Polyphasic Sleep Log: Day 8-9

After a not-so-fun attempt at Uberman, I have settled back into the Everyman quite nicely. I didn't get any extra sleep to make up for the sleep deprived Wednesday that I had. I just got back to my routine of 4 1/2 hours core, and 4 naps. Now it's Friday afternoon. I've got my students working on a lab for a few minutes with a break soon, so I decided to blog about yesterday and today before I forget what happened and when.

My naps on day 8 were, once again, taken in the car. I DID actually take a longer noon nap, now that I think of it. I tried to take the whole lunch hour to make up for day 7. I still end up waking naturally half the time I take a nap. If I get up then, things go pretty well. If I try to go back down for just a few minutes, it usually makes things worse. So, in order to get a little more sleep without making things worse, I tried to get 2 full naps on the lunch hour so I wouldn't get that "few extra minutes" grogginess. I was able to fall asleep relatively easily both times. When I lay down my mind begins to wander. When it's focused on some particular issue, I don't fall asleep. If it wanders freely, I drop off to sleep pretty quickly (it usually wanders into the realm of dreamland where things don't have to be relevant or make any sense). If I find myself focused on something a little too much I have to clear it out. Sometimes I end up thinking too much about this polyphasic thing and have to force myself to get off that topic. One technique that has worked for me is to clear my mind by "looking" at the back of my eyelids. I don't know what I'm really seeing, but usually it looks like blackness with faint white floating/swirling patterns. At the end of my second lunch nap there was a very interesting thing that happened. The floating swirly things were very bright lime green! I thought I must have had my eyelids slightly open and somehow it was filtering out the light, leaving behind this glowing green color. I closed my eyelids tighter and it didn't go away. It was very interesting. it was kind of like the green blob on the wii fit (if you've never played wii fit, you'll just have to use your imagination).

My 4pm nap was just your plain old run of the mill 20min nap. I'm still using the stuffed animal as my pillow. I park behind work so there won't be as many people walking around noticing my weird habit of sleeping in my car with a stuffed animal. I think my alarm had to wake me up for that one. I felt great though, no more of the tiredness from the day before.

9 o'clock was a struggle. Again, I was laying with the kids. My son was fidgety and I couldn't get myself to ignore it. So I went on the floor in the girls room, but the girls were even more distracting, asking questions and generally stalling bedtime as much as they could. So, I didn't get much of a nap there.

I decided that I would try a 1 1/2 hour core sleep, figuring that I could always extend it if I felt too tired. Then something really interesting happened! I woke up at 5:30! Wait... I should have woken up at 2:30am? I checked my alarm and it was set for 9am. I have no recollection of waking up at all during the night and resetting my alarm. The fact that it was reset for 9am doesn't make much sense. I'm guessing that, in my sleep, I attempted to reset the alarm and it ended up way off. This could have been very problematic as I would have slept way past the beginning of my classes. I'm the teacher so I think they would probably notice if I was missing. But, my internal alarm kicked in and I woke up naturally at my normal 5:30am time. I thought that was significant.

I had a work meeting before my class (that I was late too, but not because of my sleeping patterns). I had to skip my 8am nap. It didn't really slow me down, or have any negative impact on my morning. I was fine all the way through to my noon nap. I woke up before my alarm had to buzz me. 4pm nap went off without a hitch. The only problem was that I was in a hurry to get to my nap, so I ended up getting my adrenaline rushing a little. I had to get some things set up for my next class on Monday, and it took a little longer than I wanted it to. Rushing around in a frenzy so that I could get to my nap, made it a little harder to settle down to sleep. It just took an extra minute or two to fall asleep, and the alarm woke me up 20 minutes later.

I ended up getting tired and a little yawny at 8:30. When I felt it, I thought "It must be 9 o'clock" but I guess my internal timing is a little off. I had no problems falling right to sleep once 9pm rolled around. The alarm buzzed me back 20 minutes later. I decided to hit snooze for the 5 extra minutes. I should know by now, not to do that. I was a little groggy when I finally got up. Now it's 11:30pm and I feel a little tired, but not enough to threaten my 1am goal. So... tomorrow the exciting adventure will continue.

I have to admit I am somewhat surprised that a couple people I know are actually interested in this stuff. I guess I thought it was interesting enough to read a couple strangers blogs about it. At some point I figure it will get to be so routine that the interest will wear off, but I will keep trying to tweak everything until I figure out it's limits. Hopefully that will keep some interest. Thanks for reading!