A new approach to writing this blog

A brand new approach

I’ve decided to take a whole new approach with this blog. I ran out of time to do it, and second it wasn’t fun to do. The reason it wasn’t fun was that I was treating each post like an article of sorts. I spent too much time on each post. It was blog suicide

So my new approach is a just a daily catharsis of events.

A question that I had was whether or not to have one blog for all my interests or multiple blogs to focus in on each pursuit. I wonder how many other bloggers have this same question? The trend of the more popular blogs I have seen is to focus in on a subject. I tend to like those blogs.

What I’m trying to do in the final analysis is get a PhD. That’s really what I’m doing and everything else is trying to fit or is being pushed aside towards that goal. Why I think my story will be interesting is that I am a 42 year old man (turned 42 today), not particularly bright despite what I may think, married and working class (and I hate it that I am working class). Moreover, I’m pretty sure I sit somewhere on the autism spectrum. I have diagnosed myself with Asperger’s Syndrome.

On the bright side, I do happen to live in Australia which is a great country and is a major plus point in this turbulent world. Anyone want to live in the Middle East right now? I’m Australian, born in Australia, of Anglo-Saxon origin though I actually have no idea where and where from except for the fact that I have extremely white skin.

So come along for the ride. I hope to learn something. You may be the only friend I have (except for my wife of course who I am constantly discovering).

Goal number one is to speed up these blog posts so that they happen frequently.

Polyphasic Sleep – A Wife’s Perspective – Part 2

Part 2(Part 3 of: How Not to Convert to the Polyphasic Sleep Schedule)

I LOVE HIM TO BITS, BUT IF HE KEEPS UP WITH THIS I’M OUT OF HERE……continued.

He wants to do a PhD in something or other. Whatever it is this week. He buys heaps of physics books on eBay that he doesn’t read, with titles like “The Elegant Universe” and “The Life of the Cosmos”. The last book to arrive was “The Story of Zero”. But to tell you the truth he doesn’t seem to get anywhere. He is a zero of getting things done. What about my website? Says he needs more hatting. But it hasn’t changed in over a year. Everybody loves it, but he says it isn’t finished and its just a temporary thing. I know these things take time but he seems to be taking all of it.

When he started staying up all night it was OK at first. It was new and he was excited and I was excited for him and I went along with it. I try to support whatever he wants to do. You can’t love somebody and stand in their way — you can just never do that no matter what silliness he wants to do as that might spell the end of everything. So I try to be as supportive as possible because he’s actually very talented and he’s the only reason my business is going the way it is at all. But I didn’t think then that anyone can forego daily sleep and stay up all night and only have naps and I still don’t. Having said that, I’ve always been supportive of whatever he wants to do.

Well, the first couple of weeks went OK. Our bedroom is also his office. We set up a screen and I sleep with ear plugs so it wasn’t a problem. He would lay down beside me to nap. He would never get under the covers. He said that he wasn’t sleeping, it was napping, and that if he got under the covers it would be too much like sleeping. So OK.

I never really knew when he’d get up or if he’d just keep on sleeping. I’d let him sleep. At first I didn’t mind. He had to move through this idea in his own way, and hopefully get it out of him. He would sleep for 4, 6, 8 or 9 hours sometimes. And boy would he snore. He refused to admit that he snored during his naps. He called the long “naps” oversleeping. It was weird. He went an entire month, except maybe a day or two when he was core sleeping, sleeping in his clothes.

I could never keep up with his schedule. It seemed to change a lot. He wasn’t getting anything done. Sometimes I’d wake up and he’d be out of the house. He’d be at the gym or having a coffee somewhere. Sometimes he was out walking listening to his “podcasts”.I started to get jealous. Why couldn’t I have coffee in the mornings?

But then he wasn’t coming home until midday or sometimes 1 or 2 pm. He was sleeping in his car. No I correct myself, he was oversleeping in his car. He was staying up all night on his computer then going to the gym at 6 am. Then he’d “nap” somewhere in his car and I wouldn’t see him until the afternoon. This was no way to have a marriage.

He looked terrible. I’ve never seen eyes so red. I thought his eyes were actually bleeding. He was leaving things behind when he went to work. He melted his favourite jumper on the bar heater he used while he was sleeping; this this from the man who has 3 fire extinguishers in the house and gives my daughter a hard time for having her heater too close under her desk. He was eating at night and getting fat. And in general he just looked like shit. And he was uncommunicative and sullen and not really there at all. He basically left me for a month, which is what it felt like.

In the last week he finally got moving on taking the photographs he needed to produce my brochure. I was perhaps starting to see the promised increase in his production. He said they had to be top quality and he was having trouble with the lighting. So the only place our “light tent” could fit was on our bed! Its a massive thing and it stayed there for a week. Our bedroom was turned into a photographic studio. I didn’t mind because I could sleep in my bindery on the floor, and my back felt good for it. But after about a week of Timmy sleeping in a ball behind the tent or in some parking lot in his car, one night he didn’t even come home from work. (He works at night and I usually expect him any time after midnight.) He showed up around midday the next day. He’d been asleep in his car. I’d had enough and I told him so. If he didn’t want to sleep with me in my own bed that was fine. If he didn’t want to be married that was fine. As far as I was concerned he was doing this so he could break up with me. That was how it felt.

Oh no, no he said. He wasn’t trying to do any of that, he was just having a hard time adjusting. All he had to do was stop oversleeping. But I’d had enough. Apparently he had too. He said he would start sleeping normally again. So that night he came to bed and snored his head off.

So that’s my story of a polyphasic husband. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. I don’t really think he intentionally tried to make my life hell. He says he had to adapt to it to have the time to achieve his goals. But the during the last month he got less done than the last two months combined. Production, that is, work on projects, practically stopped as far as I could see. I hope not too many other people get sucked into this program. I wonder how many marriages get destroyed because of it. A person needs to sleep. If anyone is thinking of trying this I wouldn’t recommend it.

Polyphasic Sleep – A Wife’s Perspective

Part 1

(Part 2 of: How Not to Convert to the Polyphasic Sleep Schedule)

I LOVE HIM TO BITS, BUT IF HE KEEPS UP WITH THIS I’M OUT OF HERE…

When Timmy first told me about polyphasic sleep I thought it was going to be another one of those phases he goes through. He said he was going to cut his sleep down to 2 hours per night. I thought he was crazy.

He explained it to me and I still thought he was crazy. About a week later he was still talking about it, “getting me ready”, for the big changes ahead and I realized he was serious.

I even thought about doing it myself. I could use those extra hours in the day. I cook and clean and do just about everything else as well as run my own own bindery (I’m a bookbinder) in the front of the house. I’m also trying to get my own art off the ground and I thought it could work for me.

Bananas! I must have been in a delusion. The last month has been ridiculous.

Timmy has a lot on his plate. He does all my paperwork, he is building my website and he does all my digital work, and he is making me a brochure. Never mind the fact that he’s been working on that brochure for over six months. Longer, a year maybe. I wait patiently. I thought perhaps he might get something done if he had more time. I really, really need that brochure. He means well. But how much Photoshop do you need to learn just to make a simple brochure? Well apparently quite a bit and so I wait.

Anyway that’s not what this is about. This is about a man who decides he’s only going get two hours of sleep per night spread out over a series of 20 minute naps.

What do you think might happen?

To be continued…

How Not to Convert to the Polyphasic Sleep Schedule – Day 25

Part one.

No matter the state of knowledge and awareness of the universe, or lack thereof, there is always something that each one of us knows which could be imparted for the benefit of others

I haven’t yet made it on the Uberman polyphasic sleep schedule so I can’t tell you how to do it. But I can tell you how not to do it. Oh yes, I know how to (not) do that

HOW NOT TO DO UBERMAN

The first thing you should do to utterly fail at Uberman is to make sure you are hopelessly addicted to coffee before you start. That way, as you try to wean yourself off the coffee, you’ll get headaches and a dull sleepy feeling pretty much permanently evern before you start. You should be in the middle of withdrawal symptoms the day you start Uberman.

The next thing is to ensure failure is to make sure you have a job as a “professional” driver on night shift, so as to make the ensuing days of sleep deprivation unbearable and at times a little dangerous. Or get some other job that entails lots of repitition, flashing lights, stupid people, and poisonous, mind dulling fumes. It also helps to have a bit of a chip on your shoulder, a bit of a job snob, so not only will you be struggling with the transition, you’ll hate yourself as well. Its absolutely essential that your shift times vary up to two hours either way so your sleep schedule is ruined from day one.

The next thing to ensure failure is to do it in the middle of winter so the nights are cold and the mornings even colder. Make sure you live in an old crapy house that would make an hippy green with envy and that is hard, if not impossible, to heat with the small crapy electric bar heaters that you own. Also, live miles and miles away from any all-night gyms or coffee shops. Make yourself a huge “HOLLY SHIT KEEP BUSY LIST” to keep yourself occupied during the wee hours. Fill the list with things that require you to sit still for long hours at your computer or desk. Then fill it with things to do in your workshop, only to realize, too late, that the slightest noise will wake up your neighbour. Out of sheer necessity, when you are forced to do something, anything in your workshop to stay awake, you can then live in constant fear waiting for your neighbour to come charging through your door with a wood splitter.

The next thing to do is to start on a whim without properly thinking it through. Just start and work it out as you go along. Go for about three days on the schedule, getting no more than 3 hours of sleep per day. But don’t have regular nap times. Change them around to suit your work schedule. This above all things is an excellent strategy for failure.

By about day four you should be ready to kill yourself. This would be a good time to start oversleeping. If, by some freak of strong will and excellent character, you are still persisting with the program, oversleeping will null any adjustment your body is making and prolong the agony of sleep deprivation. Oversleep every second day for maximum torture and elongation of the adjustment period.

To be continured….

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?