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.

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.

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.