedom to experiment.

Claudio Stampi, in Why We Nap, had a test subject go polyphasic gradually by incrementally replacing 8 hour core sleep with naps. After a few days, the test subject apparently had adapted.

Now, I'm on a modified Uberman. I nap for 25 minutes at 1am, 3am, 7am, 11am, 2pm, and 11pm. I probably can't oversleep 8 or more hours, even if I tried, unless I take benedryl or such. So iteratively applying "subtract 90 minutes and take an extra nap" doesn't apply.

It took me 25 days to get to this point of adaptation, where 5 hours oversleep annoys the hell out of me. I'm not going to start a core nap just to reduce it incrementally.

The plan is simple: these next three days will be perfect. If I have a dud nap, I will treat it like an interrupted pomodoro, wait a few minutes, and try again. If the retry doesn't work, rather than having a nap cluster, I'll wait til the next nap. On the other hand, if I have a nap from which I wake up groggy and in zombie mode, I will entirely avoid nap clusters.

I aim to have a dream within an hour of each scheduled nap, no more, no less.

Rather than having a daily write up during this period, I'll update immediately after each nap. This will give me an extra incentive to analyze what's going wrong and try to fix it immediately.

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