Personal Growth

It’s about 1am, Tuesday 14th of February, about 5 minutes after I woke from my third polynap of the night.
I woke up from a normal nights sleep at 7am yesterday morning. At about a quarter past seven in the evening I have my first nap; I use Eric Mueller’s 28-minute mp3 timer on my iPod, but I got woken about 5-10 minutes early by noises outside. I remained lying down until the timer went. Approximately two hours later at 9:30 I lie down again. I don’t think I fell asleep this time, but you can never be sure, your body can play strange tricks on you, and especially with polyphasic sleep, which is uncharted territory for me. My body did feel completely paralysed at times though, and that definitely was a new feeling; I didn’t anticipate any new sensations until at least several naps more in. It wasn’t really paralysis as such as I could still move if I tried (and I did try) perhaps it was more like pins and needles, all over my body. So after that sort of non-nap I watched a film. A 90’s Jack Nicholson Film Noir; I enjoyed it, but I was over 2 hours and so I only got my third nap started at about 12:20, and I almost didn’t wake up from it (I slept through all sorts of horrible noises the timer makes). Might have to set my earphones a little louder to make sure it wakes me next time.

Perhaps you’re reading this and you’re entirely unsure of what I’m talking about. Well, I’ve gone polyphasic. By the end of this week I hope to be sleeping 6 times a day, every 4 hours for approximately 20 minutes each time, giving me a total of about 2 hours sleep per day. If you haven’t heard of Polyphasic sleep before you might be thinking: that’s nuts; I’ll explain it sometime.
Right now I’m trying to get into it by sleeping every 2 hours so that I can eventually start removing every second nap and be left with the correct schedule.

Later:

It’s about 1:50 now, and there is one thing I have to add. I feel extremely awake. And I have heard and experienced this to be the case: you can miss one night’s sleep and feel fine (in fact you body will be pumping out hormones to make you feel artificially awake). Your body can borrow some extra time. So I suppose this first night will be the easiest, the 2nd or 3rd day will really be the hardest hurdle.

3:20am

I woke up from my last nap about 20 minutes ago. I felt hungry so got so I ate what I could find in the kitchen. Some food got stuck in my throat in a weird way that I hadn’t experienced before (mostly because the food was soft and would usually just have slid down), drinking water cleared it right through though; it was as if my mouth and/or throat were malfunctioning; I kept eating, making sure to chew more and it didn’t recur. Maybe that shows my level of alertness, I couldn’t even eat properly.
The Battery on my iPod ran out, so I had to do without my polyphasic sleep track and had to rely on a conventional alarm. I have to keep it quite at night though to avoid waking other people, and during the day I probably won’t be able to get to sleep without it drowning out outside sounds with it’s white noise so I’ll have to remember to keep my iPod charged.
At the moment (other than writing this) the prevalent feeling is boredom. What to do with the extra time at night when the rest of the world sleeps? I’ll have to sort that out some time, at least I have plenty of it.

8 hours later: 11:20am

I woke up twenty minutes ago. I had trouble falling asleep and probably only got a short 10 minutes or so, even though I missed the previous nap. That’s the first one I missed. Since the one at 3:20 entry I had these naps: at 4:30, 6:30, missed the 8:30 one, and took the 10:30 partial nap just now. I might as well do only every 4 hours during the daytime if I have trouble falling asleep. My eyes feel extremely tired though so I’m going to lie down for the next one, even if I don’t get any sleep, to rest my eyes.

10:10pm

At this point I feel extremely tired, the feeling is mostly coming from around the eyes and in the form of slight headaches. Since the nap I missed this morning I got all my naps in, except for the 8:30pm nap which I couldn’t take because I was at my theatre company meeting (What an amazing coincidence, I missed the 8:30 am and pm nap). I’m going to take my next nap in about twenty minutes, and hopefully continue the 2 hourly routine from there until I start experiencing REM naps, something I’ll hopefully notice straight away; Although I may miss the first one (or two).