eight-month reflection

Been a while!

Background info

My usual schedule is to have a core-sleep of 4.5 hours at night, and then 20-minute naps at around 7am, 11am, 3pm, and 7pm. If I start the core-sleep particularly early or late, I may add a 3am or 11pm nap. A primary goal of mine is flexibility, so although I never skip naps, I’ll take them anywhere from an hour before to an hour after the target time. And although my core-sleep is always 4.5 hours, it can start, these days, anywhere from 10pm to 2am.

The above background summary is nearly identical to the one I posted at the two-month update. This has been and promises to continue to be a great long-term schedule. The main difference is the word ‘usual’. That’s because roughly every other week I ‘sleep in’ on a weekend morning resulting in roughly a 6-hour core sleep (I try not to set an alarm). I like doing this for the variety and for a bit of lazy morning partner time. I’d even consider doing this sleep-in once a week, but it’s so common for me to stay up late on a weekend evening that the usual 4.5 hour block just fits.

Conferences

In October I went to a multi-day conference. I was curious about how the naps would work in that kind of setting: structured, with predictable break times, but unpredictably flexible in terms of a compelling ebb-and-flow of conversations and meal-meetings. The normal day was structured with a half-hour morning break, a lunch break, and a half-hour afternoon break. I initially tried my 20-minute naps during the morning and afternoon breaks, but that felt too rushed given the time required to get to and from my nap-spot (a slightly out-of-the-way chair in a hotel lobby-hallway that I had scoped out ahead of time) and to be able to enjoy brief interactions with people at the beginning and end of the breaks. The solution that worked for me was simply to take a 15-minute nap during those breaks. Hard to believe that a small 5-minute change could ‘fit’ so much better, but it did.

I was so intrigued with how refreshed I felt after those 15 minute naps that I tried switching to a 15 minute nap schedule permanently. Over a two-week period, though, I just felt a little too rundown, and switched back to my standard 20 minute nap schedule. I have since attended another conference that had the same half-hour morning and afternoon break-schedule, and the 15-minute nap worked fine for those slots.

Reflections

Since August when I last posted I’ve made one cross-country round trip, and again was struck by the fact that I had no jet-lag issues. From that trek, and from a whirlwind vacation to DisneyWorld, and my conference experiences, I suspect that my body does feel the wear of travel, but simply has numerous opportunities throughout the day (the naps) to adjust and adapt.

A moment the other day at work made me think more along these lines — that I do experience aspects of ‘normal’ patterns of body-stress and weariness, but that these are generally much less intense and are moderated by the naps. One late afternoon of a workday that started early, I had just finished a good piece of work, and had a feeling of wanting to just sit back in my chair and stretch and watch mindless tv (that was the odd feeling; there is no tv at work and that’s not something I tend to do anyway). I did *not* feel like starting another piece of work. I realized it was time for a nap; took it, and upon waking felt ready to tear into the next piece of work that 20-minutes previously I didn’t feel like doing. That’s kind of striking, and variations of this occur with some regularity. My sense is my pre-nap feeling was part of the ‘late-afternoon work-day slump’ that is so well-known, but given my nap schedule, it couldn’t get any traction.

Summary

As I noted in my last post, I expect to continue doing this indefinitely, probably experimenting with tweaks and variations over time. I think my success with this is attributable to a few main factors: pretty firmly adhering to a flexible schedule; having things I look forward to doing during the times when I arise hours before dawn; feeling to my bones how centering and humane the brief zen-naps make my day; and appreciating the things this schedule allows me to do as I swing ever-closer to 50 than 40. Two examples of that last factor: I saw Patti Smith in concert a couple days ago (stunningly impressive), got to bed near 2am, was up before 6:30am, and felt physically great throughout that workday. Very cool.

two-month reflection

Background info

My schedule is to have a core-sleep of 4.5 hours at night, and then 20-minute naps at around 7am, 11am, 3pm, and 7pm. If I start the core-sleep particularly early or late, I’ll sometimes add an 11pm or a 3am nap. A primary goal of mine is flexibility, so although I never skip naps, I’ll take them anywhere from an hour before to an hour after the target time. And although my core-sleep is always 4.5 hours, it can start (these days) anywhere from 10pm to 2am.

Vacation report

One of my partner’s biggest concerns about this experience (see a partner’s perspective) was imagining how our summer vacation with in-laws would work out given my switch to polyphasic sleep. Some of her polyphasic concerns have shrunken over time, due in large part to my commitment to flexibility and ability to nap in ways and at time not obvious to others, thus minimizing ‘nap-impact’, and due to the extra chores I do and that the household generally perceives me as ‘nicer’ now that I have more personal/creative time. But the vacation concern remained. Short summary, it was fine.

One striking benefit of the schedule was that I had no jet-lag either from Rhode Island to California, or back. The backup timer I use for my core-sleeps (and the occasional crawl-in-bed-and-luxuriate-20-minute-nap) has, in addition to an optional beeper and optional light-flasher, an optional vibration feature. So I used that for my unobtrusive in-flight nap-alarm, which worked fine, and I adjusted the nap target-times slightly to account for the 3-hour time-zone difference so that I’d just be ‘on-track’ at the destination. Now jet-lag has never been a serious problem for me in the past, but its absence was noticeable and welcome.

The first segment of our trek was a few days in a hotel suite in Santa Cruz. Each kid got a small bedroom and Trace and I shared a pullout in the living room. I setup my laptop at a desk and spent most of the wee-hours of the morning doing computer stuff, bundled up in a blanket in the cool California morning air. As an aside, I’ll note that when I researched the purchase of this Apple PowerBook (new models are called MacBook Pro), I didn’t care at all about the ‘lighted keyboard’ feature, and in fact thought it frivolous. But I’ve come to love it over the years, and this was yet another time that the elegance of this laptop’s design was much appreciated.

A sleep vacation-pattern we fell into that we really liked was that I’d check in with Trace the evening before to get a sense of when she wanted to get up, and then time my morning nap so that I’d crawl into bed 20 minutes before that time – another benefit of the flexibility-priority with which I’ve approached this sleep schedule.

We were together in Santa Cruz for a few days, then Trace and the kids headed up toward the home-base in the Napa Valley, while I spent about three days doing my annual visit to the Bay Area crew. I’ll post about the fascinating aspects of maintaining quality relationships with folk I see, and communicate with, only once a year, but regarding sleep, I made a significant adjustment for these days. After skipping a few naps early on — extremely uncharacteristic for me, I realized that the wildly varying schedule of visiting these 5 individuals scattered around the Bay Area, along with the intensity of our mutually wanting to soak up as much time with one-another as possible — made even the flexible target times feel too restrictive. I wanted to be able to go with the interpersonal flow as much as possible. So I allowed 6-hour sleeps these three nights, and got in naps whenever it was convenient. I was surprised that I still slept during many of the naps given the long core; I attribute this to the emotional and physical-exertion of frequent travel and spirit-exertion of connecting with these great souls. Then for the remaining week I headed back up to join the rest of the family in a small guest-house where I shifted back to the 4.5 hour core and 4+ naps. One nice aspect of having the early morning hours there was that the mountain guest-house had only modem internet-access, using a line shared with the main house that is heavily-used during the day, so it would have been quite uncool to have it tied up. Thus it was pretty convenient to be able to hop on without worry at 4am for my daily internet fix.

Summary

So, again, I plan on doing this indefinitely. I do periodically have moments where I have flashes of irritation at a ‘required’ interruption to a flow during the day or evening in order to get a nap in, despite the fexible 2-hour window around my target times. But recently I played Warcraft III and Halo with my younger son, on a work-night, until 1:30am, and on another recent night I got up at 3am and finished a really cool piece of a work-project, did some chores, caught up on finances-management, and wrote to a friend, all before the 7am nap. Given that I work long hours (at a job I love), this is just so cool to be able to do.

days 30 through 45

Nap-sloppiness…

On Saturday, July 15, I forgot my first nap; just worked right through the 3pm target. I realized it about 5pm when my partner picked me up from work. I thought I might take a nap in the car on the drive home (in passenger seat!) and count it as a late 3pm, pushing the 7pm back to my limit of 8pm. But one of our teenage sons wanted to go out to dinner with us, and after recovering from the shock of that info, I just decided to take the car nap, internally counting the 3pm as skipped and taking the 7pm early. Normally my ‘start’ limit for the 7pm nap would be 6pm, but given the skip this felt like an ok make-up approach. Keep in mind that whereas many ‘pure’ polyphasic-ers describe needing to rigidly adhere to a schedule to keep functioning polyphasically, my big core-sleep of 4.5 hours feels like it gives me lots of flexibility.

That skipped nap was symptomatic of an increasing ‘sloppiness’ in my attention to napping, and I’m not sure what to make of this. The first aspect of the sloppiness is that in the previous 2-3 days before that forgotten nap, I had nearly forgotten a couple of naps, but remembered still within my ‘window’ (starting within an hour of the target-time).

The second aspect of the sloppiness has been around nap-planning. Before the past few days it had become an easy internalized habit for me to roughly plan out in advance when I’d take my next nap. An example situation: Target nap at 7pm — Weekend dinner-plans for 7pm — Restaurant where I’ll meet my partner and friends is a half-hour from my house where I’ll be beforehand. So I internally plan to leave the house around 6, find a parking lot near the restaurant, take the 20-minute nap, and I walk into the restaurant at 7pm. Smooth, easy, no problem for me, no stress placed on my partner about whether others will have to schedule things around my polyphasic schedule. I had gotten good at this. But in the last few days I’ve been slipping a little.

I *think* the sloppiness is because this experiment is no longer ‘new’ and ‘exciting’, but rather simply a great integrated part of my life now. The fact that I’m no longer blogging about it daily also undoubtedly allows it to slip from the attention-priority queue. The sloppiness is also in some way a testament to the success of this system for me, in that I don’t go through the day tired, *needing* or desperately looking forward to my next nap. Still, though, I’m going to work on giving the napping a bit more attention. This has been a great enough addition to my life that I don’t want to mess it up.

A possible night-time shift

For various reasons, I may be shifting my core-sleep time from starting at roughly 10pm or 11pm to roughly 12:30am or 1:30am. If I kept my current 4.5 hour core, that’d mean I’d awaken at 5am or 6am. That’s a bummer; I do not liking the idea of missing out on my ‘free’ wee-hour morning time. I know it’s all the same amount of time, but I have two teenagers that sometimes stay up late during the summer and it’s just not as relaxing. So… I’m considering shifting to a 3 hour core, which I’ve wanted to experiment with anyway. In the past I’ve often thought of knocking a half-hour off the core for a few weeks at a time until getting down to 3 hours, but with this new schedule I might just jump right in.

Monkeymind and naps…

A recent thread on the Uberman list discussed techniques people use to focus the mind to foster sleep. I’ve been doing this thing for a while in which I count breaths, up to four (then I start at one again). On ‘one’ I visualize a point; on ‘two’ a line; on ‘three’ a triangle; and on ‘four’ a square. I don’t do this all the time, just when I recognize my mind is either flitting around or focusing on thinking about something. This is a bit related to the nap-sloppiness paragraph above, in that I was for a long while very conscious of relaxing and calming my mind to ‘invite’ sleep. I got so good at getting into levels of sleep quickly that I began to get careless about going through a calming process, instead allowing myself to mentally flit about or think about some issue. Sleep still came; my body has gotten nicely accustomed to the naps — but I missed the process of clearing my mind, and so developed this little ritual. I usually don’t do the cycle more than two or three times before I sink into some level of sleep. I’ve found the visualizing also helps. I can’t really clearly visualize the shapes; but the visual intention seems to help the centering process. And the reason I only count to four? Partly there’s a dimension / number-of-sides simplicity to the shapes I envision, but mostly it’s because the repetition itself is helpful; when I’ve tried counting sequentially, I found it somewhat distracting to be aware of how high the count is. Also, since the process is designed to gently return my monkeymind to a calm state, little failures which are a normal part of the process are exaggerated if the count has to start over from a high number.

one-month reflection

Some of these thoughts duplicate the information in my ‘two-week reflection‘ post.

As I said then, I plan to continue this method of sleep indefinitely.

I love the extra time. Some of the time I use for chores, and some is more personal time I use creatively. The creative personal time has obvious appeal, but completing chore responsibilities during the dark hours gives me much more flexibility with Trace and the kids during the day hours. Having both chore and personal-creative time means that I feel much more open to going with the flow of an interaction with Trace or the kids after a long day at work.

I love that I’m not ‘wiped-out’ at the end of a long work-day. For much of the past year, having any personal time during the week usually meant staying up late and then being exhausted later the next evening.

This experiment has been a pretty unqualified success to date. Websites and mailing lists are replete with folk who speak of this being much harder than they envisioned, and falling off the plan due to a cold or a life-obligation or just regular oversleeping. Below are some of the factors, in no particular order, that I think have helped me make this transition so easily. (Some of these can be practiced before trying polyphasic sleeping.) To put the list of these factors in context, my current schedule is a 4.5 hour core-sleep nap from about 10 or 11pm to 2:30 or 3:30am, and 20-minute naps at target times of 7am, 11am, 3pm, and 7pm. If I start the core-sleep particularly early I may throw in a 3am nap as well.

• Consider a version of polyphasic sleeping with a chunk of core-sleep, at least to get started. Steve Pavlina is and always will be our hero for his account of going pure-polyphasic, but for me, given a more traditional work-schedule, a working partner, teenagers, and my reluctance to take a two-week vacation for the transition, starting with a core-sleep of 4.5 hours was *perfect*.

• Consider making flexibility a priority instead of rigidity in your approach to your schedule. This relates somewhat to the above. I never skip naps, but I’m completely fine about starting a nap any time within an hour of the target time, which gives me a two-hour window to start the nap. Similarly, to stay connected with my partner, I try to go to bed roughly around the time she does, which varies with life-obligations and flows. Being able to stay up a bit late to see a movie with my partner or the kids is a nice benefit of my polyphasic schedule, instead of rigidly removing myself from a nice family activity. (Note: many folk who have succeeded in implementing a ‘pure’ 20-minutes/6-times-a-day schedule speak of the importance of firmly adhering to a strict schedule. Not having that experience, I don’t mean to undermine that advice; my goals in my approach are simply different.) Flexibility (and working around others’ schedules, noted below) has also alleviated most of my partner’s numerous concerns at the start of this experiment.

• Learn to ‘roll out of bed’. When your alarm goes off, don’t think. Roll right out of bed and stumble to the other room where you’ve put your clothes. Tell yourself ahead of time that you’ll make any decisions about going back to bed and sleeping longer *after* you’ve gotten out of bed and are in the other room. If you regularly spend even 10 seconds after you’ve shut off the alarm mulling over your schedule for the day, you’ve lost, for you’ll easily be able to convince yourself that it’s ok to sleep just a bit longer.

• Organize your clothes and project stuff in another room the night before. Don’t allow yourself the excuse to stay in bed of not wanting to waken your partner as you bumble around or turn on lights to find clothes. A few organizational experts have written that folk who are successful at difficult tasks don’t necessarily have lots more will-power than others, they’re just better at using willpower smartly. So use your will-power to organize clothes and project stuff before your partner goes to bed.

• Don’t get hung up on falling asleep during naps. They may be mostly like mediation sessions at the beginning. Over time sleep will come when your body needs it. I read a suggestion-post a while back that matched my experience of meditating in a way that invites sleep. I’ll feel an early bodily sleep-signal and sort of welcome it.

• Learn to nap sitting up. I call my weekend naps where I happen to be home and can stretch out in bed for a nap my lux-naps for the luxury of the comfort. But I think much of my success is due to the flexibility of napping positions and places. My two work-day naps are in a little cubicle with my legs stretched out and propped up on a desk, sitting up in an office-chair. It’s actually reasonably comfortable. And I’ve taken a *bunch* of naps in the car — not as comfortable but adequate. I find that reclining the driver’s seat only a little to be better than reclining it a lot.

• Try to work around others’ schedules. Given the flexibility in the target-times, and being able to (usually) nap in the car, if I have to meet my partner at a restaurant or someone’s house for dinner, I’ll often drive to a parking lot near the place, take my nap, and then head inside. That maximises the window before the next nap, and minimizes others feeling like they have to accommodate some ‘weird’ schedule, which allows them to be curious and supportive.

• Develop an alarm system that works for you. For years I’ve loved the simplicity of the default Palm alarm. It emits a two-tone sound only three times, then stops for 5 minutes, then repeats. I appreciate that it’s not incessant and obnoxious, and 99% of the time awaken to it fine. Although I’ve continued to use my Palm and that default alarm sound, it’s a *lot* simpler for me to use Palm software that acts as a timer than setting a traditional alarm time. That’s because in the software I use, I can do a one-time set-up of two time-blocks (20 minutes and 4.5hrs for me), and then easily start the countdown timer, circumventing all the calculation of time involved in setting a traditional alarm. I also use a more obnoxious and incessant backup alarm — my Timex watch’s countdown timer during the day naps, and another countdown timer when taking bed-naps or the core-sleep. I set the obnoxious alarms to go off a minute after the nice Palm alarm, and they’ve only gone off 3 times in the month I’ve been doing this.

• Do some planning ahead of time, making a list of things you’d like to do with the extra time. Learn how to play the piano (well, electronic keyboard with headphones)! Put up that website you’ve dreamed about! If you can’t come up with things about which you feel some passion, you’ll likely not stick with this very long. Add to the list more boring non-sedentary tasks you could do even if sleepy. Chore tasks will *really* be useful to do during adaptation phases when you’re sleepy but the next nap is a ways off. Doing chore tasks also has the wonderful benefit of gaining some nice familial points and offsetting possible partner concerns about the experiment.

• Consider blogging your account, and telling some close friends up-front about your one-month experiment. I decided to blog this account because I found Steve Pavlina’s so inspiring and helpful, but it has had the added benefit of keeping me accountable. Since starting this blog, I’ve read accounts of others that have noted the motivational benefit of public accountability. Also, by considering this a one-month experiment — even if you internally intend it to be longer — you’ll be more likely to overcome humps you may encounter.

So that’s it for now. It has been a great month; I took a leap and have been extremely happy with this schedule. I’ll undoubtedly play with it over time (I’m curious to see what a 3 hr core sleep would feel like) and intend to post two or three times a month for the next few months. Feel free to email me any questions at birkin@earthlink.net. I’ll likely get back to you sometime between 3am and 7am! :)

a partner’s perspective

From Tracy…

I was not enthusiastic about the polyphasic sleep experiment. I was worried for a couple of reasons. First, I was worried that it would set Birkin apart from the rest of us. Second, I selfishly worried about having an alarm go off in the middle of the night waking me up and my not being able to go back to sleep. Third, I knew I would miss having him in bed with me in the middle of the night and when I woke up in the morning. Finally, I dreaded going on family vacation and having to explain to my relatives the new “weird” thing that Birkin had dreamt up and to warn them he would have to disappear at regular intervals to nap.

Well, to my surprise some of these fears have not been well-founded. Birkin actually is more connected to all of us because he is more generous and cheerful about spending time with us. That has been a real bonus. Second, the alarm does not wake me up. I do really miss waking up with him and having in bed in the middle of the night. That feels like a real loss to me. We have an upcoming vacation, so we will have to see how that goes. Since he is flexible about his nap times I feel a little less worried about that. I will keep you posted!

Another positive note is that the kitchen has never been cleaner!

day 30

This is my last daily post of my sleep experience! In the next day or so I’ll post a ‘one-month-reflection’, and then give a day 45 and day 60 update.

Again this morning I awoke without an alarm. Again I didn’t check the time, but guess it would have been about a half-hour before the full 4.5 hr core sleep was up. Again I decided to go back to sleep. So this makes 3 out of 6 days in which I awoke early before the alarm when I *could* have gotten up. I’ll end the mini-experiment here (to extend the core by a half-hour and see if I would awaken on my own). I was initially going to try it through next Friday, but I’ve achieved the knowledge I was looking for: a) I know that somewhere around half the time I go through a sleep phase light enough to awake from and get up; b) I know that I can ‘help’ that happen by drinking more liquids than usual close to core-sleep-time; c) I know I do not like looking at a clock to check the time; d) I know that I enjoy the core-sleep time-frame enough — given that I’ll be getting up soon anyway — that I’ll tend to choose to go back to bed.

Regarding that last point, it’s occurred to me that one of the reasons I enjoy going back to bed is that I don’t spend much ‘conscious’ time in bed. I really enjoying crawling into bed for the core, knowing I don’t have to get up in 20 minutes. That’s not at all to say that I’m dissatisfied with the naps; quite the opposite — I look forward to them as little rechargers. My enjoyment of the beginning of the core is rather an enjoyment of the difference of the experience. Given my overall very successful napping, I’ve gotten good at dropping into some stage of sleep pretty quickly during the core sleep, so I don’t tend to hang out in that realm of enjoying the beginning of the core that long. So what I’ve found is that by awaking early, before I have to get up, I get an extra dose of that relaxed enjoyment of being in bed for an extended block of time — before I doze off again.

As I posted before, as part of this mini-experiment (seeing if I’d awaken on my own), I switched to a 4.5 hr core sleep from a 4 hr core. I also decided to skip the 3am nap which even at 4 hrs was often being pushed way back. That’s been fine. I’ve tended to sleep deeply during the 7am nap, but that was true even before. One nice thing about skipping the 3am nap is that I haven’t really lost out on much time due to the increase.

Now that I know I’m not going to try to get out of bed earlier, I have to decide whether to stay at 4.5 hrs for the core or go back down to 4. For now I’ll stay at 4.5 hrs for another week, to give the body a chance to fully acclimatize before trying something new.

day 29

I awoke early this morning from the core without an alarm, but decided to go back to bed. I didn’t check the time, but guess it was within the 3 to 4.5hr time-frame of this experiment in which my core-sleep is 4.5 hours, but I’ll allow myself to get up from a core sleep anytime after three hous.

Score, 2/5, meaning that twice since I started this mini-experiment five days ago, I awoke without the need for an alarm. In both cases I decided to go back to bed. I’ve wondered why. Partly I know I’ll soon be busy enough, and want to enjoy the last few minutes of peaceful bedrest.

Uncharacteristically, none of my naps (7am, 11am, 3pm, and 7pm) were deep and high-quality, but rather more of meditation-sessions, almost like at the beginning of the entire experiment. I suspect I’ll sleep well tonight.

day 28

11:46:20 PM

Great morning. The alarm woke me out of a deep, deep 4.5 hour core sleep at 3:30am, but after stumbling about slowly for the first 5 minutes, I was able to do two hours of computer work after getting some ‘active’ chores out of the way. The mini experiment score (seeing if I awake spontaneously): 1/4.

Though I know it’s not a good idea to change too many variables when experimenting, I’ve decided on an additional slight shift in my schedule. Previously, my cardinal rule was never to skip a nap. Never. And I’ve stuck to that, even if my core has been from about midnight to 4am-ish, meaning that I’d take my 3am nap at around 5am.

The change is that if I can’t start my 3am nap by 4am, I just skip it. I did that this morning with no ill effects. I had a great, deep nap around 7am, 11am, and 3pm, and feel no worse for the wear. I’ll see how that goes.

day 27

Awoke spontaneously about 35 minutes before alarm wakeup! (mini-experiment score: 1/3) I didn’t take advantage of the time; just noted that I felt fairly clear and then crawled back in bed. I think I knew that the alarm also meant that I’d be going to the gym soon, which I didn’t feel like doing.

We’ll see if that was an abberation or whether it happens again. One thing I *don’t* like is the wondering about what time it is and having to check (I had decided not to get up unless I’m less than one hour from my target wake-up.) Oddly enough, the artificiality of the alarm is better in this respect, although I *could* just decide to arise any time I wake up before the alarm.

I’ll keep the rule as it is through next Friday for now.

day 26

Didn’t awaken spontaneously last night (mini-experiment score: 0/2), but the wakeup was comfortable.

I’ve noticed occasional proof that the body is capable of reaching a REM state in the 20 minute naps that, monophasically, occurs more often in cycles of about 1.5 hours — but I haven’t known quite how to put it, given that I have sort of an old-fashioned sense of a boundary between the public and private realms.

So I’ll just say that from my polyphasic experience I can confirm *all* of the second paragraph of the (current as of today) wikipedia entry on REM sleep, in the section titled ‘Physiology of REM sleep’.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement>

The other interesting aspect (which I have mentioned before) of the naps continues: that I sometimes can transition so quickly from the meditative pre-sleep state into dreaming, that I’m aware of my body nearly or actually physically reacting to the dream. Today during a morning nap I dreamt of someone offering me a bite of a cracker with cheese, and despite the fact that I was aware it was a dream, I could feel my mouth open involuntarily before I closed it. A variation of this regularly happens when reaching for something in a dream-state. I suspect this happens because the mechanism — described in the wikipedia paragraph right before the one I mentioned above — for shutting down muscular reactions to dreams hasn’t had time to fully kick in yet.