For the last 3 days of my polyphasic sleep trial I was experiencing mixed results. I had some naps that were refreshing and some that left me almost more tired than before. I also had some more consecutive naps and one oversleeping incident.

Having a nap that isn’t completely refreshing during the day isn’t as bad, because I have many people and things around, that distract me and keep me engaged. But during the night the options are limited and I’m more likely to do mostly sedentary work. I also tend to do mostly passive things like watching animes or reading.

I noticed, that the times I couldn’t get myself out of bed where those when I felt like I was falling asleep standing before a nap. Instead of doing something from my EBFL I rather opted to take an additional unscheduled nap.

Those naps aren’t  bad per se, since some of them really left me refreshed and with enough energy to stay awake for the rest of the cycle. But if I took those naps when I was really extremely tired I could almost be certain not to get out of bed afterwards.

To prevent this in the future I will allow myself only an additional nap at 2am and 6am. I will also allow myself to nap only if I’m not about to fall asleep standing. Should this be the case I will do some items from my EBFL first.

I noticed that for some naps I had pretty bad sleep inertia and I couldn’t get myself going after waking up. Yesterday evening I found that I could get rid of this pretty easy by practicing a speech, or doing something else engaging. Practicing a speech is an activity that’s both,  mentally and physically engaging as I have to remember it and I also have to stand up and use body language while doing it.

Last evening started pretty good. I felt wide awake and refreshed after waking up. I could concentrate easily and I was  even able to watch a movie without getting particularly tired. This was still the case after my midnight nap, but before my 4am nap I started to get increasingly tired and I decided to take an unscheduled nap at about 3am. As it turned out this was a mistake. At first I added another nap after this one and then I somehow forgot to set my alarm again which lead to an oversleep of a couple of hours.

Even though I said I would allow myself only one try this time, I don’t see this as a failure yet. I think I came too far down the road to adaption to revert to monophasic sleep right now. Also at the moment I feel pretty good. I had no problems getting two restful naps already in which I hit REM sleep after the oversleeping incident.

After my level of tiredness was decreasing yesterday during the day, it increased again during the night. This morning I was really tired again and I decided to take an unscheduled nap at 5am. What followed was a fallback to one of my negative habits I formed during my previous tries. I repeatedly went back to sleep and had several consecutive naps. Luckily I managed to set enough alarms every time, so that I didn’t oversleep.

I don’t know if this is a good, or a bad thing, because the scheduled nap at 8am that followed was the first one where I had a vivid dream, that I could still remember after waking up.

Even though I didn’t have another dream during my other daytime naps, I felt pretty good. The naps were restorative and I didn’t feel tired for the biggest part of the day. I went for a long walk this forenoon which was very relaxing. In the afternoon I even felt capable to work on a speech I want to give on my next Toastmasters meeting.

I had a big pizza and a salad for dinner, which in hindsight was a mistake. I was pretty full after that and this combined with the regular nighttime drowsiness led to another series of consecutive naps.

Normally I have several alarms set up all over the room to force me to get up, but this time for some reason I thought that I’d only need my main alarm plus one backup. This turned out to be a mistake since it was all to easy to me to repeatedly reset the alarms (I have plenty of experience with that from my previous tries).

So to prevent this from happening again I will from now on use all my backup alarms again. To make sure I just turn them out from the bed I will distribute them in several different places throughout the rooms, maybe even other rooms. This is to make sure I have to move around for at least a couple of minutes so that I’m guaranteed to wake up and to be able to make sound decisions.

I hope that this isn’t affecting adaption too badly, but I think that an oversleep of equal length would have been far more destructive.

Another thing I thought of was scheduling two additional naps during the night. I think I might be less inclined to take an additional nap directly after waking up if my subconsciousness knows that the next nap is not even away two more hours. After the adaption I can still get rid of those naps when night time drowsiness is starting to subside.

Today was really interesting. I manged to get all my naps on time without oversleeping. As I thought, sleep deprivation was getting worse. The strange thing however is, that this was only true for the next two cycles or so. I also had to add in one additional nap in my 4a-8a cycle at 6a.

During the time from midnight to 8am I really had to fight fatigue. However it was still mild, compared to the fatigue I had to deal with during my previous trials. I remember having bouts of narcolepsy (falling asleep against ones own will) when I was visiting a friend. I practically fell asleep while I was talking.
So far I haven’t even come near to that state.

I’m not sure why this is so, but I think, that in the last couple of month, I might have conditioned myself to fall asleep quickly and to get at least some rem sleep during those naps. I’m uncertain yet whether this is a good or a bad thing, as I don’t know if it will help adaption or actually make it take longer.

Starting from 8am I gradually became less tired. I don’t know if I have to attribute that to my naps or just the reaction of my body to the daylight and an increased activity level.

The first day of my polyphasic sleep experiment was surprisingly easy. When I think back to my previous attempts it feels very different. For example so far I had no problems getting out of bed or waking up to my timer. On all my previous tries I had problems with oversleeping right from the beginning. I constructed more and more complicated mechanisms to wake me up after my naps. None of them prevented me from oversleeping.

Technically they woke me up, however most of the time I would somehow talk myself into getting “just one more nap”, because I wasn’t able to sleep for the first 15 minutes or so. This inevitably led to extreme sleep inertia. The process repeated, only this time I would be too tired to set my alarm systems correctly and I would awake several hours later, frustrated and still sleep deprived.

This time however I’m very strict about getting right out of bed and not allowing consecutive naps. I also write in big letters on a piece of paper, which I place right besides my bed, what I intend to do immediately after waking up. This helps immensely because it gives me an actual reason to get up.

Quality of Naps

While I wasn’t able to fall asleep on the first three naps yesterday, I had no problems falling asleep for the following naps, except the last one.

So far I don’t dream during those naps but at least they are somewhat restorative.

I think the worst part of sleep deprivation lies still ahead of me, but I feel confident right now that I can manage it since my experience so far is so different from my previous attempts.

Now it’s official – I just started my polyphasic sleep trial. So far I did all my naps on schedule. However I wasn’t really able to fully fall asleep during those naps, it felt like I was just on the verge of sleep. I can remember several short dream images, however it felt like I stayed conscious the whole time.

I think this might be the normal experience of the onset of sleep and it’s just that we normally don’t remember that  because we fall asleep directly afterwards. It’s probably much like we don’t remember waking up at night just becuse we drift back into sleep right away. The strange thing is however, that I felt much fresher and more awake than before the naps.

I also recorded a short video clip to announce this trial:

For at least the duration of the adaption period I will continue to post updates, both here and on youtube.

Polyphasic sleep, or more precisely Uberman’s sleep is a special way to sleep, which allows for a massive reduction in total sleep time. The term polyphasic sleep itself only means sleeping in more than two chunks (two chunks would be called biphasic). The ‘normal’ sleep schedule most people follow would be called monophasic sleep (one big chunk).

Schedule for Uberman

Now with polyphasic sleep there are several different possibilities to schedule your naps. Probably the most widely known variant is the so called Da Vinci (Allegedly Leonardo Da Vinci followed this schedule) or Uberman sleep. The term Uberman was coined by a blogger called Puredoxyk who was the first to blog about this way of sleeping. As a student of philosophy she was referring to Nietzsche’s Übermensch. This comes from the fact, that somebody who sleeps this way only needs about two hours of sleep per day. One can easily see that to an outsider this might seem to grant superhuman powers.

Now what exactly is this mysterious way to sleep. Basically it’s very simple. You take naps of 15 to 30 minutes length every four hours. This totals 6 naps per day and an average time spent asleep of 1.5 h to 3 h.

But that’s Sleep Deprivation!

I can hear you say, that this is severe sleep deprivation, but believe me it isn’t. It’s similar to the way soldiers are advised to sleep during a prolonged battle situation. It’s also common with solo sailors who have to stay awake for a long time to maintain optimal performance. There’s also a study by Claudio Stampi which discusses two experiments that indicate that such a way of sleeping is possible.

How does it work?

This is pure speculation, since there is only one scientific study available on this topic.

The following are my own ideas on the topic: As far as I understand it, our mind works, on a very simplified level, similar to a rechargeable battery. When you are awake, you drain energy from that battery, while you are sleeping you recharge it. For your brain battery to last a full 16 hours you need to charge it for 8 hours. But what if you could charge your brain faster in the beginning? Then you could recharge more frequently to increase efficiency. As it seems you can charge it for 20 minutes which will give you enough energy to run for another 4 hours. This way you can greatly improve your sleep/wake ratio.

The Adaption

Before you can get the benefits of polyphasic sleeping you have to go through an adaption period in which your brain will adapt to the new conditions. The time to adapt is about one week and involves some serious sleep deprivation, since in the beginning you can’t fall asleep fast enough and even if you do, you won’t enter the essential stages of sleep fast enough (most people consider this to be the REM sleep). After some time however your mind learns that it doesn’t get much sleep, but it gets it regularly. When this happens it starts to jump immediately into the more important and refreshing stages of sleep.

Previous Tries

So far I’ve tried to adapt to polyphasic sleep a couple of times, however without much success. I never made it through the adaption period, as I was constantly oversleeping which is the worst thing you can do because it totally destroys all the results you have achieved up to that point. I managed to oversleep even with 5 to 6 alarms set. The problem was not as much sleeping through the alarms, but to reset them frequently to get ‘just one more nap’. After the second or third consecutive nap my mental abilities declined considerably and I wasn’t able to reset my alarms properly which led to a sleep of several hours

The next Try

Starting with Monday (actually I’ll start on Sunday but Monday will be officially day one, as it is the first day I will sleep completely polyphasic)  next week I want to give polyphasic sleep another try. This time I want to increase my chances for success as much as possible. So to avoid the biggest mistakes I made last time I will make the following changes and add some new rules for this time:

• No consecutive naps during the adaption (I might allow one additional nap during one cycle to fight fatigue however.)
• Create an BFL: This stands for Big Fat List. It’s a list of things to do while sleep deprived. It will consist mostly of tasks that don’t require to much thought, but will keep me awake anyways.
• Create an EBFL (Emergency BFL): This is an extension of the BFL which contains things to be done when I’m on the verge of falling asleep standing.
• Post regular updates of my progress on youtube and on this blog to create responsibility.
• Create responsibility by telling others about my experiment.
• Before a nap, exactly plan what to do after I wake up, as my ability to think will not be too great immediately after waking up. (Not that it will be great between naps but maybe it’s at least on the level of a zombie instead of an armless legless braindead zombie with a head shot. But that’s why I created a BFL, right?) This way I can jump directly into action and will have something better to do than going back to bed right on the spot.
• Only one try! On previous attempts I overslept repeatedly. However those prolonged naps didn’t leave me rested. So when I was starting over again at this point I already had a big amount of sleep debt on my shoulders, only making success less likely. Therefore I will include a rule this time, that I have to wait for at least 2 month after a failed attempt to start another try.