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 I’ve just woken up from a 2.5 hour oversleep.

I had been experimenting with how far I could push the naps back and forth at this stage, it was too early in the adaptation to be doing this. I moved my 4pm and 10pm naps back half an hour each to 4:30 and 10:30, which I thought was a small enough movement of the naps that it wouldn’t negatively affect the schedule. I think I’d have got away with moving the 4pm one if I had then got back on schedule and taken the 10pm nap on time, but I took it at 10:30 and woke up feeling very tired. I managed to stay awake until nearly 1am then decided to take an extra 20 minute nap, but instead of taking it in bed I set a countdown alarm on my laptop and took the nap on the sofa - the alarm on the PC wasn’t loud enough to wake me and I slept until nearly 4am, so 2 full sleep cycles. It probably didn’t help that I had just eaten before this unplanned extra nap as well, I try to eat early in the waking periods and go to bed on an empty stomach as I find this leads to better quality of sleep and makes it easier to get up at the end of the nap.

This is disappointing and is the longest oversleep I’ve had so far. It’s good feedback though since I have learned that I can’t be flexible with the naps yet, and that napping without my loud alarm is not a good idea at this stage, especially if I am particularly tired like I was when I took this nap. It’s also a very positive sign that I woke after 2 sleep cycles - I clearly have adapted to some degree, as I seem unable at this point to sleep a full monophasic nights sleep even when really tired.

So bearing these two lessons learned in mind I’m going to start bringing my extremely loud alarm downstairs with me when I awaken from the nighttime naps, or indeed any time I’m really tired (although this has only been in the night cycles yet) and setting it for 20 minutes ahead constantly to prevent an oversleep if I nod off. I’m also going to stick very strictly to the nap schedule (no more than +/- 10 minutes) for at least a month regardless of how well I think I’m adapting.

I’m on a meditation course for 10 days in the middle of May, so this may prove difficult to do then - I will certainly try to keep to the nap schedule strictly, but if it proves to be impractical and conflicts with the course I will go monophasic for the duration of the course then restart afterwards - hopefully this should not be necessary though as I already have a partial adaptation and the start of the course is over 2 weeks away so I stand a pretty good chance of being fully adapted by then.

Up until shifting the 2 naps yesterday I was sticking to the nap schedule within a matter of a couple of minutes either way, and even if I had trouble getting to sleep for a nap I was in bed and attempting to nap, which seems to prevent any disruption to the schedule - there have been times when it has taken me as long as half an hour to get to sleep - that’s how much I tried to move the naps yesterday - but in the cases where I have been in bed and trying to nap I have noticed no fatigue later and no disruption to the schedule.

Sleeping monophasically it’s fairly easy to move one nights sleep by several hours and to take the next nights sleep on time if you desire. With polyphasic sleep I feel an intense pressure to nap if I’m even a few minutes late going to sleep, since there’s so much more of a knock on effect on the later naps. Going to sleep later leads to 2 undesirable options - either take the next nap on time when you will be less tired than you want to be, and falling asleep will be harder, or try and push the next nap further back and wake up feeling exhausted. The tradeoff for all the extra time is the discipline required in keeping to the schedule. I’m not saying shifting one nap by half an hour or maybe even an hour is not possible, just that it has a definite impact on the later naps and your level of alertness over the following couple of waking periods, and is not (for me at least) a good idea during adaptation when you are already somewhat tired as a baseline.

In any case, the flexibility once adaptation is complete is an unknown quantity as yet - last time round I started mapping out the flexibility in the uberman schedule, but never really got it down to a fine art and would quite often push my luck a bit far and end up tired later from shifting a nap. The flexibility, if any, in the dymaxion schedule is yet to be established because as far as I know no-one except Bucky Fuller has slept this way before, and as far as I’m aware he never documented it.

Moving the naps also made me aware that I am starting the feel the kind of sleepiness I used to feel when I adapted to uberman before - it’s different from the kind of sleepy you feel when you sleep monophasically, it’s like your body and mind both start shutting down of their own accord. I have never kept a strict sleeping schedule at all when sleeping monophasically, so I am unused to feeling tired on a regular schedule, but the regularity with which I feel tired when nap time approaches is such that you could set your watch by it.