day 19

3:18:31 AM

Ah, yes, a great morning.

Ran the core from 10:30pm to 2:30am.

At one point I woke up *wide* awake, so clear that I thought that I must have, for the first time, slept through both alarms. Turned out though that I had 40 minutes left on the 4-hour block. I was tempted to get up then, but when something like this happened once before, I decided to be a bit rigid about sticking to a 4hr core sleep for 2 weeks before I start playing around. So I lay back down, thinking that I’d probably wake up groggy at the 4hr alarm, at some un-optimal point in my sleep cyle. But I fell asleep quickly and although I was in some deep sleep when the alarm went off, I was clear quickly. Nice.

The other issue I’ve really been tempted to play around with, and probably will in the future, is with the timing of the core nap. Monophasically, I’ve tended to get tired around 9-10pm, but if I push through that and get a second wind, I can often stay up late *easily*, so much so that I’ve then often gone to bed at, say, 2am, simply because intellectually I know I *should* get some sleep before an early start to the day — not because I’m tired. Of course then the next day I’m more tired and grumpy.

Given that ability to stay up late, I’ve recently been tempted to shift my core sleep from the roughly 10pm-2am slot to something like 2am-6am. My main reason for deciding on the 10pm-2am slot has been to minimize disruption of time with Trace, which is why I’ll likely keep this. But this week she’s been visiting some relatives for a few days, so I could have tried it, but I’m sticking to my goal of 2 weeks for this 4hr core before playing around with a schedule. If I try the later block next week I’ll note it.

Scanning the Uberman list posts recently, I saw a thread about night-time nap movements. It didn’t really register, so I have to go back and find it, but during a nap yesterday I thought of it. I’ve mentioned before that one of the things that happen during my 20 minute naps, but not at night, is that I perceive a ‘sinking’ feeling early in the nap. I imagine that if I were hooked up to sensors that some drop in blood-pressure would be perceived. It feels as if at a certain point my body recognizes — either from body position or mental meditative state or some combination of the two — that “hey — this is nap time” and over about a half-second goes into a deeper state of relaxation that preceeds sleep. It’s kind of cool. Uh… but that’s not what I wanted to mention.

The other thing that I’ve noticed during the 20 minute naps, but not during the core sleep, is that I’ll get to a state where I’m somewhere between thinking about something or dreaming about something and will almost, or involuntarily move. It’s the movement issue I’m curious about. An example: I’ll be somewhere between being conscious and thinking — vs. dreaming — about having finished a presention when someone comes up to congratulate me. As they put out their hand to shake mine, I can feel my hand — resting in my lap a standard sitting up nap position — almost, or actually slightly involuntarily move to shake the thought/dream person’s hand. I’m immediately aware that this isn’t really happening. And there are many variations of that. It’s almost as if the compressed time-period occasionally blurs the concious-physical realm with the dream realm. I’d like to read more about whether other polyphasic-ers have experienced this. It also makes me think that it might be good to have my core sleep time to really allow myself some time in the dream realm not blurred with the concious realm.

A two-minute-later lightbulb update… this may be related to the lucid dreaming that many polyphasic folk have mentioned. Will think more on this.