The Ball and Recovery

Polyphasic Sleep Day 33 to Day 40

I knew this would happen but who can decline a free ticket to a ball at Oxford. I was offered free entry to the Linacre College Ball for 2 hours of work at the Bar. I had never done bar work before, so I was kinda excited about that too. I took my nap before the ball began at 9 pm. The ball was good fun, posh, good food, decent music and nice performers. I was supposed to take a nap again before my shift at midnight at the bar. I missed it. The bar job was much harder than I thought, I had to keep running up stairs to get fresh glasses and refill booze stocks (must’ve made 15 trips in 2 hours!). I enjoyed the work but I was quite exhausted. Right after my shift I had some alcohol and took a nap (on a couch!), but that was the time when I am supposed to take my core sleep. But I wanted to enjoy the ball till the end. It was going to end at 4 am. Somehow I managed to keep myself awake till then and went home. I fell asleep at 4.30 am and got up at 1 pm that day.

Yes, I messed up my nap schedule. But I was feeling perfect, no hangovers as always. I went about my day as usual and forgot to take my afternoon nap! I realised only in the evening that I had messed up for a whole day now. That night I overslept in my core hours instead of 4 hours, I slept for 6 hours. Although, I got back to my nap schedule, I was oversleeping in my core hours or feeling extremely drowsy before core hours. This continued up till this Wednesday, since then I’ve gotten back to the schedule and feel fine now.

I think it was an expensive mistake that I would not like to make again. Nevertheless, I recovered which has been a good learning experience.

Lucid Dreaming

Polyphasic Sleep: Day 23

I believe I have acclimatised to everyman schedule. Yesterday, I had my first Lucid Dream and it was a brilliant experience. Before during my adaptation, I had phases where I knew I was dreaming and I knew my muscles were not exactly obeying my orders (REM atonia) but nothing was as lucid as yesterday. In my dream, I was trying to chase something. I think I was somewhere in the middle-east (probably the effect of playing Assassin’s Creed) and I could direct myself through streets. I don’t know why the streets were empty or what I was chasing. But that’s fine because, I always have weird dreams. The important point though is that I was able to control my actions.

I would classify this as dream-initiated lucid dream as the wikipedia articles says. Also, I can still recall bits of my dream even now. During the monophasic days, the early morning dreams (or technically, REM dreams) I could only remember for a few hours after waking up, they seemed to fade away with every moment. This one’s different.

After reading through, I think I am going to keep a dream journal for sometime and judge my bizzare dreams.

Polyphasic Sleep Day 19

We had a crazy bike ride last sunday and that got me ill. I had fever for a day, cough and cold for the whole week, as a result I had to increase my core hours upto 6 for couple of days. But I am back on schedule, 4-5 hours core sleep. I don’t miss my naps but I cannot always make it on time. I hope this kind of flexibility will not increase the time of settling in this schedule.

I have joined the polyphasic sleep group on google. It has some interesting topics and good people. Here is Mr. Poptart’s advice which I am following as much as I can. As we all know, there has been no research on long-term effects and that’s why I feel a little scared thinking of doing an uberman or dymaxion after settling into Everyman. Of course, more reading will help but from what I have read till now, the only known examples of uberman have lasted at the most for 6 months. Medically, it has been tested over 2 months only. So I have my doubts.

Now that I am in week 3, I have started taking up the extra tasks I always wanted to. I have started blogging again, I am writing a review, I am learning to be an X-ray crystallographer and I’m loving it. Go Polyphasers!

Polyphasic Sleep Day 7

I thought I will put up an update on how the experiment is going on. I have managed to get 3 naps a day for all the past days. I haven’t been able to stick to a certain time all the time but within ± 1 hour. What I have managed to do is bring down my short naps to 20 minutes and most of the times I get up without an alarm now. (although, I set them all the time!). I also seem to know when I need the nap as my head starts feeling heavy 20-30 minutes before normal nap time. I haven’t yet achieved control over my core sleep hours. They tend to vary from 3-5 hours depending on how tired I am in the day. I realise that to adapt to Everyman, there may be flexibility but not that much. I have to try to discipline myself further.

On the non-experimental side of things, whenever I talk to people (obviously, I am not the one who starts the topic but Alex!) about sleeping patterns, they always seem to come up with the same problems. Like, I can’t sleep for less than x hours or if I nap for 20 mins I am fresh if for 40 mins I feel groggy or if I sleep for 12 hours a day I still feel tired. Again, these are Oxford people, I think the least anyone can do to manage their day well is to get a good core sleep (6-7 hours) during a fixed time to fix all these problems. The amazing thing is that sleeping patterns are a wide problem but people don’t really do anything about it. They lose so many valuable hours each day. This sometimes makes me feel happy and motivates me to keep doing this.

Polyphasic Sleep Day 3

Like the past 2 days, I slept longer this morning but not because I wanted to but because I had to. My alarm clock, I think, was tired too. Now it was going off not once a day but 4 to 5 times! Even though I am trying to adapt to the Dymaxion schedule, I think it’s too hard for my body and mind. Unknowningly, I am following the Everyman schedule instead. (Comparison of Sleep Patterns). I should give my body it’s own time to adjust and not put it in a state of shock. Once I am well adjusted in the Everyman schedule, I will slowly start decreasing the time of the large chunk of sleep till I can hit Dymaxion schedule.

Apart from this dilemma, the rest of the day was fine. I noticed that I had increased concentration after short naps and much lower concentration by the end of 4-5 hours of a nap. If the nap lasted more than 40 minutes, then it wasn’t as pleasant after waking up. I felt like sleeping more then but if I restricted the nap to less than 40 minutes then no such need was felt. Today I slept from 12.15 pm to 12.50 pm and 7.15 pm to 7.40 pm.

Polyphasic Sleep Day 2

Thu\is morning was particularly hard to get through. I slept from 5 am to 7 am. My alertness during the day till mid-day was 5 on a scale of 10. Plus things in the lab were not going as I wanted them to which made me groggier. I grabbed some sleep from 12.30 pm to 1.15 pm. Afternoon was better than morning, possibly because I attended the Chinese Tea & Cakes at Exeter. I felt particularly productive during this period. For my evening sleep, I slept from 7.15 pm to 7.45 pm, had to postpone this because of lab stuff. Later, I attended a talk by Prof. Peter Atkins organised by the OUSS. It was an interesting talk and my concentration dropped only a bit at the end of the talk when he was talking about the wave theory. Back at home, I was not exactly up for another wakeful night. Nights are so hard to get through. Argghhhh…yet so far so good.

Polyphasic Sleep Day 1

Bloggers speak of experiencing heightened alertness in their polyphasic life. It’s reason is something which eludes me but it will be worth all the exercise, I believe. Tonight, I slept from 4am to 7am, yes overslept but that’s not abnormal. I had a fantastic morning, slept from 12.30 pm to 12.55 pm and woke up without an alarm. I did shavasan to help me achieve sleep quickly. I felt quite refreshed after lunch and worked till 6 pm. Post lunch was also a good active session. I felt quite sleepy after 6 pm , so slept from 6.20 pm to 7.10 pm, went for a quick swim and came back cooked a healthy meal. Slept from 11.30 pm to 12. 15 am. The next session seems to be the hardest but it was good to see that Day 1 went by without much hassle. Day 2 is going to be harder, but I feel I am up for it.

Polyphasic Sleep

Yesterday, I decided to try polyphasic sleeping as a challenge. After reading Wiki and blogs like Steve Pavlina and Uberman Schedule, I thought it is worth giving it a shot. The requirements were flexibility in work schedule and some big project to keep you busy with. Luckily, both factors work in my favour currently. I have decided to follow Dymaxion, which is sleeping 30-45 mins every 6 hours. From experiences of other people, there seems to be a degree of flexibility that a person can harness to make the adjusting into this schedule easy. Day 2, 3 and 4 are supposed to be the toughest. I am going to try to keep a log of my daily activities and expeirences. Let’s see how things go.