ihavebeenfloated

I’ve been looking into something called polyphasic sleep after a guy on this forum I go to posted about how he was going to try it about six days ago. He, having since posted about other things, hasn’t mentioned it since, so I’ve messaged him trying to find out if he’s still trying, but I really doubt he is. Regardless, he got me interested in it as I’ve been feeling lately like I hate sleep, and that life is too short to sleep through, etc, etc.

The basic idea of polyphasic sleep, also known as Uberman’s sleep, is that instead of a monophasic sleep schedule, which is sleeping in just one large chunk of time every 24 hours, you commit to a polyphasic sleep schedule, meaning many chunks of time. By training your mind to get used to sleeping as little as 20 minutes every four hours, (*2 hours of sleep in every 24 hour period*), you can instantly fall in and out of REM sleep and suffer no known short term short term reactions. (The possibility of long term consequences are unknown.)

This tester tried it out, made it for fourteen days and decided to continue with it, but how long they continued after their final post? Who knows. The rest of the website is missing, but they managed to sort of stick with it for fourteen days.

On Everything 2, there are a couple posts about it, one of which is a former college student talking about how great it worked for them back in those days for a period of six months. They haven’t tried it since, however. The second person tries it out for seven days but gives up, so that is of no use to me at all. The third person tried it out for a period of two to three months and talks about some potential “dangers” that I thought sounded stupid but are confirmed below. (Something about eating grapes?)

One of the more helpful sites is this data sheet on kuro5hin which mentions that one of the drawbacks to the schedule is a larger appetite and this strange craving for… grape juice? I wish there was more substantial information on this grape fascination somewhere, maybe there is some sort of chemical… Oh well, I wont worry about that now. If I end up drinking grape juice, so be it then.

Here is someone who sort of half-asses the schedule by sleeping a block with mini-naps in between. Sort of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it? But the page contains a lot of other interesting data, mainly a good summary of a section of a book called Why We Nap? which costs $155 and is not at any of my public area libraries, so that’s as good as it gets for me.

Here’s another page as well. Just because you can’t have too many off site links in one post when your site isn’t even a blog. If you search Googel for Polyphasic Sleep you’ll come up with a lot more stuff.

Enough links, now… what do I think?

Well, so far all the people who I’ve found online who’ve posted blogs or the like about their attempts at polyphasic sleep have either been, 1.) Jobless, 2.) College students, or 3.) Self-employed to where they can sleep whenever they want, no problems. None of them have had a full time job like myself, this poses an interesting problem and something that I think needs to be looked into. How does one achieve a fully polyphasic sleep schedule when you have an eight and a half hour work day ahead of you? That involves taking, at the very least, one nap during work, which is possible… but what about the nap at the beginning and the end of work?

If I followed the basic polyphasic sleep regime of twenty to thirty minutes of sleep every four hours, that would involve me doing something like,1.) Drive to work, nap for twenty minutes in my car until right before my clock in time, 2.) Work for four hours, take my lunch, nap for twenty minutes in my car, 3.) Nap at the end of my shift for twenty minutes in my car, and then drive home. Obviously this would be relatively painful after a short amount of time and would involve me sleeping in broad day light for one of the naps. Early in the adjustment period this would make me want to kill myself.

Another problem I see is that there has, from what I see, been absolutely no research into the potential long term side effects of continuing on a polyphasic sleep schedule for an extended period of time. I’m not sure why being a guinea pig for this appeals to me, but if I got into the schedule and it worked for me, I could see myself doing this for a long time.

Interesting and positive side effects I’ve read about so far include increased energy, more vivid/easily remembered dreams, and being super cool because you’re different from everyone else. Oh yeah, and the whole being awake for twenty-two hours of every day while most people are only awake sixteen to eighteen hours a day. That’s cool, too. Also famous intelligent people like Thomas Jefferson and Leonardo Da Vinci were polyphasic sleepers as well, and fuck all if I’m not going to famous some day.

Other hurdles I face as well are my lousy junk food diet, nicotine addiction, and caffeine addiction. I’d more then likely end up having to give up at least two of these bad habits if I decide to try out polyphasic sleeping, but I guess I can wait and see.

I don’t think I will be able to do the ‘20 minutes in 4 hours’ thing, I may have to adapt polyphasic sleeping to a normal working man’s schedule, and exactly how I’m going to do that I’m not quite sure. It’s clear that I will have to take a nap on my lunch, but as to whether I can space out the naps more than four hours apart is unknown to me. My main limitations in this regard is that the naps, or at least one of them, will have to be under thirty minutes, probably twenty, and that one sub-thirty minute nap will have to occur either four to six hours after the nap before it. I will figure this out when the time comes to seriously get into it.

Regardless, I honestly believe that this is a good idea and hope to try it out soon. Possibly in the next week or two. I will be running a daylog under this category from the day I start trying out polyphasic sleep until the day it becomes a regular schedule for me (or if I end up giving up). I make no guarantees about my adaptability to this schedule as, like I said, I work full time and would have to seriously juggle my schedule around.

Sorry if this post seems a bit jumbled… I am very tired.