Sure, as I began this journey, I saw that I had a lot of time on my hands. I've spent too much of it watching a few movies and many episodes of The Big Bang Theory, too much browsing Reddit, and not enough reading, programming, and practicing. Granted, I knew my first week was a test phase. I was scared about the total sleep deprivation I was going to suffer, scared that I would lose two days being a zombie, and scared about not knowing what lay on the road ahead.
Reading some people's blogs about their experiences was very helpful (notably Steve Pavlina's). But absolutely none of this could have prepared myself for what I truly felt. Logically, the first week was supposed to be as they described it - a gruesome battle against drowsiness until the body was forced to get it's needed REM sleep during the short naps.
My first week was different to several orders of magnitude. I didn't have that adaptation phase, and that scared me the most. I was feeling terribly great even with an hour of sleep in two days, even with nine hours in five days. True, I had that nagging sleepy feeling behind the eyes, but it was never too much to handle - just like a normal day when it's three hours past your normal bed time. From there, I knew I could not rely on other people's accounts. Either I was doing something wrong, or there was something inherently wrong with me.
Remembering Steve Pavlina's stories, I knew that, if everything turned out like his own experience, my sleeping schedules would be very flexible during the day, as long as I had the six 20-minutes naps. I knew that it would be harder during the night, most likely because of the darkness outside, and lack of noise around. This was exactly how I felt, and I began to tweak my schedules to the extremes. Only for convenience's sake, I was napping right before work, at noon, and right after work.
Right there, my schedule was stretched by a lot - I had waking times of five hours, for someone who was just starting the experience. I initially had my other three naps evenly spaced during the remainder of the "day", but began to tinker and move them around.
Three days ago (day five of the experiment), I missed my first nap. I was still feeling good, and was not otherwise disturbed by it, so I did not add an extra nap during the night. Things started to be a bit different the next day (day six). I overslept for the first time - fell asleep in front of the computer. I was programming, trying to debug some algorithms about planetary orbits in a geocentric equatorial coordinate system, which left me just staring blankly at the screen, motionless. I slept for three hours, and woke up at around 07:00, near when I would have normally woken up from my last nap (06:30-07:00). To be honest, I felt even better than usual. The feeling behind the eyes was gone for most of the day.
That had made me miss almost entirely a waking cycle, and in retrospect, it was most likely caused by my missing a nap the previous day. I must say I'm getting a bit confused here, writing about day and night, when this is obviously not how it happens to me. I don't have a clear delimitation like when you go to sleep for 7-8 hours. For simplicity, my day starts at 07:00, right after I wake up from this nap. This is confusing when, for example, I do something during the day, and consider the following 06:00 as the very same day. Please bear with me.
Then yesterday, at work, I was nodding off during the afternoon. When I got back home, I couldn't fall asleep (on my 18:00 nap). That changed my already-dynamic night cycles, and I ended up waking up from a 01:30-02:00 nap and reasoning that it would be good to test a longer period of sleep, until 04:00, since the previous unintentional longer sleep had been so good physically.
This was disturbing my cycles even more. What started as pretty good stable nights was quickly turning out to be grueling duels against sleep deprivation. I was not handling this professionally - not at all. Today, I had some moments when I was nodding off, and I took a hot chocolate at around 15:30. Luckily, my 18:00 nap did not remember that fact, but I understand that I'm going down because of my carelessness.
I am now getting back on my feet, ready to fight, with a hard schedule in front of me. I will take the timings I first had during the night, modify them a bit with my current knowledge, and adhere to them, even if I don't fall asleep. My naps will be around 12:00, 18:00, 22:00, 00:30, 03:00, 07:00, more or less 15 minutes. I must stray from these timings as rarely as humanly possible.
I know I won't keep this up for long. The uberman polyphasic sleep schedule, reportedly, is not healthy, for obvious reasons, but these reasons pale in comparison to the advantages. For the last two days, I have been reading and researching a lot more about sleep. The biphasic sleep schedule encourages to take a nap in the middle of the day. Building up from that, there are various polyphasic schedules, the everyman versions, taking increasingly more naps for less and less of a core night. The most extreme version, the uberman, rids itself of the core night in totality.
The human body apparently needs REM sleep and deep sleep the most. The uberman, as you know it by now, forces the body to feed only on REM sleep. Depending on the person you ask, it can be debated that only giving the body REM sleep is enough. That being said, I find myself in the same situation as when I took the decision to become vegan in January - I am looking at the research data, and must choose a side depending on who I trust the most.
There are more researches studying the effects of the sleep phases, than there are studying how cool polyphasism is. I understand in my heart, grudgingly, that my body will need its deep sleep sooner or later. I will not put my future self's health in jeopardy, but I am not ready to relinquish my new-found power. I will continue with the uberman sleep schedule for the next couple of weeks, for the next month if I so choose, but then I shall turn to biphasism, or maybe triphasism (napping twice, with decreased amount of time during the core night sleep).
You can imagine how difficult a decision this is for me. I have been wanting more time for personal growth for years, and this is the first opportunity that presents itself. I totally love my nights. I love the feeling when I get up with only thirty minutes wasted, while everyone else is sound asleep. I love how, for the first time, I can dedicate myself to multiple things at the same time, without favoring one over all the others. I love when, at three in the morning, I turn my computer monitors on, and eat a huge quantity of vegetables and home-made hummus. I love seeing people's reasons for being pro or con concerning this idea, how they either try to talk me out of it, or try to get more information. I also love how educational this has been for me, and how I will come out of this a more experienced person. This is why I will back down from this schedule in the near future with mixed feelings. I will do this for my long-term health, but I want to be able to enjoy it a bit more before I put this extreme experience in the drawer and lock it forever.
On a less dramatic note, there is something called a sleep manager. The company named Zeo provides the buyer with a way to analyze the different sleep phases during your slumber. Contrarily to the iPhone app Sleep Cycle alarm clock, which registers your nightly movements with its accelerometer and guesses which phase you are in, the Zeo Sleep Manager is a headband with contacts that registers the brain waves. True, it's more expensive than a 1$ mobile app (the Zeo Mobile is 100$, and Zeo Bedside is 150$), but you get a lot of power and data when you analyze your sleeping habits.I am deeply interested in purchasing this technological gadget in the hope that it will help me take the best decisions about my future sleeping schedules.
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