Well, it’s Friday afternoon about 1:30 and things are looking on the upside. Today will be my last day here on our vacation to Oregon, but I’ve been having some positive omens… sorta. Actually, not half an hour ago I was walking from my brothers apartment here back to my parents and there was a lady laying down on the ground. I called to her and asked if she was OK, but she didn’t respond, so I shook her a bit to get her attention, but she was out. I told some people nearby to call 911 and checked her pulse and finally got her to respond a little by shaking her and calling to her. Apparently she works here at the resort and was walking to the office and just passed out. She couldn’t move really though, and was pretty unresponsive the whole time. The fire department and ambulance came and picked her up, so hopefully she’s OK.

As for positive things, Wednesday, in my 7PM nap I had a lucid dream, which is one of the side effects of polyphasic sleep, and one of the reasons for switching to polyphasic. I remember realizing I was dreaming and trying to get my younger brothers attention to tell him I was dreaming, but he wouldn’t pay attention in the dream, so I proceeded to go look for myself since I’ve heard of meeting yourself in dreams and I always thought that would be pretty cool. I woke up thinking about it though, and my alarm hadn’t even gone off yet. It’s nice to wake up on my own before my alarm goes off, because it was like a signal that I had enough sleep. I had been taking my naps a bit late that day since we were out and about visiting the Tillamook cheese factory and an old air museum, so I wasn’t sure how tired I’d be that night.

I didn’t make it to bed till about 12:15, so that kind of threw me off, and I slept through my phone’s alarm again, but only 4 hours this time. So, I guess that’s a little bit of progress. I fell asleep again in my 7AM nap and woke up from another vivid dream before my alarm went off, so I felt pretty good yesterday. I’ve been keeping my naps within at least an hour of when I mean to so that might be helping, though I didn’t fall asleep during my naps in the daytime yesterday. I felt fine though, so I guess that’s OK.

Last night was interesting too. I went to take my 3AM nap, but instead of crashing, I didn’t fall asleep. I wasn’t really tired like I have been the last few nights, so it’s a pretty good indication that I’m making progress. Hopefully, anyway! I rode with my Mom to the airport in Portland at 4AM and didn’t get there till six, so I had that on my mind when I laid down. After I dropped her off at the airport about 6:30, I was feeling tired so I pulled over on the way back at about 7:30 and dreamt pretty vividly. I woke up before my alarm again and since it seems I’m more refreshed after dreaming, I woke up feeling 

pretty good. I was only asleep for about 25 minutes, so that’s cool. I think not falling asleep at 3 was catching up to me though, since when I got back to the resort I was feeling tired again at around 9:30. I fell asleep again without the alarm, but woke up on my own just after 11.

It’s now Wednesday morning about 8AM. I didn’t quite follow the schedule I was planning yesterday, but that’s not to say I’m giving up. I layed down for my 4AM nap yesterday and though I woke for my alarm, I shut it off and layed back down and slept till about 7:00. I figure it was a good thing though that I woke up on my own after only that long. I don’t know that this is speeding up the process at all, but I was awake when I did get up and that was good. I figured I would just take my 11:00 nap and act like it hadn’t happened. I think that was a fine plan, but we were out at the beach and I was not paying too much attention to the time since we found some cool stuff like starfish and crabs, so I didn’t take my next nap until about 12:30.

I also didn’t take my next nap until around 4:30. I just don’t always want to stop what I’m doing especially when I’m out with my family doing stuff with them, so it’s not really like I don’t know it’s naptime, but I’ll just kinda play it by ear and try to stick with my schedule as much as is reasonable. My wife’s not really into the polyphasic thing as it is. She says she feels like I’m asleep all the time since my naps are so often. Anyway, I’m still not falling asleep during most of my daytime naps though. Usually, I’m not really tired, but that is likely affected by the fact I’ve overslept a bit at night.

Later yesterday we drove into Portland, and since I was the one driving, my next nap wasn’t till about 7:30. So, it was a bit more on schedule, but since we picked up my sister from the airport after dinner there and I was driving the whole time, we weren’t back to the resort till 12:30 and I wen’t to sleep without my alarm on and woke up at 7AM… woops! Oh well 6 hours is better than 8 I suppose… except I’ve still got 2 hours of naptime during the day. That’s not really getting me any extra time. I’ll try not to do that anymore unless I decide to switch back to monophasic.

Even with all the extra sleep I don’t feel any more rested than I have been with just the naps though. In fact I’d say I’m definitely more tired than yesterday morning. One reason I want to make the switch to polyphasic sleep is that I work a full-time job and often feel pretty tired at work especially when I have less than the normal 8 hours of sleep I would usually want. Part of the reason I decided to make the switch during this trip is that I wouldn’t have to drive or have a lot of responsibilities, but that hasn’t really been the case. Plus, considering how I feel a lot of the time at work I haven’t really felt any more tired during this polyphasic trial than at those times. Of course, I’m not sure anyone else would have the same experience with it as me.

Anyway, I’m making the switch now and I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do to stay on the schedule once I get back to work. I guess I’ll just plan on a nap in my car at around 11:00 an 3:00. I’ll just have to try it and see what seems to work best.

Well… it’s now 2:18AM on Tuesday the 27^th. Today is my wife, Katrina, and I’s anniversary of 3 years. The time sure does pass by quickly these days… actually; I guess now that I’m on this polyphasic schedule it’s going to pass by more slowly. Well, the more time the merrier I think. One more reason for doing this is to spend more time with my family. I suppose I can use night-time for some of my projects so that they won’t tie up my daytime.

Anyway, the last day has been alright. I didn’t realize we were leaving right after my last entry, so I got only a short nap in the car as we drove down to Depoe Bay. I felt fine though. It’s just been tricky to get my naps on time since we are going places also. Since we were down in Newport most of the day I didn’t nap again until we got back to the resort here. That was at almost 6PM, so I pulled another long interval between naps. I did feel fine the whole time, but I also got some sleep last night. I took another nap at 9:30 and though I had to use some effort to get out of bed, I was OK till my next nap at 1:30AM.

This nap has been the hardest so far to wake up from up since I’ve normally been asleep at this time in the past. I really had to convince myself to stay up instead of laying right back down. I was thinking this might be the case and so set myself three alarms, two on my phone and one stand-alone clock, at short intervals from each other to keep me up for a few minutes to get my head straight about my goal here. It worked, though this night-time stuff is definitely a bit harder to get through at this point. I think what I could do is plan to do stuff at night so that I’ve got motivation to be up. The daytime doesn’t seem to be a problem, except that I have been extending the time between naps, which has probably been the cause of, or at least it aggravates, the other issue.

I think what might help is to change my approach a bit from what I’ve been doing. I’ve been keeping the awake intervals to as close to 3 and a half hours as I could each time, but I wonder if this is causing some sleep deprivation issues when I have longer intervals between my naps. I did this under the assumptions that; it might help me to actually fall asleep during my daytime naps to be more tired when an interval got drawn out, and that 20 to 30 minutes of nap-time should keep me good for a few more hours. They might be decent assumptions, but I think while I’m still at the point of trying to switch, it might be good to schedule my naps at certain times of the day and stick with those times whether I draw one interval out or not. In other words, it might be good to make sure I get all six naps each 24 hours at mostly regular intervals. That way I am less likely to want to crash after a day with fewer naps. So far it is the night-time that has been the most difficult to wake up during, so we’ll see if this helps.

Well, it’s been over an hour since I started this post, and I’m feeling more awake, but I’d still say only 70-80% of fully awake. I’m definitely a bit slower right now, but I’m going to stick it out. I think what I’ll plan to do is take my naps at about 3:00, 7:00, and 11:00, but since my nap earlier was about 1:30, I think I’ll take another nap somewhere between 4:00 and 5:00 before my 7:00 nap. This may also help me get past some of this tiredness tonight and offset the nap I effectively missed yesterday.

It’s now Monday morning. Sunday started out good, but I think I pushed it a little too much. After that nap I took after my last post I felt really good. I actually woke up before my alarm went off from a pretty vivid dream, then realizing not much time had passed I fell back to sleep to another dream and woke up again without my alarm going off. I had set the alarm for 4:30 and thought maybe I hadn’t heard it since it seemed I had been sleeping a while. But, it was 4:26 when I woke and by far this interval after that nap was the best so far. Waking from a dream seemed to be a good motivation for waking up. So, because it was 4:30 in the morning I just went out to the ocean and picked up agates and other rocks until my next nap since everyone else was asleep.

I took another nap around 8:00, but since I was taking my nap out in the family area and people were getting up for the day my nap got interrupted before I could fall asleep though I laid there for about 40 minutes hoping I would still get the rest. I was OK, but definitely not as good as earlier. At our church meetings I was feeling pretty tired and was nodding off a bit during the first hour. The meetings weren’t over until 1PM so it was already past my nap time when we left there, but I got caught up in a discussion with my brother and my Mom, so it wasn’t until about 3:30 that I got my next nap, so I essentially skipped my Noon nap. I felt alright during that time after church got out, but I wasn’t sure if skipping that nap was going to mess with my schedule.

I didn’t fall asleep during that afternoon nap, but didn’t want to get up afterward either. I had given myself 40 minutes so I could fall asleep, but didn’t feel sleepy enough to sleep. After I did get up though I felt fine and went out for a walk on the beach and ate dinner when I got back. It wasn’t till about 8:15 that I got to my next nap and laid there for almost an hour not really having fallen asleep. It’s hard to think I’m polyphasic when I’m not falling asleep during my naps, but I’ll keep at it. After that we went to my brother’s family’s room to play games and I felt like I was operating at somewhere between 80% and 90%.

It was about 1:30 by the time I took a nap again, and when I woke I was pretty tired and didn’t have anything planned to do, it being 2 in the morning, so I fell back asleep without setting my alarm. That didn’t work. I woke up again about 7:00. I felt more tired waking up from that than I have been after all my other naps. Oops! Well, I’m not going to quit after that. It is a bit promising that I only slept a little over 5 hours and didn’t feel like sleeping anymore except I was tired. I feel a little better now, but it’s now 10:36AM and time for another nap.

Well it’s 2:15AM on Sunday here in Oregon and I’ve been meaning to write another post so I’ll give a summary of what’s gone on so far. On Thursday after work I decided to start and took a nap about 6PM and gave myself around 45 minutes cause I tend to take a bit to actually fall asleep. I realize this equates to over four hours of sleep time per day, but during the transition I’m not trying to be too strict except for the discipline of actually taking my naps at regular intervals. I’m hoping that making this transition will also help me to learn to fall asleep faster also.

Anyway, I took another nap around 10PM that evening and felt fine during the intervals afterward, though about 2 in the morning I was getting tired and feeling it was time for bed. So, when I woke up from my alarm half an hour later the combination of that and just waking up had me wanting to stay in bed, and I woke up a bit after 5AM. I wasn’t too concerned about it though, since I’m switching directly from monophasic to polyphasic. Plus I felt pretty good after only 3 hours of sleep that night. I was mostly just getting ready for this site reading up on WordPress, but didn’t feel the urge to sleep at all. Not really surprising though since in the past I’ve never really had any problem staying up for two days straight if I wanted. These naps on top of that fact have kept me from really feeling the urge to sleep except for the nighttime.

After my brother called me I worked on my 1981 Mercedes 300SD just a bit to see what I could do to fix the door. That car is another project that ought to be a good one. I took another nap that Friday morning at 9AM just to keep the rhythm going and was actually in bed a whole hour… it’s that getting up out of bed thing when I’m comfortable right where I am that seems to be the only real issue yet. So after a bit of getting ready for the day that’s when I called Joel to help put my blogs database on the server and get this blog up and running and wrote that last post. I took another nap right after that which I only gave myself around half an hour to take since the naps I take during the day don’t seem to really put me out. I’ve just kind of been laying there trying, but didn’t really fall asleep cause I didn’t really feel tired.

My family has been planning this Oregon trip for a while so I spent the time after that nap getting ready. It took quite a while though since I had quite a bit to get done, so I ended up putting my 6PM nap off until 9PM at my parent’s house when we were finally all packed and ready. At that point I was feeling a bit tired, but not really sleepy, so not wanting to miss my nap I laid down for another half an hour, but again didn’t fall asleep. Even though I haven’t fallen asleep I still feel pretty refreshed by just laying there trying. My family’s caravan finally left around 10:40 that night to drive through the night to Oregon so as to avoid traffic and excessive heat. No… they’re not polyphasic, but I did get my brother kind of started himself. I felt pretty awake most of the time until my next nap, but pretty close to 1AM I started feeling the effects of not having a full nights rest for most of two days.

I gave myself 40 minutes for that nap, but still didn’t fall asleep, though that may also have been caused by the fact I was riding in a car. I was still conscious during that nap, but fell into a sort of half sleep where I was sort of in that state of waking up… closer. It was still a good refreshing nap and I felt plenty good to drive for the next part of our drive for a few hours. By 4:30AM though, I was definitely ready for another nap. This time I actually did fall asleep into a dreamless sleep and missed Boise, but though I wasn’t at 100% after the nap, I still felt plenty well enough to keep driving. My brother I was driving with was taking the naps too, so we didn’t let ourselves get tired and just rotated driving every couple hours.

Two hours after that previous nap I took, I was feeling a bit towards the sleepy end of things finally and took another half hour nap at 7AM. Again I fell asleep fairly quickly, but felt pretty good again a few minutes after waking. In fact as the daylight came on I felt less tired than earlier in the night. Probably some of those side effects of all those years of monophasic sleep. I actually missed my 11AM nap I was planning cause we were talking and I didn’t feel tired, but when we got to Portland around Noon I took another half an hour and fell asleep in the daytime.

I felt pretty good after that, and about 3PM I took another nap in the car so I could drive while my brother took his nap. I fell asleep again cause by the time I took the nap I was tired again, but that could have been amplified by riding in the passenger seat with not much to do. I felt great after that nap, it was a lot easier though, since we were out of the car and walking around, but I didn’t really feel tired when my 7:00 nap came, and when I did lay down I didn’t fall asleep, but I did feel rested afterward. All in all it was a decent day for alertness. I didn’t feel zombified or anything, so I think it’s going alright.

My 11:00 nap I did fall into a dreamless sleep again, but when my alarm went off I didn’t feel tired at all and got right up to play some Nintendo games with my brother. I’d say I was at 90% on alertness, most days on monophasic don’t feel that good to me so it was fine. So, when my brother went to bed I started this post.

It’s about 3:50AM now and I’m feeling tired again cause I’ve been pushing this interval.