Day 1

Or should I call it day 0?

This blog is about a polyphasic sleep experiment. I was recently reading "Destructive Emotions" which is about science and buddhist monks discussing ways to help people cleans themselves of destructive emotions. This caused me to read some googleable information about buddhism and meditation. In one source, I don't remember where now, I think some mediation book, it breifly mentions that some buddhists claim that meditation can replace sleep. So I googled that, and stumbled on to something called polyphasic sleep.

I have so much to do. I am a programmer and computer and Internet consultant. After 14 years of contracting my skills out other companies and individuals, who then in turn sell a product to the public, I've decided to take all those indirect learnings about B2C that I got from my B2B activities and give it a go with my own products. I decided to do this in December. But here it is middle of April and I do not have what I would call a viable product to launch. I have 1/3 of the project to go, but I am already past my earlier set deadline for the end of March.

Then there is the house. We bought this old place as a fixer upper about 1 1/2 years ago. Since I went to school for architecture, and I worked in a wood furniture and cabinet factory in the summers, I decided to revive those skills and, typical of me, go it alone on the labor through the whole list of improvements. And what a list! Build a new fence, replace the siding with hardy plank, install wood floors, remodel both bathrooms and the kitchen, renovate the yard and plant gardens, reinforce the attic with hurricane straps, replace the air conditioner, put in new doors and windows... endless.

I've gotten little of the house done. We have new floors, and the attic is insulated 4x as much as it was, and a new attic deck to store things away (which I will finish off with drywall ... some day). There is still much to do. With work there just aren't enough hours in the day. I don't even have kids yet.

So I have about two months, as this summer it will be just impossible to do anything as the schedule looks. The two goals are impossible under a normal schedule. But this polyphasic sleep thing looks like something I daydream about lately. In fact I believe I have accidentally stumbled on it a few times. There have been a few times in the past when I've gotten very little sleep over 4 or 5 days. I catnapped, and often felt very refreshed after them, so instead of sleeping, I just catnapped every now and then. So when I read about polyphasic sleep or uberman sleep it seemed very familiar and believable to me.

The best source for the experience I have found so far is StevePavlina.com . He has a diary about his 5 1/2 month experience. He started out intending to have a go with it for about a month, to get past the getting used to period, but liked it so much that he just stuck with it.

Being a .NET programmer, I don't see blogspot as being where this diary will stay. I will be moving it at some point to my own domain and blog. I am throwing this up here now because I don't have any other place at this time. I can access this from my ppc phone at any time, so that makes it ubiquitous. And I plan to update once every waking period.

Based on what I learned at stevepavlina.com from his experience, i will be doing the full uberman, but with a few changes. I can't understand the idea of completely moving away from the circadian rhythm, breaking up waking states into 4 hour periods. I don't think playing around with what I see as molecular and metabolistic timing that much on the front end will glide anyone into the sleep pattern any easier. I often notice the 90 minute cycles during the day when I am working on something intensely. And Steve's idea of taking another sleep at 2 hours if he needed it just seemed like common sense. So I am going to be on a 90 minute evaluation schedule, with some times being dependable sleeps, while others being only if I need them, depending on I feel at the time. But I will only sleep at 90 minute increments, for Steve's suggested 25 minutes on a timer.

So today is the first day. I've already been messing with my sleep schedule in the past week. So today I was asleep at 6:00am and slept til 2:30 or so. I tend to be a night owl, so that might help with night time sleepiness. It's about 7:00pm now. In half an hour will be another evaluation time, at which if I feel tired I will lay down and set a timer for 25 minutes, and get up even if I don't sleep. I did this a few times for the past few days, and a few of the times I managed to fall asleep and dream. As I mentioned I've done catnaps before and I think I may have some skill at falling into REM quickly.

So here I go. Let's see how long I can keep this up. I'll put up more information and links on this kind of sleep as I can find it, but for this first entry I'm just doing what I can now. I don't think I'll want to do anything too exciting for the first several days of this.

As for 7:30pm, I don't really feel tired. I was naughty about an hour ago and had a Mountain Dew, so that may explain it. That will be the last one though. So I will be up 'til 9:00pm at least.

Wish me luck!