Polyphasic Sleep Week 5

Today marks the end of my fifth week conducting this polyphasic sleep experiment and the third week of sleeping biphasically. It's been a good week. Very stabilized and normal. I'm still feeling twice as good than I was on monophasic. I no longer have high levels of background anxiety, something I wasn't expecting, the dark circles under my eyes are now virtually non-existent, and my health is twice as good. My muscles and bones don't ache half as much as they did before, and of course my mind is more alert throughout the day. I rarely feel sleepy. You'd think it'd be the opposite but it's not weirdly enough.

I now have an application to compile graphs for me and measure how much sleep I'm getting average. Over the last week it reports that I've had an average of 6.2 hours of sleep. This average obviously went up on the weekend, which by the way, I regret. Friday night I slept-in, waking up naturally after 7 hours, almost 2 hours more than usual and although it was the best sleep of my life I felt super ill all day. I really should stop doing that.

Earlier on in the week I was having trouble with the correct times to wake up as I'd become pretty reliant on my smart alarm to wake me up at the right stage and because I was falling asleep too fast, under 5 minutes, I found myself waking up in deep sleep. I had to shorten my core sleep from 5.5 hours to 5.1 hours. That fixed the problem and I felt ok again.

As for my mid afternoon naps, they are a force to be reckoned with. I love them. They no longer feel like an inconvenience, I absolutely love them. Now that my body's adjusted I have an average of 15mins sleep, although occasionally I'll still sleep up to an hour, just because it feels so good. I've also started dreaming at the beginning of my mid afternoon naps, which is an odd experience to say the least. It feels like I slip straight from wakefulness into dreaming, and although I don't actually realize that at the time, it's made the beginning of about half my naps this week pre-lucid. I'll often question whether I'm awake or asleep, often to wake myself up twitching realizing that I was actually asleep and dreaming. I call them micro-dreams, brief periods of REM unlike hypnogogia.

Wrapping up, this schedule is the best I've ever slept, and I highly recommend it, but now my curiosity is getting the best of me and I've decided that from today I'll be going triphasic, which I'll go into in my next post.

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Polyphasic Sleep Schedule - Day 28

Day 28:

So yesterday I forgot to take my nap because I was busy with something on the computer. That means I didn't do any exercise either and therefor I was really tired by the time dinner came around. I didn't want to take a nap then though because I knew it would keep me awake all morning. In the end I decided to take a 15 minute nap and keep it short. I feel asleep within 5 minutes and woke up just before the alarm, giving me a good 10 minutes of sleep.

That seriously perked me up and I didn't start to feel sleepy again till about 2:00am. I decided to go to sleep and not set any alarm and just wake up at whatever time: The thing is I'd stupidly forgotten to deactivate my weekday alarm and I ended up having my sister waking me up at 7:15am by dumping my phone on my bed. It had been vibrating since 6:00am! I switched it off but I didn't know whether to go back to sleep or not.

I'd had about 5.25 hours sleep at that point and considering this is around the period of my fourth sleep cycle that I usually wake up in I was all perky and awake. I considered staying awake and just having an extended nap in the day, but I find it difficult enough to find napping time in the day as it is.

I decided to stay in bed and try to fall back to sleep. It took me about half an hour to fall back to sleep, that's how alert my mind was. I don't think I've ever found it so difficult to go to sleep. I almost gave up but couldn't be bothered to move and eventually slipped into a light sleep. I remember waking up a couple of times before I fell into deeper sleep and was woken from a dream at 9:30am by my mum.

I was in bed about 7.5 hours but I reckon I slept around 6.5 hours altogether. It's a little weird. If someone had woken me up at the 7 hour mark before this experiment I would've been extremely pissed off at the disturbance. Now though I don't feel grumpy at all from the disturbances and I still feel like I've had a good sleep.

I do feel a little weird from the feeling of being in bed all day but seeing as I was disturbed twice it's not that pronounced. It actually feels like I woke up, had a brief waking period, and then had a 1.25 hour nap. I don't think I should be needing a nap in the day lest I feel like being awake all morning again. I think I'll do lots of exercise to tire me out and make all that extra sleeping time worth while. Maybe this sounds weird but I'm not sure I like sleeping anymore than 6 hours anymore, maybe 6.5 at it's max. I do feel absolutely fine on 5.5 hours of sleep.

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Polyphasic Sleep Schedule - Day 2

Day 2:

This morning at 8:00am when I woke up after 4.5 hours sleep I looked in the mirror and noticed ugly dark circles under my eyes. Thank god for concealer, the last thing I need is having to explain to mum that I'm staying up till god knows what time in the morning.

I still didn't manage to fall to sleep at the designated nap times in the day but thanks to being super tired I zoned out into a hypnagogic state almost immediately as my head hit the pillow. I reckon a day or two more and I'll be falling asleep at the right times during the day.

I was feeling relatively normal until about 4:00pm, then I started to feel really tired. Another thing is that whenever I'm hungry I feel sick, and I've been hungry probably something like twice as much than what is normal.

I've gone into quite a few short zombie states throughout the day. That's not exactly unusual for me anyway, but I was seriously out of it at times. I also noticed that for a split second I went into a very dark place emotionally, somewhere I haven't been for months. I almost didn't realize it, it was so brief. I need to be careful of this.

As the day wore on I began to feel lightheaded like yesterday and actually accidentally smacked myself in the face with a door from losing my bearings for a split second.

I've just tried having my second nap of the day and unlike yesterday at this time I feel majorly tired. For reference, my eyes feel like sandpaper glued together. And I'm so incredibly hungry, I've now a secret stash of cereal under my bed for the early mornings.

Just another four hours and forty-five minutes till I can sleep. I will stick through this. God save me.

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