Uberman (Polyphasic Sleep) – Day 9

Its time to bring this blog into present time.

As of this morning I’m in day 9 of the Uberman Sleep Cycle. On the Stanford Sleepiness Scale I’m steady at level 3 to 4. I occasionally peak up to level 2 for short periods.

When I wake up from a “core” sleep however, I’m consistently down the bottom at levels 6 to 7. Its a hell ride to consciousness. But once I’m moving around its all behind me. I’m doing this for the extra time it will bring me, not for any wellness considerations.

I also do it because sleep is unnatural. It may be natural to a body. But its not natural to a *uniform*, that the best scientific minds on the planet, at least in public, dismiss the existence of non-chemical life out of hand.

Doing Uberman is bringing me closer to God. Not the God of the Bible or the Koran or the mystical East. I answer to a different God. He is a diminished god, not so different than you or I. He is multitudinous in number. He exists everywhere. He needs food and shits in a toilet if he is lucky. He is confused. He has forgotten who he is. He has no power. He is diminished.

What’s happened to my polyphasic schedule?

I started out on a 3-7-11 schedule. By about day 4 I was starting to bottom out on the Stanford Sleepiness Scale.

From about day 5 I began to oversleep.

My scheduled naps were being altered by my work schedule. Sometimes I missed a nap. Nights were hell. I had planned to do a lot of work in my “workshop” at home. I had a long HOLY SHIT KEEP BUSY LIST (thanks PD for the idea), but I quickly realized my neighbour’s bedroom shares a wall with my workshop. Can you believe it? At 4 in the morning the slightest noise can be heard throughout the building. I did do some work but I became more and more paranoid she would come charging through the door with a kitchen knife at any moment. So I had to stop.
One thing I noticed was that after oversleeping I felt noticeably better for the entire day. I felt terrible when I awoke, but as soon as I got moving things improved. I’ve never, ever felt refreshed after a sleep anyhow. No matter how much I slept I would still feel groggy when I awoke. Thus, I don’t have an expectation that I’ll consistently reach 1 on the Stanford Scale. I rarely have during monophasic sleeping (one sleep period per day), so why should I start now?

Oversleeping…

My experience with oversleeping has convinced me that a short sleep is essential. There was no denying the improvement in my well-being after oversleeping.

The first time I took an intentional nap was day 6. I awoke after 1.5 hours feeling, probably, the worst I’ve felt so far! I decided to go back to sleep for another 1.5 hours, to make a total of 3 hours, in the hope that I would feel better. I awoke feeling just the same as I did after 1.5 hours. The conclusion?

If I feel the same after a 3 hour sleep as I do after a 1. 5 hour sleep, I might as well take the 1. 5 hour sleep. My objective, of course, is to sleep the absolute minimum. I intend to drop the core sleeps as soon as I can. Maybe in the second month I can do that.

New sleep schedule…

My new schedule is 4-8-12. I will have a total of 5*20 polynaps and one core sleep of 1.5 hours in place of the 8 am morning nap. I will go to bed at 6.30 am and wake up a 8 am. All for a total of 3 hours, 10 minutes total sleep per day. I can live with that.

I am more closely aligned now with my work schedule. Sometimes I will miss the 4 pm nap completely. There is no avoiding it. Fortunately if I had to miss a nap, that would be the preferred one to miss. The core sleep is intended to take up that slack the following morning.

My problems with the schedule highlights the importance of careful planning before you start Uberman. You are living on such a fine edge of sleep deprivation and attenuated awareness, you want to give yourself every chance possible.

Look at me. I’ve been on the schedule 9 days and I’m talking like a guru. =]

I’m building some stats of my progress and they seem to show the same thing. So we’ll see how that goes as I move into my third week.

T.

Heart and Soul

The heart and soul of this blog is to document an absurd, preposterous journey.

Imagine you knew this guy. He was a quite kind of fellow, obviously working class, not the smoothest diamond in the case and a big hulking fellow. When you saw him you thought of an out of shape footballer. He was a little rude, uncommunicative, immature, not showing a lot of apparent interest in others, but you suspected maybe he was just a little shy. He seemed to read and study a lot, but was not apparently qualified in anything much. He was 42 and drove a bus. Then you find out that he wanted to be a computer scientist and cosmologist. Not that he’d tell you that. But somehow you find out.

Do you laugh? Do you pity his folly? Do you wonder as he struggled with high school mathematics and popular science texts, if perhaps he was a little too old and slow to achieve such qualifications?

I would.

I’d think this guy was terminally pointless and sad. Where will he end up? What about all the lost income opportunities as he spends his money on adult education? What about his frustrated wife who wonders why he can’t do better, why he never seems to get anything done? How long will it be before he leaves her for some 22 year old lost soul. What about the fact that he doesn’t go out or socialize with friends?

What would you make of this guy?

I’d think I’d met my soulmate. If he were a girl I’d marry him on the spot.

Uberman (Polyphasic Sleep) – The First 3 Days – Continued

Here are some things I started doing right from the beginning and havn’t changed.

The schedule

After reading the basics on Uberman I decided to go with the original Uberman, that is, the 6 x 20 minute nap cycle. My timing was 3 am, 7 am, 11 am, 3 pm, 7 pm, 11 pm, and so on. That abbreviated to a 3-7-11 cycle.

As it turned out that didn’t work with my work schedule and I’ve changed to a 4-8-12 cycle. This is a more elegant timing, too. I am a firm believer in The Elegant Universe, though I’ve yet to read the book of the same title.

Electronic help

I hope I am correct in assuming that most people on this schedule will rely on either a timer or alarm clock or both to wake up. I too thought this would be absolutely essential.

I was wrong.

Before I started Uberman I was lucky enough to stumble upon Placebo’s blog and his Polyphasic Sound Track MP3.

Wearing earphones while sleeping is like wearing earplugs. It was my wife who introduced me to wearing earplugs while sleeping. She wears them to, “shut out the noise in my head.” That doesn’t make sense of course, as wearing earplugs while sleeping will *shut the noise in*.

But I too suffer from a noisy head. A buzz, a whine, a fine pitch whirr. I’ve always had it. If I listen hard, I can hear the constant babble of voices too. Not the babble that a crazy man hears, but the more constant stream of consciousness native to all of us. For me, its like a party, everyone speaking a little louder over time to be heard over everyone else. For some reason wearing earplugs when sleeping ameliorates this noise.

I sleep with Placebo’s 23 minute Polyphasic Sound Track going. I have Koss ear buds connected to my MP3 player. These are, arguably, the best possible ear buds in the under $100 price range. They seal up the ears like earplugs to a certain degree and the sound is very good.

Placebo’s Polyphasic Soundtrack is 23 minutes of *static*. Its a clear, even sound of the same ‘wavelength’ as internal noise. It tunes out the static in my head. Underneath the clear, even sound of static is a deeper, rumbling static that ebbs and flows, like a swift river over rapids. I’m not sure if its on the actual track, or, if its created inside my head by my ears. Its a three dimensional sound.
After 23 minutes the static fades out to silence. I usually wake up at this point. The SILENCE wakes me up. I wake up in two stages. First *I* wake up. Its clear and silent. My thoughts are lucid. But my eyes are closed and I’m disconnected, a sort of floating in space feeling. At first I would panic because waking in silence nearly almost meant I had slept through an alarm.
Then the second stage hits: my body wakes up. I become aware of my body and the fatigue. This is personal evidence that sleep is not connected to the mind. The mind resides in the body, and its the body that gets tired. It you can disconnect from the body, there is no such thing as tiredness. For a few seconds when I wake up, I experience this.

After a minute or two of silence on the sound track, a rooster begins to crow. Very cute. And very effective. Its like waking up in the country. If that fails you then hear a pig digging and snorting. I sometimes stay for that. If you still refuse to get up, you hear music, first soft, then much, much louder. Then finally a loud tone will sound.

I began by using a timer as backup. But I never needed it right from the first day, and on the third day I lost it. I’ve been using the headphones exclusively ever since. I’m confident now, even at work when oversleeping would place me in a lot of trouble. As long as the MP3 player keeps playing and the buds stay in my ears I won’t oversleep. Of course I could decide to oversleep by not getting up when I’m supposed to. That would be a lack of will power.

How I nap

I don’t undress and I don’t get in bed. I rug up with a jumper if its cold. I lay down on my side, earplugs inserted, and switch on my MP3 player. Fully clothed.

I look out for *sleep signals*. These come within the first minute. Mostly its the first stage of sleep, that dreamlike, smokey feeling when hallucinogenic mumbo jumbo mixes with reality. It truly is an altered state.

Then I’m awake floating in silence. My body might not feel rested yet. I’m not that far into the cycle. The sense of intervening time is immense. Its disorientating at first. Each nap can be the equivalent in perceived time of an entire nights sleep. Its weird. I wish I felt that rested when I woke up. That’s coming I suppose.

Some advice I’ve learned from others and can confirm:

• Don’t get into bed.
• Lie *on* the bed. If you need a blanket, use a jacket draped over you. Do not under any circumstances get your naps confused with sleeping as you know it. It has to be a new experience.
• Have a backup alarm clock if you need it.
• Use Placebo’s Polyphasic Sound track. I highly recommend it.
• Begin practicing sleeping in your car, in chairs, etc. Its hard for me to do. I don’t sleep as well. But up the track, I see the benefits.
• Have something to do as soon as you wake up: a meal, a shower, sex, a walk, something physical to set the reluctant body in motion.
• Don’t lie there TRYING to go sleep. Just lie there and look out for sleep indicators. Focus on them and ignore everything else.
• In my experience, even 5 minutes of sleep is worth it. But seriously, you’ll be so tired almost from the get-go, falling asleep won’t be a problem. Getting up may be.
• Use a sleeping mask. Leave the lights on. As soon as you wake up, take off the mask. The sudden inflow of light should help.

More on the headphones

The more I think about it, the more IDEAL the headphones are for Uberman.

• The ones I use block out sound. So that means, when you get the hang of napping, you can nap anywhere. I nap at work with a TV just outside the sleeping room. (Yeah, I know. Hard to fathom). If its going I just turn up the volume on my MP3 player. Even when the static is quite loud it you will still get to sleep.
• Use Koss ear buds or something similar to act as earplugs as well.
• You can always carry an MP3 player on you wherever you go. No matter the environment, as long as you are safe and comfortable, you will be able to nap anywhere.
• When you just need to tune out some exterior noise, but need to concentrate, the Polyphasic Sound Track is perfect. (Yet to be tried, but I don’t see any reason why not.)

Uberman (Polyphasic Sleep) – The First 3 Days

Did I mention that the first 3 days were hell on Earth?

Is it worth it?

Successfully converting to Uberman is the only way I’m going to even *begin* on my quest to answer The Ultimate Question. In truth I began a long time ago. There is focus now. There is intent. There is courage to say what I want to do and courage to make the decisions that must be made to do it.

The hardest thing about making a decision is that it excludes all the other possibilities. You have to choose one thing, and exclude all the others. Decision, pointed intention, is a process of exclusion. These are some of the things I am learning from Mastery, a book am I reading.

I’m at day 8 now. I can actually read again.