I Wasn’t Quite Ready
Dan on December 17th, 2006
About 35 hours into polyphasic sleep I realized I wasn’t prepared well enough. I didn’t have enough to keep me busy and the motivation to pull through. I woke up from my 2AM nap today very tired. I had trouble falling asleep for most of my naps and hit REM in very few of them. I could have kept going as I managed to make it to 5AM before giving up. At that point I made the decision that I need to prepare better before continuing.
I want to work on my new website idea but I still haven’t come up with a domain. I have a few in mind but I’m being very indecisive. I have a few other things I want to do but they require reading and learning, both of which are very hard when you’re awake at 3AM and feeling very sleep deprived. I have the first season of the X-Files and the game Farcry to keep me distracted from sleep but they only go so far. I want to use at least some of this extra time constructively but I just didn’t have things ready to go.
I’ll be starting again sometime this week. I want to spend the next few days getting things together and planned out before the next round. I also want to start taking frequent naps to get used to them again. Last year when I did polyphasic sleep for the first time I had no trouble falling asleep. I’m not sure what has changed this year. Overall it was going pretty well until I took that 2AM nap. I wasn’t feeling very tired beforehand but I knew it was going to be tough to get up. By having a short core sleep at night (4.5-6 hours) and taking a few naps during the day I hope to eliminate my napping troubles. I don’t mind sleep deprivation during adjustment due to having less than 3 hours of sleep but I don’t want poor napping to extenuate it.
Structure and routine make the adjustment period easier and I didn’t have that in place. Today I’ll be coming up with a plan for all of my free time during the first week of adjustment. It will be designed to be as constructive as possible while allowing me to pull through the tough 2AM-6AM time period without much thinking.
On a side note the dream journal is going well. I haven’t had much to write in it but I make sure to record if I don’t remember dreaming anyway. I’m logging when I go to bed and when I get up, any dreams I have, and how I feel after waking. At first I wasn’t very clear in my recording. For example, last night for my 10PM nap I wrote “Started dreaming about being on a ship.” I think my recollection of that dream was poor but I could have been less vague. The problem is that when I wake up I may recall the dream well but translating those thoughts onto paper isn’t easy for me to do when I’m half asleep. I write a few things and feel like it will be enough to remember the dream again but it’s gone a few minutes later. I’m learning what works as I go. I hope to get to the point that I’ll automatically wake up and write down the time and a detailed description of my dreams.
December 18th, 2006 at 6:26 pm
Hi. Just found your site. I started on a polyphasic (Uberman) sleep cycle back on 11/1 (Halloween was my last ‘regular’ night of sleep), and was having trouble falling asleep for my naps at the start, similar to what you are describing. What worked for me was taking a melatonin pill. Melatonin is usually used by people to help them maintain a ‘normal’ sleep cycle. Thought you might want to try that if you encounter problems falling asleep with your naps again.
I only had to use melatonin for the first week or so and then was able to fall asleep for my naps without a problem. A warning though - after you’ve adjusted, take with precaution. I couldn’t fall asleep during one of my naps a week ago, and took a melatoning pill because I wanted to make sure I fell asleep during my next nap. Well, I got really groggy (something I didn’t experience initially when I was adjusting) and ended up sleeping for 3 hours straight.
Keep the updates coming! I’m interested in seeing how your experiments go.