So, I haven’t posted for the last week since I haven’t made much progress as of yet.  In fact I’ve been falling into a bit of regression, not that I want to quit already, but it’s not the easiest thing to keep to this schedule when I wake up tired in the middle of the night and the bed is comfortable.  As you can imagine, I’ve done some oversleeping, but it wasn’t completely accidental.  I was hoping to catch up on some sleep to perhaps reduce the sleep deprivation effects I have.  Really, that only includes some bags under my eyes and some night-time tiredness.

Anyway, last night and the night previous I slept through the night… or at least kept going back to sleep when I woke up till it was time to get up.  I’ve still been taking my naps and have actually been sleeping during those daytime naps I was having a problem with before.  The nap I have the hardest time falling asleep during recently is my 9:30 PM nap for some reason.  This isn’t too surprising to me though, considering even on monophasic sleep I’m more of an evening person and have always felt a boost in energy as the evening comes.  Even if I had hardly any sleep the night before and was tired all day I was OK in the evening.

But anyway, the extra sleep I’ve gotten hasn’t left me feeling better.  In fact, I’ve felt overslept and a bit malaise without a lot of energy these last two days.  Sunday, I’d had about 8 hours of sleep, after my afternoon naps I felt better, but I couldn’t fall asleep in the later evening.  Yesterday I’d had another 8 hours or so again, but was feeling similar and was tired at my morning naptime at work, but again felt better once I took my naps.  So after not being able to sleep during my 9:30 evening nap again I figured it was time to get back on the ball and stick to my schedule.  Tonight’s been alright, but I feel like those last two nights have been kind of like hitting the reset button.

Anyway, it’s time for another nap, and then I’m headed to work, so we’ll see how it goes.  I’ll try to update a bit sooner next time since it helps a bit with motivating me to keep going… not that I want to quit, but again, some nights it seems very reasonable to lay back down in bed.

It’s amazing how fast a month can pass by, even when you’ve effectively added about a week to it.  The last few nights I haven’t made much progress on my sleep schedule.  Saturday I was out with my wife shopping, and consequently my evening naps were postponed.  That caused me to crash Sunday morning, so I ended up sleeping through the night for about 7 hours, yet I wasn’t any more alert, and when my naptimes came around on Sunday they were very welcome, as I was feeling pretty tired that morning.  The rest of that day went well, though by the later evening time my body didn’t really wanna sleep when I laid down.

That night was going fine too, but after my 5:30 AM nap I laid down next to my wife to put my arm around her for a minute.  Or at least so I thought.  I was waking up at 8:40 when I realized my mistake.  Only a little over two hours so not a big problem… except I’m supposed to start my job at 7:45.  Woops! I had to stay late there at work and make up for it, but my naps went well enough.

Last night I crashed again.  Though, that was due to another silly mistake.  After I woke up from my 1:30 AM  nap I was thinking that it took me a while to fall asleep so perhaps I could take another half an hour and be fine… not so.  I didn’t wake up until 7:00.  I thought that waking up from that first nap may have sent me straight into deep cycle sleep when I went back down and left me there till my alarm was done.  Good theory, except that when I got home from work I was about to set my clock for my afternoon nap and found it was set for 2:20 PM instead of the AM I had intended.  At least I wasn’t late for work though.  Today I may not have felt so tired, but I look like I could use some sleep.

Tonight is the first night I am experimenting with the added nap at 3:30 AM right between my 1:30 and 5:30 naps.  I hope by doing this I can reduce some of the sleepiness I’ve felt during the nighttime hours.  The only trick about this is it only leaves me an hour and a half to get things done between each of those naps.  We’ll see how this goes this week and hope it works better than what I’ve been doing.  I think it should.

Wow! try as I might, phasing out these accidental core naps has been very difficult for me.  It’s now just after 3 AM Saturday morning and I just woke up from a totally unintentional nap of perhaps two hours.  I’m not sure exactly what time I must have fallen asleep, but it had to be very shortly after my wife laid down.  Of course… the conditions were just right for an accidental nap now that I think about it.

I had been playing Final Fantasy XII on my homebuilt projector with the noise low so I wouldn’t keep my wife awake.  I don’t know if you’ve heard the soundtrack for that game, but let’s just say I’m not surprised I fell asleep.  That combined with the fact that my projector requires the lights to be turned off and also puts off enough heat to keep our living room about a constant 85 Fahrenheit or more, and to me, in shorts… that’s good put me to sleep temperature.  All that and the fact that it was 1 in the morning and I was tired shouldn’t surprise me at all.

Oh well, on the bright side of things I woke up only two hours later and feel pretty good actually.  Yesterday morning I was really tired after my 5:30 nap and I didn’t really feel awake till about noon.  I could hardly pay attention to what people were telling me at work when I was sitting down due to almost nodding off.  I was set on following my schedule, and it was working too.  I fell asleep and dreamt during each nap all day, and other than the morning tiredness I felt pretty good through the day without oversleeping… till now.

Anyway, I’m not giving up.  Though, I think I’m gonna try what Steve Pavlina did while he was in the transition, which was, taking an extra nap between my regular scheduled naps in the night.  I think his logic behind it was pretty reasonable, that this would give the body some of the extra rest it was looking for and still keep the nap to it’s regular 20-25 minute length so the body would continue to be used to it.  Considering that I had that extra bit of rest tonight and feel fine right now, I think I will put that off tonight, but plan on it tomorrow night.  When I get to the point of not being tired at night, then I’ll work on phasing it out.

All in all I feel I’m making progress, what with actually falling asleep quickly enough to sleep and dream during my daytime naps.  I’ve also felt fully awake a lot of the time between my naps, except I’ve still have some bags under my eyes that I’m hoping will go away when the transition is complete… We’ll see.  Well, I was gonna write an email to Jorel314 and take him up on his off to be a part of Adventures in Polyphasic Sleeping.

I am convinced that core sleep does not help with the conversion to the polyphasic lifestyle.  Perhaps that is just my personal opinion, but I tend to feel more wiped out every time I take a long nap than with a short one.  It also seems to muck with the next nap in the schedule also.

This is gonna sound ridiculous after what I keep saying I’m trying to do, but last nights naps went fine until I woke up from my 5:30 AM nap.  I was all happy that I hadn’t slept through my alarm, but instead of getting up and ready for the day, it being pretty early, I sat down on the couch instead and ended up being late to work since I fell asleep for about an hour and a half.  At least it wasn’t any longer than that though.  The rest of my naps turned out good also.  I fell asleep during all but my 9:30 PM nap.

I’ll just have to make sure to get ready for work when the time comes today instead of doing something like sitting on the couch.  It definitely helps, at least during the transistion period, to be involve in more engaging activities.  I will make sure to make a good effort at this tonight.

Well yesterday went alright, but I must’ve hit the snooze on my alarm a few too many times in the morning without even realizing it. So I ended up sleeping a two hour nap for my 5:30 AM, it wasn’t until two naps later during the afternoon that I felt really awake again. It being my wife’s birthday we had my brother and his wife over for a movie in the evening, so my 9:30 PM nap turned into my 11:20 hour and a half nap.

I keep meaning to stick to schedule, but then I don’t want to put company off for half an hour while I nap either. Oh well. I think it would’ve been fine had I woken up from that nap OK. Since it was almost 1 in the morning and close to my 1:30 nap I decided to delay my next two naps to somewhat even intervals at 3:00 and 6:30 respectively then catch up my schedule with my normal 9:30.

It seems to have worked, because today was a good day. My morning naps went well, and I really felt fully awake after my naps all day… well, up until my most recent nap at 9:30 PM. I think I went into deeper sleep and it left me a bit groggy, but I’ve actually been falling asleep during all of my naps all day, so I guess I’ve been sleep deprived for long enough that it’s actually working. I suppose this may have come sooner had I not put off some naps and overslept every few days for this past few weeks.

We’ll see how tonight goes, but I intend to set both clocks so I make sure to get up. I think it also helps to have some light in the room when I nap since it seems to help with getting me into REM sleep instead of the deeper cycle sleep. That may be the cause for the tiredness I’m feeling right now from my last nap. But, as long as I will be consistent to my schedule I think that this will just get easier.