www.Paul-Bradley.com

It’s now 5am, I napped at 10pm and 4am and I’m feeling about a 6 out of 10 right now.

It’s too early in this new schedule to make any real observations yet, but I have noticed how much easier I’m finding it to sleep at nap times - 6 hours is definitely a stretch with only 30 minutes of sleep in between, and it seems to be making me sleep deprived faster. One of the problems I had adapting to the uberman schedule (20 minute naps every 4 hours) last time around was that sometimes I wouldn’t be tired after 4 hours and would find it difficult to sleep during my scheduled nap time. Sometimes I would have to get up then nap off-schedule maybe an hour later than planned. This would sometimes lead to an oversleep later, I think I’m going to find it easier to stick strictly to the schedule on the dymaxion sleep pattern since the waking periods are long enough that even during the initial adaptation I am expecting to be tired enough to sleep on schedule.

One of the changes a lot of people who have gone polyphasic have talked about is the psychological effect of monophasic sleep in terms of resetting you for a new day - when you go polyphasic it doesn’t seem like a new day ever starts, the subjective perception of time becomes very unfamiliar to someone who has been accustomed to sleeping monophasically. The reset effect becomes so ingrained we don’t really notice or question it - if you’ve ever been up all night and then slept from say 11am to 7pm, you’ll be familiar with the fact that a new day seems to have started when you wake up - objectively it was the same day at both ends of your sleep period.

I’ve decided to adopt the convention of calling the time between awakening from my 4am nap and going to sleep for my 10pm nap “day” and the time between awakening from my 10pm nap and going to bed for my next 4am nap “night”, so I have just finished Wednesnight and am now moving into Thursday. Putting some sort of convention on what is regarded as day and night, as well as giving the overnight phases a different day name should make it easier to mentally process the recent past - it’s easy to lose perspective when you’re sleeping this way, something that happened say 8 hours ago can seem a long way in the past and last time I did the uberman schedule I remember a number of occasions when I just couldn’t place when something happened at all - it can be very confusing.

Something I just realised I haven’t mentioned in my previous posts, which Steve Pavlina brought up when he did his polyphasic sleep experiment last year, is the effect of diet on this sleep schedule. Steve’s a vegan, I’m a pretty healthy eater myself, but not vegan. Last year, I started out doing this without much consideration for diet and thought I’d wait and see what the effect was - it is massive. Sleeping this way really brings home to you the effect of what you’ve recently eaten on your energy levels, I am taking care to eat light meals that are easily digested, eating a lot of quickly digested fruit, and I’m taking care to eat in the early to mid part of a waking period so my ability to sleep, or the quality of my sleep isn’t affected by having eaten too recently. I’m considering doing a vegan eating trial for a couple of weeks to see how it affects my energy levels, I would also like to try eating raw but the inconvenience and difficulty of getting a varied diet puts me off a bit - I’ll have to look into it a bit more.

Cutting out caffeine is also essential, although I very rarely drink coffee nowadays anyway, so I haven’t really had to make any changes in that regard. I do normally drink alcohol though, and that is a definite no on this sleep schedule - I tried very moderate alcohol consumption last time around and overslept every single time - that’s actually one of the hidden benefits of going polyphasic, it makes apparent to you the effects on your state of things like diet and alcohol. You would normally not notice the insidious effect of a couple of glasses of wine on a monophasic sleep schedule, on polyphasic the effect is absolutely devastating to your energy levels and it makes you realise just how much you can be affected by something but be oblivious to it because you’ve learned to ignore it.

I can’t believe just how easy this is. I keep waiting for the sleep deprivation to really kick in. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been pretty gruelling sometimes for short periods of time, like earlier when I couldn’t get asleep on my 12pm nap, then got up groggy around 1am, but all in all it’s been much easier than I’d expected based on the last time around.

It’s now 33 hours since I awoke from my last monophasic sleep, in that time I have napped 7 times for a total of 2 hours and 20 minutes of sleep in nearly a day and a half - and I feel great. Mentally I am clear and lucid, physically just a little drained but really nothing to make a fuss over. Maybe Steve was right about it being easier to re-adapt, although I never experienced the ability to nap and get rapid REM that he talked about, but I rarely remember my dreams (something I’ve worked on a number of times in my efforts to lucid dream with only limited sucess) so maybe I’ve been getting fast REM all the last year and never remembering it.

I’m noticing how I’m adapting the sleep schedule more than I did at first last time around. Since it was new to me last time around I tried to keep to it strictly so as to acclimatise to the regularity of sleeping every 4 hours - after a while, your body starts to naturally want to nap on approximately this schedule, but there is room, and even the requirement for a bit of flexibility.

The famous hypnotist Milton Erickson used to talk about how he would wait for his patients to naturally quiet down before trying to direct them to focus inwardly. Other hypnotists and therapists have observed the natural tendency for a kind of ebb and flow of attention throughout the day superposed on top of the normal circadian rhythm which is reponsible for the wake/sleep cycle of those crazy people who sleep at night This other cycle seems to take place over a course of about 2 hours or so and is known as the ultradian rhythm, at the end of each approximately 2 hour period of good outward directed focus there is around a 20 minute period when you are more likely to feel sleepy or daydreamy, your visualisation skills improve and you want to go inward, people tend to naturally use this time to take a break from whatever they are doing, but the best way to use it is to take advantage of the natural inward focus it creates and powernap, meditate or just relax and visualise during this time.

Looking at this cycle the parallel with the night-time REM cycle is obvious, and it would seem that the natural ebb and flow of hemispheric dominance also has something to do with it (observe some time which nostril you are predominantly breathing through, you will notice you tend to alternate nostrils over a period of a couple of hours or so. Similarly for the side of the face appearing more animated. Yoga practitioners have known this long before we had any concept of hemispheric dominance).

On the whole I feel great so far, and feel like I can be a little more flexible with the cycle. I may try what Buckminster Fuller called “Dymaxion sleep” which is 30 minutes of sleep every 6 hours, since this would give me the longer waking periods which I want.

A year or so ago I was inspired by the experience of Steve Pavlina to try out polyphasic sleep.

I guess a lot of people reading this will already know about polyphasic sleep, but for those of you who’ve not come across it before it’s a sleep schedule where you take 20 minute naps approximately every 4 hours, for a total of around 2 hours sleep a day. At first, you experience sleep deprivation but soon your body adapts and you start experiencing REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movement - the sleep phase where dreams take place) immediately upon falling asleep.

It seems that REM is the most important phase of sleep, since once you’ve been through the adaptation phase and have started getting REM sleep immediately on falling asleep, any tiredness disappears. The actual mechanism by which the adaptation takes place, and the type of sleep you get is still up for conjecture, but whatever the mechanism it works.

The first time I tried it I did so because I was so horrified that anyone would try such a thing and I’m not sure I really believed it, so I wanted to see what it was like in my own experience. I’m thoroughly glad I tried it - I felt more alive, awake and clear headed than I ever have sleeping monophasically.

I stuck at it for around 3 or 4 months last time around, and I intended to blog my experience, but never did, then Steve wrote this post a little while back about looking back on his experience 1 year later, and it reminded me about it, so I’m going to try polyphasic sleeping again and blog my experiences here. I’m not sure how long I want to stick at it this time, I’m just of a mind to play with it a bit more, and I’ll certainly be doing it for at least a couple of months to experiment with some changes to the schedule.

My reason for reverting to monophasic sleep last time around was exactly the same as Steves reason - I loved polyphasic sleep, and would still be doing it now if the rest of the world also slept this way! The problem is that you are out of sync with the rest of the world and while I am rather familiar with being out of sync with the rest of the world in general this was a very amplified and ever present reminder of it. I wonder if this will be more manageable this time around if I can introduce some more flexibility into the nap schedule.

I was up late last night and only got up around 6pm, since it’s more convenient for me to nap at 11pm I’m going to stretch the first waking period a touch and nap then.