day 25

11:19:11 AM

I started a little experiment last night that I’ll continue at least through next Friday. I’m going to bump up the core sleep from 4 hours to 4.5 hours, but allow/encourage myself to get out of bed any time after 3 hours. The immediate goal was that I wanted to get a piece of work done early this morning and wanted to maximize my chances of awaking and hitting the computer right away, without worrying about sleepiness. I didn’t awake early, but was easily able to hit the computer and get a good hour of work in right away before taking my delayed 3am 20 minute nap.

When I started this whole thing, I used a core-sleep of 4.5 hours the first week, and it was so comfortable that I cut down to 4 hours after the first week. It may well be that the initial string of bright-eyed awakenings was due to the newness of the experiment, but it also fit the supposed 1.5 hour ‘normal’ sleep cycle. The 4 hour timeframe has been fine, but about once a week I’ve had a ‘grind’ morning, and I’ve regularly had to alternate between ‘active’ and ‘sedentary’ tasks during the early morning hours. I’ve toyed with the idea of cutting down more, but want to try this experiment of seeing if I can catch a cycle on my own first.

I had noted in yesterday morning’s post that I’d be curious to see how the office ‘chair-naps’ went after a 3-day weekend with lots of lux-naps in bed. It was fine; glad to know of yet another element of flexibility with this sleep experience.

Trace mentioned that after she got home yesterday she thought she would try one of the 20 minute naps that she had sort of come to enjoy on our Friday vacation, but one of the cats needed some serious petting, so she didn’t fully relax. Still, nice that she felt so positive about that Friday experience.

day 24

4:17:22 AM

It has been a good, easy morning. I had my core from about 10:30pm to 2:30am, and awoke fairly clear, so much so that I sat down immediately at the computer. After about 5 minutes I felt sleepiness lapping at the edges of my consciousness so I shifted to a chore routine, moving slowly but without difficulty.

I kept up the lazy-weekend luxurious in-bed naps yesterday and again slept quickly and deeply during all, so I think I’ve recharged the sleep lost the other night. Since I took Friday off, I’ve been away from the office-routine for three days; I wonder how the chair-naps will go.

day 23

4:42:59 PM

I considered doing an unlimited core last night, like two nights ago, to catch up from the unexpected 1:15 hour core of the previous evening. But not wanting to lose the established 4 hour per night core pattern by veering from it three nights in a row, I stuck to the 4 hours last night and not surprisingly had a grind of a morning.

I just allowed myself to move slowly, and filled the dark hours with ‘active’, ‘eyes-open’ tasks, of which I had some extra since returning from the mini-vacation. All of the naps today have been ‘in-bed’ naps — a nice weekend luxury — and during each of them I’ve fallen deeply asleep nearly immediately. During the 11am nap, I awoke with a start, wide awake and clear, with the sense I’d overslept by hours, only to find that only 10 minutes had passed since the start of my nap!

I’m going to stick with the 4 hour core the for the rest of the month and decide at day 30 what my next step will be.

day 22

9:45:58 PM

This hopefully will be the most unusual sleep-day of my 30 daily posts.

Went to bed at 12:15am while on a get-away weekend with Trace, and, without getting into details, got a call from an emergency room at 1:30am requesting permission to treat one of my kids. Jesus. The night and morning involved three trips from Newport to the South County emergency room but everything is ultimately ok. So this is a post about an unintentionally short core-sleep, with naps being more survival techniques for the day rather than the usual ongoing experiment. Normal impressions aren’t relevant because they were infused today with an emotional rollercoaster of worry and relief.

In hindsight, though, it was interesting to get through this crisis by relying on the structure of 20 minute naps that have come to be a natural part of my life. And once again I’m glad for intentionally building in the one-hour give-or-take buffer into the target times. Knowing I’d have some downtime never more than about 4 hours away was nice, and the fact that the recharges only took 20 minutes allowed me to work them into the unexpected errands that arose today.

Yesterday’s vacation update…

Trace and I did the full cliff-walk hike, followed by a 20 minute nap for me. It wasn’t a great nap spot, but it was nice to get off our feet for a while before a tour of the Breakers mansion. Trace did my nap-sessions with me, meditating, people-watching, or working a crossword. The mutual break time was nice, though some of the public settings could have been more comfortable. It gave me the sense, though, that if I continue this schedule, or reimplement it at some point in the future during a trip involving just the two of us, we could easily make it not just work, but make it add to the experience of the vacation.

day 21

5:359:40 AM

Well well well. I conducted a little experiment, the result of which was about a six and a half-hour sleep!

I’m away on a little jaunt for my 20th year wedding anniversary. One of Trace’s concerns was how I was going to navigate our rare time away at the small bed & breakfast scene, but she was willing to have me maintain my polyphasic schedule if I chose to.

Our room consists of a bedroom and an attached, large bathroom with a small table at which I’ve placed a chair. There is also a parlor open 24 hours, so there are (slightly awkward) possibilities for arising and shifting (sedentary) activities elsewhere.

So I decided to try for last night going to bed and not setting an alarm, thinking that there was a 50-50 chance of awaking after a few hours — or sleeping through the night. The latter happened. I probably fell asleep a little after 10:30pm and awoke a little after 5 am. Trace says there was a wild thunderstorm last night during which I didn’t move a muscle; it’s par for the course that my core-sleeps are sound.

My tentative plan for the rest of this weekend is to try to take the 7am, 11am, 3pm, and 7pm naps (and the 3am one if I’m up) and possibly do this again tonight and tomorrow night — partly to go with the flow at the B&B and partly as an experiment. It wouldn’t surprise me that if I get my naps in, one of these nights I’ll arise at after a shorter core sleep; we’ll see.

I’ve seen a bunch of posts about people who do a monthly unstructured core-sleep; this feels something akin to that. Overall I’ve felt so good about my polyphasic schedule that I haven’t entertained much thought about trying a monthly unstructured core sleep, and I’ve wondered what the ‘costs’ would be for the benefits of allowing the body to do what it wants once or twice a month. Assuming I do this again tonight and tomorrow night, and if I sleep long again those two nights, I’ll be curious to see what it’s like to readjust.

day 20

4:52:09 AM

This morning was the second time I slept through my first gentle alarm, and was woken up by the insistent one set to go off a minute later.

I was in a *very* deep sleep and was aware as I rolled out of bed that I was fighting a cellular-level desire for sleep. Not a good feeling. I wondered if the rest of the morning was going to be a grind like the one I had some days ago, and found the thought discouraging. I tried something a bit different. Instead of just starting off doing something somewhat ‘active’ as opposed to somewhat ‘sedentary’, I figured I’d make another requirement to get through the initial hump doing something (active) that also required my eyes to be open.

For instance, I do a series of stretches, sit-ups, leg-lifts, and push-ups regularly that would clearly qualify as ‘active’ — but I can do many of those routines with my eyes mostly closed — keeping me in the fog of sleepiness. So this morning I folded laundry, transferred stuff from the washer to dryer, trimmed fingernails, and cleaned the Roomba — all stuff requiring my eyes to be consistently open. The sleepiness fog dissipated very nicely — though it’s hard to know if that’s from this refinement of my early-morning technique, or whether it’s simply due to the possibility that this morning’s sleepiness stemmed not from sleep-deprivation but just from awaking at an awkward point in the cycle.

Sleep update: Didn’t fall asleep during any of the day-naps yesterday, and struggled with ‘monkey-mind’ in the meditative sessions. Odd, and it’s why I wondered initially if the difficult wake-up was due to sleep-deprivation. Took the core late, from 11:45pm to 3:45am. I was again happy with the goal of flexibility when due to scheduling I took my 7pm target nap at 5:10 (knowing that I had shifted my 3pm target nap to 2pm), and then from 5:45 to 11pm I was directly on the go with no I’ll effects, alert and present. Nice.

This-morning pdate: recently awoke from my target 3am nap, which I took at 5:10am (1 hr minimum from my core wake-up, plus another 20 minutes or so ’cause I was on a writing roll) and was clear and alert (and glad to be so!) within 5 minutes. (I *always* sleep deeply during the 3am target.)

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.

day 18

Oooh, moving slowly as I start this post at 4am-ish. Pushed yesterday’s 7pm nap session to 9:15, latest ever, due to a dinner commitment I couldn’t plan around. The dinner was fine, but I think the body expected the late nap to be the core, ’cause getting moving afteward was slow. I hit the sack for good from about 11:30 to 3:30am.

I ate a lot last night, which I’m aware could play a big roll in how long it took me to get moving this morning and last night. Lots of folk pay careful attention to the relationship between the quantity/qualiy of their food intake and their polyphasic sleep experiment. I thought about doing so, but chose not to. The reason is because my goal is not to fully ‘optimize’ my sleep, or finely hone it down to its most efficient state. I want to stay adaptable, to be able to go a bit overboard on occasion during a meal in terms of quantity or spiciness or just because a particular dish is so delicious.

Napped deeply and consistently yesterday — feels as if my body is catching up from the light meditation naps over the weekend.

day 17

Again yesterday had the experience of not having high-quality naps. Probably related to the fact that I took the most of my daylight naps over the last two days in the car on the way to other places, and most of them ended up being primarily meditation sessions. The result was that I felt fine throughout the day, but again really began looking forward to the core-sleep time which I took from 10:30pm to 2:30 this morning.

After an initial week of having most of my naps being meditation sessions, most of my naps the second week involved sleeping to various degrees and I had just assumed that would carry on into a busy weekend, but that wasn't the case this past weekend. This makes me think of two factors I think have make this pretty successful so far that I didn't mention in my 2-week reflection posting.

First, I don't worry about falling asleep during naps. Having gotten this blog going and joining the Uberman list, I recently read through some other blog-accounts of folk trying the polyphasic thing, and was surprised at how often people sound stressed because they're not falling asleep, at least initially, during their naps. This partly could be because on a pure 20-min_6x/day regimin, not getting in a high-quality nap likely matters more than my schedule (4hr-core&20-min_5x/day) — but I think it also has to do with being a bit too goal-oriented vs process-oriented.

Second, I've learned to nap/sleep sitting up. I have to do this at work, and have found a couple of quiet places where I can prop my feet up and take my 20-minute naps — the quality of which have continued to improve. That positive experience has allowed me to utilize car-napping on busy weekends. The quality of these hasn't been as great, but they're recharging nonetheless. The benefit of combining a quick nap in some parking lot with an errand has been that my family doesn't perceive me as interrupting natural household or vacation-household flows due to my napping — which is nice for me as well as them. I've realized I can comfortably do this now because the temperature is nice; I'll have to revisit this in the Fall/Winter.

day 16

Today was the first morning since I began this experiment that I slept through my primary alarm. My backup alarm, set to go off a minute later, awoke me.
As I just posted yesterday, I have a primary gentle non-insistent alarm, and a backup insistent annoying alarm set to go off a minute later. I never await the second and always roll out of bed when the first goes off.

I was in a deep sleep, but it could also be that I didn't hear the initial one because of AC and possible pillow arrangement. Might also have been related to an extra deep sleep due to a double-gym workout followed by rain-football with a bunch of older teenagers (who oddly seem to be getting faster!) and non-sleep 3pm & 7pm naps. When something like this occurs, I'm often curious to see if it's the beginning of some new issue or pattern. In this case I don't think so.

Ran the core from about 11:30 to 3:30 with my 3am target taken a bit late, at 5am.

Saw 'An Inconvenient Truth' last night with a friend. Powerful, powerful movie. Given the fact that I meditated instead of slept during my 3pm and 7pm naps, I was curious whether I'd feel tired. No problems at all, but did then feel that sort of cellular-level desire for sleep by 11pm. Not sure why I didn't fall asleep during the mentioned two nap times (did sleep nice and deeply during this morning's 3am target nap) — but I felt good after the sessions regardless. I'm at a place where I figure my body will do what it needs to during those naps. Mostly these days I fall asleep during them, but who knows, with acclimatization I might more occasionally end up meditating during some of them.