The Sleep Schedule Begins

So I am now fully recovered from all of my sickness from the quarter. Or so I hope. Because I'm going to take an ambitious leap and go for polyphasic sleep. I tried it during the quarter and it just didn't work out: I always forgot to nap, never obeyed my alarm, and ended up sleeping more than I would otherwise because I wasn't willing to adjust. But that's going to change.

First off, some very basic information on how this will work. Our sleep cycles are typically 90 minutes long. This gives us a full does of NREM and REM sleep. The goal of the extreme versions of polyphasic sleep (such as Dymaxion, uberman, and even everyman - see the Wikipedia article for more information) is to break that through serious sleep deprivation. When sleep deprived, you enter REM much faster than otherwise, and thus a 15-30 minutes "power nap" will give you the REM you need to continue functioning. Over time, your body is trained to enter REM immediately. You only need 2 hours or so of REM every day, so using six 20-minutes naps spaced evenly in the day is all you need to function at your best. There are a few blogs about people starting the uberman sleep schedule, some more successful than others. One of the most descriptive writers I've found is Steve Pavlina's blog. His entries start HERE.

I'm not going to go with full uberman. I don't particularly like suffering through sleep deprivation (believe me, I've had my fair share of it), but I hate having to sleep a full 7-8 hours every night. That's why I choose to get up early. But my schedule, particularly when baseball starts up in late January, is pretty tight. I figure if I can break through the sleep deprivation now, I can adjust later to suit my schedule better.

My options are fairly limited because of my schedule. I absolutely cannot do more than three naps in the day, so uberman, Dymaxion, and some variants of everyman are out. I can do biphasic, with 4.5 hours in my core sleep and a 90 minute nap in the day (6 hours total). Or I can go with everyman with the same core but two 20-minute naps (~5 hours total). Or everyman with a 3 hour core and three 20-minute naps (4 hours total).

Each of these options has some serious limitations. For biphasic, not only am I still sleeping 6 hours a day, but I have to find a 90 minute block to sleep in the afternoons or evenings, which is a huge pain. For everyman, though the sleep is less, it means running back to my room to for a quick power nap between classes. Manipulating this schedule with my rather random baseball practice schedule and annoyingly long Thursday physics lab is going to be tough no matter what. But I think I can get it to work best with the everyman-3 (that is, 3 hour core nap and 3 naps in the day), mostly because I see that as being the most flexible option.

In order to fit this into my schedule, I need to plan it out and get started right away. I figure I'll start tonight. My schedule, in order to fit my classes and baseball best, will look like this for a while (Central Time, so while I'm in Portland I'll subtract 2 hours):

                Core sleep: 5:00 - 8:00 AM

                Nap 1: 1:00 - 1:20 PM

                Nap 2: 7:20 - 7:40 PM

                Nap 3: 11:40 PM - Midnight

I'll update here every day I can. I might not be able to right around Christmas because I'll be at my grandma's, but otherwise I'll keep close tabs on my adjustment.

Every day I'll track my progress with the following criteria:
Alertness: My general awareness of world around me and comprehension of those events.
Memory: My ability to remember things. Also measurable by blindfolded Rubik's cube solves.
Initiative: How motivated I am to do things.
Sociability: How willing I am to participate in human interaction.

Here we go...