Uberman (Polyphasic Sleep) – Day 23

As I continue my goal of cutting back sleep to just 2 hours per night the results speak for themselves.

As you can see I’ve only managed at most 3 days in a row on Uberman. I’ve been polyphasic the entire 23 days but have been plagued by over-sleeping. I’m averaging 7 hours per night on a 3 day running average. I might as well just go monophasic with these statistics.

As you can see by my state on the

Stanford Sleepiness Scale I’ve not been feeling the brightest. I get a slight boost from sleeping in but not what you’d expect. In fact, I’m starting to get rundown and no matter what I do I tend to feel like shit, for lack of better words.The main problem has been my lack of consistency: not sticking to a routine for long enough. I won’t bore you with all the schedule changes and times and so on. A hexaphasic schedule of 5 x 28 minute naps has not worked. I suspect 28 minutes is too long to take for a nap as it allows me to slide into deeper sleep and is thus too hard to wake up from. I’m back to the original 6 x 23 minute Uberman schedule.

It has to work…. I start uni in 27 days. I’ll be doing 2 subjects. There is no fracking way I will manage on the time I have left after working fulltime and sleeping 8 hours per day. The ONLY solution I have is to successfully convert to the Uberman Sleep Schedule. There’s no bout a doubt it.

This is a last ditch effort for me now. God how I feel like lead is melting in my brain when I awake from my 3 am nap. This morning I went back to sleep, it just was not worth it. It was too horrible. I only slept to 7 am though, which is a positive decrease in my oversleep time, though I did get 8 hours the day before.

Most of my oversleeping is done during the day. I don’t sleep under the covers at all. If I oversleep its in my clothes just as if I was napping. Getting undressed and going to bed is a thing of the past. I use my bed as platform for my light tent. I have time for a photography project.

This used to be my bed. I nap behind the tent laterally across the bed with my knees bent. Look closely and you’ll see the bed underneath. Where does my wife sleep?

Unfortunately my bedroom doubles as the study. My wife sleeps with ear plugs and a screen is used to block out the light. The bookcase was set up to form a better barrier. Its not a perfect setup but it works.

Its time now to edit some photos. Blogging is very time consumming, more than I suspected.

Word of the Day: Stupor

stupor

stu•por

stupor

1. dazed state: an acute lack of mental alertness brought on, e.g. by shock or lack of sleep

2. unconsciousness: a state of near-unconsciousness induced by, e.g. drugs or alcohol

[14th century. < Latin < stupere "be stunned"]

adj: stu•por•ous

For the polyphasic sleeper, this is a word you will get to know. Use it to accurately describe your mental state to friends, or when they ask what they can expect on the first month of the Uberman polyphasic sleep schedule.

I believe that I am an immortal being…

I believe that I am an immortal being that has lived as many lives as there are grains of sand on the beach.

Why is such a belief so difficult to hold in this modern world? Because the facts just don’t support such a belief. There’s too much suffering, too much human aberration, too much religion.

Let’s just assume for a moment that what I believe is in fact an incontravertable truth. Okay, why then, with all the science and technology that we have, all the “advancement” in psychology and mental therapies, has the spirit not been detected? Why is it not a simple fact that can be proven in any high school lab? If its true, if its a fact, why can’t it be proven, time in and time out?

It can’t, and it probably never will. Science deals only in what can be sensed, measured and experienced. It deals in quantities and distances, forces and vectors in space and time. What then is a spirit made of? It has been looked for and not found. There’s plenty of it about if it exists, so it should be easy to find.

No, the spirit cannot be found because it does not lie within the bounds of Science. Science has boundaries. The error that Science makes, the error that, indeed, puts Science itself onto the path a religion, gives it the flavor of dogma, is that if something does not exist within the bounds of Science, then Science assumes it does not and cannot exist. How arrogant is that?

Imagine if you were an opera singer raised on an isolated island that knew no other form of music than opera. It would be natural for you to assume that no other form of music existed. That’s what you were taught and the only acceptable belief to hold was that it was impossible for any other form of music to exist. Imagine then if you were shown a different type of music by a visiting tribesman. Imagine hearing the music and saying, “Nope, that can’t possibly be music, doesn’t exist, and although I can’t explain it, what I am hearing can only be explained by opera music and it must be an extremely complex and rare form of opera phenomena that we don’t fully understand yet.” You then call the tribesman a crackpot and send him on his way.

So, the error of Science is not in its inability to find the spirit. Maybe it can’t be found with scientific technique. No, the error in Science is the arrogant-beyond-belief religious belief that the only knowledge available, the only available route to knowledge is through the Scientific Method.

Scientific Method gets the job done when dealing with the physical universe. But what if the spirit did exist, but it was not part of the physical universe? How could that be? If something exists, yet is not matter, space, energy or time, what else could it be? How can something exist yet have no quantity or measurement? How can something exist and have a location in space and think and postulate and perceive, and yet not exist in the physical universe?

And finally, if this thing called a spirit does exist, and if I am one of them, how come I have a body and need to speak and eat and have sex and sleep and all those other things that bodies do? How come I’m so deeply unmeshed in all of that and still call myself an immortal being? And finally, if I am an immortal being that has lived as many lives as there are grains of sand in the beach, how come I don’t remember those lives?

Who’s to say I don’t? But then again, I could be suffering from Multiple Lives Syndrome or some other made up disease made up by a bunch of nutbags who themselves suffer from Obsessive Disease Naming Syndrome and who call themselves mental health practitioners. (They do happen to be getting very rich though.)

P U R P O S E

So what is purpose? Purpose is the end game, the objective that we work towards, the reason we do what we do. If we have a purpose in life it gives what we do meaning.

My purpose is TO SUCCESSFULLY DESCRIBE AND UNDERSTAND, IN MATHEMATICAL TERMS, THE INFINITE ZERO FROM WHICH THE UNIVERSE HAS COME. See About. Is this a purpose that will die when my body dies? No, it is a purpose that is mine. I still have time this lifetime to get some degrees and a doctorate and call myself an expert in some field or another. I want to do this. It is my goal. But what happens when I die?

Hopefully, as I believe it will, the aware thinking center of perception that I call me will continue to exist after body death. But at that point everything I have achieved with the body and identity I now have will have ceased to exist. The certificates and diplomas will all say My Name. But I will no longer have that name. That name will be attached to a photograph on a licence. But the body of that image will slowly decay into dust. All of that effort, all of the effort I plan for myself over the next 40 years will have come to nothing when the body dies.

So the whole point I want to make is this. I don’t care that what I want to do is a pipe dream. I don’t care that it is a task of genius and not of ordinary, perhaps less than ordinary, stock. I don’t care that many would say such a task is unknowable and not within the bounds of knowledge and therefore not knowable. I don’t care that is takes me so long to do anything, how can I expect to do that. I don’t care that it is a stupid thing for a man with responsibilities and family to be spending his life on. I don’t care that a part of my thinks that I’m just full of shit. And I don’t care that just about everyone else will to.

The first thing I want to explore is the paradox between what I know to be true and what I experience on a day to day basis. How come I’m a fucking bus driver and not a respectable, funky, well paid, mysterious professor having affairs with lost soul graduates? How come I do very little on a day to day basis, yet have the ambition of an army of men?

These and more are some of the questions I want to explore. God help me…

Polyphasic Sleep – Drugs

I knew a girl once for just 24 hours. It was a one night stand thing, one of the very few that I’ve had. I did go to the beach with her the next day, so I’m not sure if that strictly qualifies as a one night stand. She was a weird girl. She spent a great deal of the night sucking my feet, but I digress.

I was in town for a couple weeks to visit my mum with my 3 year old daughter. It was a night off for me. To cut a long story short I ended up in a house alone with this girl. She was a habitual pot smoker. This did not seem to have any apparent affect on her. She appeared bright, attractive, quick witted. …So out came the pot. I partook of the green weed as I definitely wanted to get laid. We got stoned and things progressed as you expect they would have.

During an evening of prolonged debauchery I discovered the following facts: She had just broken up with her boyfriend, a fulltime dope dealer. He supplied her with as much of the stuff as she wanted. She worked as an event coordinator in a five star hotel. She looked the part. She was small, petite, dynamic, bubbly. I also discovered she was basically stoned 24 hours a day. She smoked in the morning, during the day, and all evening. She took the stuff like cigarettes. Or morphine.

I was dumbfounded. How could a girl so bright, so beautiful, so alive, take so much marijuana and still function? If I get stoned that’s it for me. I might as well say goodbye to any production for about 24 hours. I’m no stranger to the stuff either. I spent about 3 years in my late teens in my own apartment living life through a smoky haze. Back then it was just what you did. But I didn’t take the stuff at work. My work suffered to be sure, but I was never stoned while working. It would not have been possible. At that time I worked in a factory with dangerous machinery. I was scared enough as it was.

So, years later, meeting this girl was a real eye opener for me. She was such a lithe little thing. Where did all that THC go? What a dynamo would she have been without the drug? Well, actually, she might have been a total mess without it. The point I want to make is, here was an apparently normal girl with a good job franticly trying to put herself to sleep. Even then, I was spending my life looking for ways to wake up! And here she was putting herself into emotional numbness her entire waking day. What pain she must have endured, to need all that sedative.

I talked to her about it. I told her, (I knew from experience) that she was heading down a path of destruction. She knew that she was. While we were sunning on the beach, she made the momentous decision to not smoke during the day. From now on, she only going to smoke at night. That was a huge thing for her.

I never saw her after that so I don’t know how it turned out for her.

My point? There is no kidding yourself that marijuana is harmless. It leaves a residue and stays in the fatty tissues for months. It may or may not harm the lungs. That’s not the point. The point is that it destroys the mind. Its a death of a thousand cuts, one drop of blood at a time. Like alcohol, like many other things, it an attempt to put oneself to sleep. Little by little it adds molassis to the brain.

One thing I like about Uberman is it is an attempt to wake up. Sleep is not natural. Who was it that said: the less you know, the more you believe? There is so much I want to know. There is so much I don’t know. What I have until I do know all that I want to know, is a great deal of belief. I believe the raising of consciousness, of awareness, perception of the environment is probably the single most important thing we can do towards achieving a higher state of beingness. And I believe that achieving a higher state of beingness is all that can give meaning to a life. All else is transitory and is left behind at death. Will we carry our awareness with is into and beyond death? Now THAT is the big question, is it not?

So I say to all you dope smokers out there, don’t do it. Give it up and find it that much easier to wake up. And there will be one less thing in your life that is putting you to sleep.

Uberman (Polyphasic Sleep) – Day 20 – DEATH RATTLE

Day 20
I wonder if Uberman people just get used to being tired, or if they actually do adjust and raise up the Stanford Sleepiness Scale? Maybe its all just a whole lot of hocus pocus devised by a crazy group of sleep deprived nutters together in some crazy plan to raise consciousness through the suffering of others.

Or maybe this just works for other and not for me.

Well I’m not going to cry about it. I’m just going to do it and beat it and become an Uberman. Today is really Day 2 of UBERMAN for real. Two days is the longest I’ve gone without an oversleep so far on this crazy program. Tomorrow (day 3) my entire body will be wired and begging for an oversleep. It will seduce me into its trap. I will be overcome.

But will I let it?. Oh, no I will not. No sir, this daddy is going all the way. At day 20 of attempting to convert to polyphasic, though my daily sleep pattern has been a roller coaster ride of sleep deprivation and blissful oversleeping, my overall average sleep time over that period was 5.5 hours. So, despite my apparent failure there has been progress made. Of course I feel like shit and sit way too low on the Stanford scale to be sustainable, but there is progress nonetheless.

I am prepared now for what is to come. I know the depths of sleep deprivation that I must traverse. I know the path and I am ready. I am waiting.

5 days straight on less than 3 hours of sleep a day. That is still my target. Beyond that I know nothing. But until I can make if for 5 days, there is no use thinking I will succeed on this program in the long term. If I can’t make it in the short term then I can’t make it in the long term
University enrollment is fast approaching
I have 4 weeks until I start university again. It has been a long time coming. The only way I can possibly hope to continue working fulltime AND move ahead on my absolutely insame study program is to nuke sleep right out of my universe. If I succeed on my current program of 5 x 28 minute naps for a total of 2 hours, 20 minutes, I will have for intents and purposes, overcome the need for sleep. Before I knew about polyphasic sleep that was only a crazy dream.

New Theme

I just couldn’t stand it any more. I had to change the theme. I like this one better. Cleaner. Simpler. Easier to read. What do you think?

Polyphasic Sleep – Reasons For Failure

Day 17
I am plagued by chronic oversleeping and I have to say that my program is a total mess. All my tinkering is to no avail. I feel like a total failure. When I wake up after my 4 am sleep I feel like death. Worse that death. Death would at least be painless (actually I suspect that death is far from painless). You know what I mean. I don’t know how to explain extreme sleep deprivation any worse than I have already, but it is worse.

Or perhaps I’m just a wuss?

My sleep graph illustrates the roller-coaster ride I have been on.

The dark blue line represents my daily sleep hours. The pink line is a 3 day running average.

I’m currently sleeping an average of 6 hours per day. My last oversleep was 9 hours. I’m sticking to the program one day, oversleeping the next, and so on…. It would be safe to say that at this stage of the game, at day 17, that my attempt to convert to a polyphasic sleep cycle has been a complete failure.

A look at my Stanford Sleepiness Scale graph shows that life has been on the slow side these past few days.

These measurements are an average taken from readings several times during the day and night. As a comparison I think they tell a fairly accurate picture. It shows that I crashed pretty heavily at about day 3. Oversleeping from that point on increased my position on the scale. I always felt good after a good sleep!

Since I was oversleeping anyway, I started to add core sleeps from about day 8. But I kept oversleeping and in fact my position on the scale has declined steadily since then. It seems core sleeping is not the answer for me.

Reasons for my failure
If I look over the Uberman program I can see where I am going wrong.

It is absolutely essential that naps be evenly spaced and regularly adhered to, at least in the beginning of the program. This is fundamental to the program as the body must get used to its new sleeping regime. Thus Uberman is not for everyone as not everyone can accommodate the time needed for naps into their lives, despite the fact that they are adding up to 6 hours of extra time to their day each day.

I thought I could make it go right with a varying schedule. Apparently I cannot. I work shift-work and although I have a stable pm shift the daily start times can vary by up to 2 hours. That means my naps have varied by up to that much. If one were looking for a reason for failure I don’t think you would have to look much further.

The final solution
My final tweak to my schedule is my last hope. If I can’t make it work this time it may be time to give up, to throw in the towel.

I am reducing my naps to 28 mins. 23 mins was too short. 33 mins was too long as I think I may have been entering into deep slumber. I am reducing the number of naps to 5.

This is my new hexaphasic schedule:

• 3pm NAP, before work.
• (Start work average time at 3.30pm, plus/minus 2 hours.)
• 8pm NAP. Dinner time.
• (Finish work average time at 12.30am, plus/minus 1 hour.)
• 1am NAP, after work.
• 5am NAP
• 10am NAP

These times are not perfect. Its the best I can do with my work schedule. If I can’t make it after this final tweak then I can’t make it at all. I will have to give it up. No bout a doubt it. I don’t think I can take this for much longer. 17 days of intermittent sleep deprivation is taking a toll on my performance. I’ve had more time but got less done. I have been able to start this blog and start reading blogs, but overall I’ve been getting less done.

I so very much want this to succeed.

Uni starts in a few weeks…

Fullman (Polyphasic Sleep) – Did I write CRASH! aready?

Yesterday was the first full day of my new FULLMAN schedule (6 x 30 naps = 3 hours sleep per day). Mornings are the worse for me. I woke up (if you could call it waking up) from my 4 am nap and felt like death. I don’t know how to explain unbearable sleep deprivation…

…lead helmet… face flat squashed flat… siren in the head screaming an emergency… eyes looking through sandpaper air… the air an ocean of weight pushing down… sharp throbbing pulse somewhere on the top of the spine, brain swelling against the skull… all the while a thousand screaming brainless maniacs yelling a silent scream….

…something like that.

I slept 6 hours. Woke up feeling like shit.
A new resolution.
My progress has been erratic and confused. My total 3 day average as of two days ago was approaching 7 hours; hardly something a polyphasic sleeper should be proud of. I havn’t gone longer than a couple of days without some kind of disastrous oversleep and change to my schedule.

The key to this program, at least in the beginning, is consistency. I am now on my “Fullman” schedule, a schedule I am already starting to believe will not work. However, I cannot keep changing it around. I must be consistent.

My new resolution is to do 5 days running without an oversleep. I think at least 5 days will be needed to know whether a program is working. That makes today day one of my new Fullman schedule.

So far, so good.

Feedback
My wife said to me last night when I got home from work, “You know, have you ever considered that your particular body is so used to sleeping every night that it may never get used to not sleeping all night?” I told her that I have considered that a great deal over the past 15 days.

She then said, “…and you’re beginning to remind me of a vampire, up all night, SLEEPING ALL DAY!”

Can you believe it?

Everyman (Polyphasic Sleep) – CRASH!

Its been a couple of days since my last post. I’ve been to polyphasic sleep hell and back and let me tell you, its been a trip that was ,well, hell.

My attempt at Uberman, and then Everyman has been a RESOUNDING, CONFOUNDING, DOWNRIGHT FAILURE. And I say that without holding too much back.

First lets look at my sleep graph.

The dark blue line represents the total hours of sleep per day, naps included. The pink line represents a 3 day running average of the daily sleep total.

I was attempting Uberman up to about day 8 or so. If you look closely at the graph, you will see that up to day 8 I had 3 major oversleeps. I was only meant to sleep 2 hours in total on those days and I ended up sleeping much more. Before those oversleeps I was severely sleep deprived.

What I noticed was, my average position on the Standford Sleepiness Scale increased whenever I had an oversleep. In other words, the oversleep made me feel better and allowed me to keep going. Hmm, that gave me an idea.

Since I was oversleeping anyway, I was seduced into incorporating a core sleep into my schedule. A three hour core sleep seemed to be the common length that I had been reading about, but I didn’t want to sleep that much. So I decided to allow myself a 1.5 hour core sleep. And from that point on things just got *worse*.

I think I only managed one day without oversleeping. Waking up from a 1.5 hour core sleep was like waking up after staying awake for two days and then going to sleep for 1.5 hours. It was the worst feeling of sleep deprivation that I have ever experienced. Yesterday I overslept 9 hours. Let me tell you, it was bliss; but where does that leave me and my program to reduce my sleep hours to a minimum?

The answer came to me yesterday, but it wasn’t until today that it hit me like a light going on. When I decided I would try it, I brightened up and became enthusiastic once more. I had read that Buckminister Fuller slept polyphasically 4 x 30 mins per day. So I’m going to try a 6 x 30 min schedule.

Why is this so exciting you say?

I don’t know. But it excites me. For some reason, I know that this is the program I should have been on from the beginning. A 20 minute nap is not enough for me. And a total of 3 hours sleep a day is still a remarkable achievement if I can do it for the long term. We will have to wait and see what happens.

I’ve basically given myself a reset. My last oversleep took me to about 1 pm yesterday. (My wife works from home and she knows to leave me alone. I guess she figures I have to sleep sometime as she secretly has no idea what I am doing.) I’ve been to work and missed out on two naps. I’ve had my first 30 min nap at 4 am and hardly slept at all. But I’m up on the Stanford Scale. It may be just pure excitement, but it *just feels better already*.

So we had UBERMAN. Then EVERYMAN, both named by our patron Saint Puredoxyk over at The Official Uberman.

I now dub the 6 x 30 cycle FULLMAN.

The whole idea of Fullman is that you start on a 6 x 30 minute cycle, then slowly, if you really want to go the distance, reduce the program to 5 x 30 minutes, and then finally to 4 x 30 minutes!

At that point, on a 4 x 30 minutes polyphasic sleep cycle, you would be doing BUCKMAN.

Now that’s having a great day.

Everyman (Polyphasic Sleep – Day 12

Its all gone to hell. I’ve been oversleeping and the whole schedule is shot to pieces.

I can’t adapt to true Uberman. My hope is that I can adapt to Uberman with a core sleep, now called *Everyman*.

Last night I went down for my 4 am nap. Feeling pretty crap. Depressed. While I was lying there I decided on the spot to convert that nap into my core sleep. I reckoned (correctly) that 4 am was the better time for my daily 1.5 hour core sleep.

I slept to 2 pm the next day.

Ouch.

…

The reason. My nap schedule has gone to pieces. I get interested in what I’m doing and I postpone my nap. Or work gets in the way and my nap is either way too early or way too late. Yesterday I had only 3 naps, due to the sleep in of the day before…
…

Rededicating to the plan. I have decided to make a deal with my body. It is a negotiation. I will give the body timed and regular naps. It will deal with it the best that it can and adapt. The deal is that under no circumstances will it get more than agreed, and I must in turn give it the agreed sleeps no matter the circumstances. If I fail to give it a scheduled nap or fail to make up for it when circumstances dictate that I must postpone it, I give my body permission to make my life hell.

I don’t think it will renege on its side of the bargain.

::

T