If you’ve been reading this you know I haven’t posted in a while.  Mostly due to a lack of time.  That’s right I stopped.  I wanted to keep going, but really I was looking worse and worse.  a couple days after my last post I woke up from oversleeping once again and looking in the mirror at the dark circles under my eyes I decided I would put off the experiment… at least for a time.  I really like having the extra free time, but I felt like I kept messing up when I would fall asleep for a few hours at a time.  The idea had been brewing in my head for a while that if I could get some real rest maybe I could try again with better results.  I just wanted to get rid of the bags under my eyes so I didn’t look like a zombie.

I guess I also had some other things going on that leaned me toward the decision.  I was made a team leader at work recently and my manager would like me to set an example of timeliness for my fellow employees.  So, with that and my wife not liking it so much and wanting to stay up for a while sometimes I thought it best for now to go back to monophasic.  I would like to do it again sometime, and I can see some applications of napping at intervals for a couple days to catch up on projects or homework once in a while.  I think I’ll try that out sometimes if I don’t just all out do polyphasic again… we’ll see.  Though next time I may try a different approach to the transition.

Coming back off of polyphasic sleep was really no problem except that the first couple of days I wanted to take a nap after I got off of work.  I keep wanting to stay up late though… not because I can’t sleep, but rather I got used to having more time and still want it.  Alas, staying up late and getting up early on a monophasic schedule has never felt that great to me… at least not for my morning self.

Whoa! Doth mine eyes deceive me?  There are real comments on my last post.  Albeit only a couple, but hey any support I can get I’ll take gladly.  So anyway… yeah!  I really think for me the 25 minute nap is optimal.  It seems to me that it’s easier not to crash for a long time.  I think that is partially due to the fact that once a REM cycle is over the body slips into deeper sleep which is harder to wake from.  In fact the other night when I took my nap I had an interesting dream that ended like a commercial, it even had a logo for some website at the end (leaddream.org or some such, but it doesn’t exist… I checked).  I only mention that to note that as I was realizing that I was waking from a dream and not a commercial… my alarm went off.  I felt great when I woke up, so I can only infer that it was timed just right.

I still haven’t tried 20 minute napping, but I’m not really planning to at this point.  In fact I read some research that NASA did on polyphasic sleep turned out a result of a 24 minute average for the optimal nap time.  The last few days I haven’t had problems with oversleeping… at least not from sleeping right through my alarm.  To be honest I’ve gotten up a few times and after shutting off my alarm laid right back down for a couple hours a couple times… I’ve been tempted to quit because I look fairly tired lately, though I don’t feel it most of the time.  Right before writing this post I had been laying in bed for a couple hours, but I was surprised to find my self wide awake so I just got up.

I’ve recently found that my cell phone actually has some ringtones that are pretty darn loud and annoying… Just perfect for what I’m trying to do, though a nice electro-shock alarm clock would be an interesting experiment.  I was thinking a nice stand-you-up-outta-your-bed-and-smack-you-till-you-can-mumble-something-coherent alarm clock was another interesting idea.

My wife’s kinda been helping me out lately.  She stays up till around 2 in the morning a lot and has come in to help me get up if my nap seems to be going extra long, but a couple of times now I’ve still been half asleep when she’s come in and in my dream she asks me something and in my half-awakefulness I’ve responded to her actual self.  Of course, she has no idea what I’m talking about, but it is interesting.

So I’ve had an idea brewing in my head for a while now, but have been reluctant to actually try it.  Apparently from what I’ve read, free-running sleep, where a person sleeps whenever they happen to feel like it for as long as they happen to feel like at the time, tends to yield the best results for alertness and creativity for people who are trying alternate sleep schedules.  Actually, it outperforms EVERY other type of sleep, including the monophasic sleep pattern that most of the world is addicted to.  Obviously there are some problems with actually living this type of pattern… or non-pattern as you might see it, especially when you have a regular job like I do.  I can’t say my job is too regular though, considering that they’ve been fairly lenient about break times and have let me take nap time length breaks, as long as I work my whole shift.

Anyway my idea has been to try free-running 25 minute naps as I don’t know that I could actually get away with pure free-running sleep as nice as that would be.  I’m not sure if those who have actually tried free-running sleep sleep any less than 8 hours a day, but in an effort to get the best of both worlds I’ve wondered if I could take 25 minute naps whenever I feel like and get that result.  Of course, I wouldn’t want to take consecutive naps… I’ve already tried that, and it seems those are the hardest not to crash from.  I think the second nap puts me right into deep sleep.  But considering I’ve had trouble falling asleep during my late evening nap and then been pretty tired in the night more than a few times, I wonder if I could get a more positive result by napping when I feel like napping while maintaining the jist of uberman sleep by trying to wake from REM sleep so I don’t oversleep and still have about the same amount of free time.

I guess my main concern with this is staying awake too much for certain sleep cycles and then crashing during the next nap.  I think though, that if I were to limit the awake cycle time to some maximum and some minimum amount (i.e. 5 - 7 hours max and 1 - 2 hours min.) perhaps I could still do it.  I would suspect that I would want naps closer together during the dark hours of the night and that would offset the more spread out daytime naps.  I just wouldn’t want to start consolidating nighttime naps into core sleep because that seems to me like it would drive me right back toward monophasic… not that I dislike monophasic or anything, but the benefits of polyphasic sleep are pretty cool.

We’ll see, I may try an experiment with this in the next few days if I still can’t seem to fully live this uberman schedule.  It just still seems that every few nights my body wants to crash to catch up even if I do feel fine in the daytime.  I’ve also wondered whether that might be remedied with an extra nap or two each day, but 7 naps ruins the convenience of napping at the same three AM and PM times, and 8 naps means napping every 3 hours instead of every 4, and both limit the amount of free time I get, though if one of them worked it would still make up for the time lost from crashing every few days… and the sleep deprivation effects as mild as they might be.

Anyway, it’s been a long post.  Happy Bastille Day to all the French people!

I don’t know what I’m gonna do to stop this oversleeping during my morning naps… but they have tended to get shorter so maybe I’m just very slowly phasing out of it.  My bike ride the other morning helped a lot, but still I went down for my 5:30 AM nap and didn’t get up till about 8.  That was extremely weird though.  I could almost swear I turned both my alarms on, but when I did get up they were both switched off.  I cant be sure I didn’t get up and turn them off, but it sure seemed like I didn’t… of course I could be mistaken that I even turned them on.  What I want is a better alarm system.  I’m thinking a timer might work better than this setting an alarm time all the time.

In fact I had an interesting idea for a timer to help with polyphasic sleep specifically.  I was thinking if I had a button that when released started a 20-25 minute timer would be perfect.  The reasoning would be that sometimes I fall asleep faster than at other times, and if I’m holding the button as I fall asleep then when I actually drop off I’ll release the button and have a nap timed just right.  This has been a frustration sometimes cause I sometimes lay down for my nap and after 10 minutes or so am not sure whether to set my alarm back or what so I get the sleep I need.  I’m gonna see what I can do to build one… I’ve already bought some parts to build a clock with polyphasic sleep in mind and this could be a good addition to it.  If anyone is interested maybe I could build more and sell them to hopeful polyphasers.

Anyway the last week has been just OK.  Sunday, Monday and last night I slept most of the night due to not waking to my alarm.  I’ve still effectively gotten less than 8 hours of sleep, but it’s difficult to kick the old circadian rhythm.  I’m alright most of the time, but every few days it seems my body wants to play catch up in the night and I don’t wake to my alarm.  I think this whole sleep schedule would be a lot easier if my wife or somebody were there to make sure I got up each nap.  Unfortunately, no one here is awake at those times, and most of the people I know think polyphasic sleep is a pretty crazy idea anyway.  I’m not sure it’s not myself, but I have enjoyed some extra time I’ve had on my hands.

You may have noticed that I changed the URL for my blog to nathandansie.com from thraze.com/blog/.  Being Nathan Dansie and all, I’ve intended to own my domain for some time, and I figured it was a better place for my personal blog anyway since thraze.com is going to have a whole nother purpose.  That’s a project for another sleep cycle though.

Happy Independence Day!

So anyway, Wednesday and yesterday turned out to be a lot like Monday.  On Wednesday my 5:30 morning nap went an extra hour, but I was still able to sleep during my breaktime naps at work, but instead of not being able to sleep during my 9:30 evening nap it got pushed back to 11 PM cause I was helping my brother move some things and I got home late.  That didn’t help since I didn’t wake up till almost 1 in the morning when my wife came in to go to bed.  Then, not sure whether to take my 1:30 nap, I opted not to till about 4 with my next nap a little after 6.  The latter turned into another two hour nap after I laid back down after my alarm went off… I’m not sure why that seems so reasonable when I wake up during those night time naps, but hopefully one day that will just stop happening.

Thursday went fine though… that is until we went to the rodeo here.  My 9:30 PM nap turned into a midnight nap, but what’s strange is that I wasn’t tired at all and didn’t fall asleep during that nap.  I’m gonna take a lesson from the last few nights though and take my next nap pretty quick here now that it’s just past 2… I figured I’d take this one just a little late to have a little time.

(NAP)

Well that wasn’t so bad, except when I woke back up I felt like laying right back down.  I feel more tired now than I did before the nap, but I think that’s mostly residual from the waking up.  I think I may go take a bike ride and see if that helps.

So today… err, yesterday, was better than the day before.  I got some more sleep than planned, but felt alright.  I got an extra hour of sleep after my 5:30 morning nap, but actually felt good when I got up.  I don’t plan on continuing to do that cause it also screwed with my daytime naps in that I didn’t fall asleep until my 5:30 PM nap and when I did I slept for a little more than two hours… I mistakenly forgot to switch the alarm to the “on” position.  Consequently, I put off my 9:30 nap till 10:30, but still couldn’t fall asleep, so after 20 minutes of laying there I got up.

I thought I’d try another nap at midnight and push back my 1:30 nap, but after ten minutes of laying there not tired I decided to just wait till my 1:30 nap.  Actually it was a bit past 2 when I felt a bit tired and took it, but it worked out.  I was waking up from a dream when my alarm went off so I thought it was good timing.  I’ve felt pretty good tonight.  I wasn’t feeling tired at all after that nap and had planned a bike ride anyway, just in case.  The bike ride went well and hasn’t left me tired, so I think I may do that more often.  I’ve been planning on getting some more exercise in anyway.

On a completely different topic, I’ve got my old 1981 Mercedes 300SD running on veggie oil.  I first stuck some in on Thursday last week mixed with some diesel and didn’t notice hardly any difference except that it smelled better than normal.  Monday, my fuel light came on at work, so when I got home I poured in a couple of gallons of the stuff I got from my work cafeteria a few weeks back.  I’d have stuck it in sooner, but was waiting for my oil to settle.  It came out a lot clearer using this method rather than when I filtered some of it, so I think this’ll be the way I do it… it just takes a while.

I don’t know if I’ll continue to run on straight veggie oil cause I’ve read there can be some problems with carbon buildup, but I haven’t noticed too much difference.  The engine is idling a bit slower and it’s more quiet too.  I’m impressed though at how well it does work.  I still need to get the thing inspected for licensing, so we’ll see how that goes.  I’ve been to Autozone about 5 times in the past two days making sure I’ve got everything so it will pass properly.

Anyway, it’s a bit past naptime.  Good night… err, Good morning…?