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

Polyphasic Sleep – Day 10

Everyman
Now that I’m officially doing a daily core sleep I don’t feel I can call my polyphasic sleep schedule *Uberman* with any kind of grace. Over at the Uberman Group Puredoxyk coined the word Everyman, for her own core sleep compromised schedule. All day I was thinking of a name to use. I thought, maybe I could create a name for the core sleep version of Uberman. Damn you Paradoxyk, you beat me to it. =)

Puredoxyk, the inventor of Uberman, is on day 10 of her attempt at reverting to Uberman. She too has succumbed to core sleeps.

Its a difficult road. I hope she makes it.

I hope I make it.

Stats

I’ve been keeping statistics. These graphs show up to day 9.

These stats show my total sleeping time up until yesterday. You can see days 3, 5 and 7 where I overslept. Its interesting to note that on days 5 and 7 I got a regular monophasic’s dose of total sleep. On days 8 and 9 I have began core sleeps. Both of those days I overslept. I should be down at 3 hours, 10 minutes.

The results of how that affected me on the Stanford Scale are shown here.

As you can see the over-sleeps improved my lot considerably. It was based on these results that I decided a core sleep was the answer to my debilitating sleep deprivation.

The Standford data is subjective of course. My position on the scale varies over a 24 hour period so averages have been used. It gives an overall indication, though, of how I’m doing, and I find it useful.

Day 10

Today was a day of extremes.

I awoke from my 1.5 hour core sleep at 8 am feeling, probably, the worst I’ve ever felt. It was my first successful core sleep that I didn’t over-sleep on. It was, literally, like getting up in the middle of the night on a monophasic cycle. I could have slept standing. I nearly fell over a couple of times. I went for a walk and revived somewhat, listening to 7th Son, a podcast novel.

Conversely, after my nap 4 hours later I felt the best I’ve ever felt. I would use the word “refreshed” if I didn’t know that I’ve yet to feel truly refreshed. I was probably at about 2 on the Stanford Scale. I know I could feel better. But I was in a state I’d very much like to remain in. The chatter in my head (the party crowd stream of consciousness that I carry around) was strangely quiet. I felt as if my attention was more focused. I felt calm and in present time. It was effortless. I felt very comfortable just being me. Unfortunately, I had to miss a nap and the feeling faded.

Steve Pavlina talked about this. I look forward to more of it as I conquer sleep deprivation.

Sleep Deprivation and Consciousness

Sleep deprivation is the leaky cup of my consciousness. Naps refill the cup as my consciousness slowly drains away. Its like a long slow walk uphill.

I suppose the analogy is, that as a person adapts to polyphasic napping, the adaption is more less akin to closing up some of the holes. And starting Uberman is like refusing to fill the cup as consciousness slowly leaks away.

I want a new cup.

T.

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.)