Hello again, audience! You may or may not have noticed the sudden disappearance of my last blog on polyphasic sleep. This is because, in an attempt to edit it, I accidentally deleted it from the site. Go figure. But! A lot has changed since that first post, so this is my reboot of the experiment, starting from scratch.
First off, a recap on what polyphasic sleep actually is. Monophasic sleep is the traditional pattern of sleeping, where you lay down at night for eight hours of sleep and wake up in the morning feeling refreshed and recharged. Polyphasic sleep is a modified sleep cycle designed to obtain the maximum amount of conscious hours and still get enough sleep by taking short 'naps' at various intervals throughout the day. The idea is that you train your body to slip straight into REM sleep, which is the deep restful sleep during which you dream. In a monophasic cycle, you progress from Stage 1 light sleep into Stage 2 sleep, then Stage 3 'slow-wave sleep', then Stage 2 again, then finally REM. Stage 2 sleep makes up 45 to 50 percent of your overall time sleeping, whereas REM sleep is usually only 20 to 25 percent. So in a polyphasic sleep cycle, you obtain the same amount of REM with one quarter of the amount of sleep.
Now, in all the studies and blogs I have been able to google up, I have not found any serious negative side effects as a result of polyphasic sleep. The most stressing part is the adaptation period, where you train your brain to slip directly into REM. You basically take the naps as you plan to and, over the course of about a week or so, your brain learns to skip the other phases of sleep and put you directly into REM sleep. During this period, you feel all the side effects of your lack of sleep leading up to the point at which your brain starts clicking into gear and immediate REM sleep becomes natural.
With all that nasty technical business out of the way, I can quickly recount the events of my last attempt at polyphasic adaptation:
It didn't work.
I believe it had a lot to do with how I prefaced the week of adaptation with a weekend of very little sleep and sporadic cycles. As a result, I was already sleepy a lot of the time, and I ended up oversleeping or taking involuntary naps out of sheer exhaustion. On one occasion, I recall waking up, turning off my alarm, and then blacking out until almost three hours later. My body just didn't have it in it to make the transition because it was so sleep deprived to begin with. So, my blogs never got posted, and the experiment was abandoned for a while.
As of Sunday this week, I decided to try again. The decision was made in part as a longing to complete my original experiment and see how polyphasic sleep worked in the long run, and part because I've decided that I really hate sleeping monophasically. I tend to either not sleep enough and feel tired all the time, or oversleep and end up wasting most of a day. It started to really aggravate me last week when I slept for 12 hours straight on three different days, mostly because I just couldn't make myself stay awake when my REM cycles ended and I became conscious. And it really pissed me off. I wasted most of three days because I was sleeping.
Back in high school, 12 hours of sleep was the most beautiful gift that anyone could ever give me. I believe this is because most of my waking hours were spent at school, and the energy drain from that left me begging for sleep. Now, sleeping for more than 5 or 6 hours makes me feel like a bum who could be spending his time doing more worthwhile things. So polyphasic sleep has become my solution to that problem. I get the sleep I need and still have plenty of time to do anything I want with my days.
Last but not least, update as to how i'm doing now: Much better than my previous attempt. Getting proper sleep the weekend before I started really made a difference in my ability to stay awake between cycles. It's still difficult to adapt, as purposeful sleep deprivation is really hard on your body. I've had a couple slips in the last two days, but overall, my naps are restful, and my waking periods are spent keeping myself busy so as not to fall asleep accidentally. I'm following the Buckminster Cycle of taking one half hour nap every six hours, on the sixes and twelves. This seemed to be the best arrangement of naps for my current schedule, and it's easily adaptable to accommodate any changes that may need to be made later on.
So there you have it: The beginning of my polyphasic sleep reboot. From here on out, I will be posting regularly like I originally planned to so as to chronicle my time spent as a polyphasic sleeper. As things are, I intend to remain a polyphasic sleeper for the indefinite future, as I see no real reason to maintain monophasic sleep since I hate it so much. It's stupid and takes up all my time and that's dumb and makes me angry. To put it simply, anyway. Goodbye for now, audience. I have Farscape Season 1 to get moving on. :D
Oh! Almost forgot. My beloved Poncho now has a blog of her own! :D Check it out: thebullwell.blogspot.com
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