GOAL : 56 hours sleep for February 2010

ACTUAL: 57 hours sleep for February 2010

You remember all that stuff I said about January being the hardest month (the last week especially)? Well, throw that out the window; February is by far the worst Dymaxion Sleep month I’ve ever had. And again, all the thanks goes to one thing, my social life.

February was filled with showcases, performances, and classes to teach. At first my whole flexible schedule thing worked out, and I finally thought I was able to have a social life and sleep two hours day (ain’t I stupid). I guess my social life has a thing against my sleep habits; I had back to back shows, back to back classes, back to back meetings, and anything else back to back.

I found myself sometimes not skipping one nap but two! If you ever practised polyphasic sleeping, especially Uberman or Dymaxion like me, then you’ll understand the importance of what I just said.

The moment I started hallucinating and falling in and out of sleep I knew I had to do something. So, I started consuming caffein pills left and right, straight dark coffee (no sugar or cream), and anything/everything else caffeinated just to stay awake. Don’t think I planned to make this the long term solution though, this was just one of those temporary band-aid ideas (that never work in the long run).

In my last week of February I ended up oversleeping three naps by two hours each (that’s a total of six hours of oversleeping). I didn’t think too much of it though, I probably skipped about 15 naps in February (that’s five hours total of missed naps) and the oversleeping thing probably equalized everything.

Right now, I’m back to normal (yeahhhh!). I’m sleeping every six hours with 10 minutes flexibility here and there. But, in the back of my mind I still worry about how I’ll survive another “crazy-social-life-no-naps” period in my life. I wouldn’t be able to handle living off caffeine alone again. I’d die.

Something had to change, and soon.

… Did you think I was going to say that I’m quitting?! I’d never be that sensible silly. Although, I’ve just hit my goal (if you remember correctly I stated that I wanted to last until March on two hours sleep per day), I’ve expanded on my previous goal by trying to achieve that all illusive one year mark.

Think about it, a whole year where I sleep two hours per day, WOW. Nine/ten more months to go. And not only will I be sleeping two hours a day, but I’ll be doing it on the flexible-Dymaxion polyphasic sleep pattern, something everyone has said couldn’t be done. For personal reasons this makes me extremely happy, I love proving people wrong.

My flexible schedule has to be MORE flexible

My flexible-Dymaxion schedule is in fact what’s going to change, I’ve realized that I’m going to have to stretch this out to it’s limits just so I can keep up with my personal life. Right now I’ve achieved 10 minutes flexibility (meaning that I can differentiate my naps by ten minutes), but for March I’m going to try to raise it to 20 – 30 minutes flexibility.

If you want to think about how great a feat that is just realize that by moving a 30 minute nap 30 minutes forward/backwards I’m basically missing the entire scheduled nap time altogether. Yes, I’m making it that drastic.

As I write this I’m practising 12 minutes flexibility (one step at a time), and everything seems to be going swell. It’s not as great as a pure-on-schedule nap is, but it’s getting there. I’m either getting used to it, or it’s getting used to me.

Future experimentations

I’ve already stated that I’m going to practice lucid dreaming (and blog about it), but I have other things I’ve been thinking about. Here’s a (very) short list of things I’m thinking of trying:

• On-and-off naps
• Two hours of sleep per day with fewer nap times (three, two, and maybe even one… but I doubt it)
• Sensory naps (just made this up)- where you sleep, dream, and yet still be aware of your surroundings. I’m wondering if humans have the ability to do this due to our history of having to survive in jungles, forests, etc.
• And of course lucid dreaming (plus all the niche topics it covers)

I’ve failed at something though

I’ve failed at keeping up with my daily Dymaxion sleep pictures. I’m sorry… I’m too busy! I literary haven’t touched my camera in a month, and for someone who loves photography in general, that’s horrible.

I’ve also slacked on my twitter updates about my polyphasic sleeping. But that was on purpose. This whole thing has become a part of my life now, like sleeping eight hours per day is for most people. Do they tweet every-time they wake up and tell you how it felt?! No! It’s wayyy too egomaniacal for me.

But, in all seriousness, if you can think of an easier way for me to take (decent) pictures of myself quickly please let me know, right now even the quickness of Flickr isn’t quick enough for me… And I’m not doing DailyBooth.

I was thrilled to receive email and comments from some of y’all asking me to help with your polyphasic sleep schedules. As I stated, I’m not a doctor (just a guy who has personal experience), but I will help with anything I can.

So… ASK/COMMENT AWAY!

photo credit: dr_vaibhavahuja

I read about 21 books per week.

Audio Books

Speed Listening

We (as humans) talk slow.

Speed Reading

Start (and finish) reading every line on the page every third word in.

Polyphasic Sleep

THE RESULTS: What I Read This Week (so far)

*As you’ll quickly notice, I’m currently fascinated with mystery novels and dot com/entrepreneurship stories. They’re hitting close to home with what I’m currently trying to do, so I’m finding them fascinating.

photo credit: jc.westbrook

Brief intro

It’s been a while hasn’t it. I haven’t updated Dymaxion sleep posts in two-three weeks now. All on purpose though.

As you may have noticed, this is not my main focus on dancePROOF. I’d much rather write something to do with personal development, or love, or society, or something else thought provoking. Something that has to do with me helping people out (and not talking about myself). Thus I decided that I will write an update on my Dymaxion sleeping habits every first Monday of every month.

I also have a confession to make. I haven’t been so anal-retentive about the whole “keeping perfect track of everything I do”. You can’t blame me though, I’ve been busy. Performances to perform, schools to teach, family to take care of, business to handle, and the oh so familiar “money issues” to take care of. As you can probably see I haven’t updated my Flickr photos or my Twitter updates in about two-three weeks as well. To all those that continued to check in on them, disappointed daily due to my lack of posting, I apologize. January was a hectic month.

So here’s to February. Here’s to me finally making a “flexible” schedule so that I don’t fuck up again, and let people down. And here’s to me actually talking about what you came here for, Dymaxion sleep.

The flexible Dymaxion sleep schedule

Do you know how my third week into this whole thing felt like? Like hell. But why did the third week feel like hell even though week two turned out to be so good? Two words- missed naps.

It all started out great, perfect naps, no interruptions, and even shorter naps; I found myself waking up ahead of the alarm clock, four times! I read countless books, listened to music albums that had been gathering dust, answered most of my eMails (99.9%), caught up on unfinished work, etc. etc., basically life was fucking great. I did have two days where I slept two hours more than required, but it was on my own accord; I did it to heal my body, not because I was tired. I was sick, and by oversleeping two naps I got over it fairly quick (sleeping four hours per day for two days is still better than what most people do, especially when they too are sick). Once the whole me being sick thing was taken care of though, everything went back to being all peachy and pleasant. But it all changed once I started performing.

Let me explain. Having to perform when you should be taking a nap instead isn’t necessarily bad. It’s the consequences that suck. For the last half of January I’ve missed my nap times of 3:30 PM and/or 9:30 PM because I either had to perform, help teach classes, or shake hands with “important” people. While in the moment I don’t necessarily feel bad, but you can find me in zombie mode an hour or two after the adrenaline wears off.

A week into this and I knew I needed to find a solution, like introducing flexibility into the plan. I heard that Uberman sleepers such as Steve Pavlina over time were able to move their sleep schedules up or down 30 minutes so that it fits better with their lives. Being one to never be beat, I started introducing flexibility into my Dymaxion sleep, slowly.

I’ve been constantly moving my naps 10 minutes up and 10 minutes down, but overall keeping them the same. I want my body to realize that I will not be getting sleep at a specific time but in a specific “block” of time. My plan is to keep 60%-70% of the naps scheduled as is, but move 30%-40% of them 10 minutes up and/or down. This (hopefully) allows my body to realize that I haven’t changed my sleep schedule completely, and for it to also realize that “Arsene has a life” and that I won’t necessarily be able to sleep at a specific time.

See, I don’t want to end this whole thing, like how other people did, because it couldn’t fit into my schedule.

Why should sleep control me?

Didn’t I start this whole thing so that I could gain more control over my sleep and not the other way around?

And so far, having been on the “flexible” schedule for a little over a week now, I’ve shown sleep who’s the boss (relatively). I still feel normal, I don’t feel overwhelmingly tired anymore, and I haven’t entered zombie mode in a while. But, I also don’t take shorter naps, and I haven’t once woken up before my alarm clock. I predict this while change overtime as my body gets adjusts to the flexibility of my new Dymaxion schedule. Looking at other people’s adaptation patterns (mainly people on the Everyman schedule) this should take around two months for a complete schedule adaptation.

I also found a great site that has music tracks for us polyphasic sleepers. The tracks are all ‘white noise’ tracks that allow you to block the noises of life out. I’ve been using the 26 minute version (longest the site had) and I personally extended it to 30 minutes to fit Dymaxion sleepers. Thanks to these tracks I’ve been able to sleep in relatively noisy environments.

I really can’t tell you how much I love this whole polyphasic sleep thing (after getting past the adaptation pains). And recently I was visiting the creators website and I realized that they wrote an ENTIRE BOOK (amazon link) on polyphasic sleep. Check it out, it provides far more in-depth information than I could ever provide; not enough Dymaxion sleep info though, but that’s expected seeing as how everyone who’s ever tried it practically ended up quitting.

Someone recently asked me why I adapted to this schedule better than most people. Well, it seems I had an unfair advantage over the majority of people on Earth, I worked night shift. And here I was thinking night shifts were a curse. Turns out they helped me with:

1. Staying up in the wee hours of the night (I don’t find the 3:30 AM & 9:30 AM naps as challenging as others do)
2. Going for days without sleep (sometimes when working night shifts I wouldn’t sleep for three-four days)
3. Sleeping while the sun is out (I learnt how to sleep with sleep masks, and when those weren’t available sleeping with the sun directly overhead was no big deal)

For the coming months, I want to finally accomplish my goal of “controlling every single dream I have” and I’ve started reading lucid dreaming books to get started. I’m going to try increasing my 10 minutes of flexibility to 20 minutes of flexibility. And, I’m also going to try posting pictures up on Flickr everyday, even though I’ve come to the conclusion that this might not happen everyday.

That’s pretty much it for January’s update. My next update will be in the first week of March (remember monthly updates only). And if you need proof as to whether or not I can still process thoughts/ideas, use this post as an example of the fact that I can still put two thoughts together and make a sentence.

photo credit: jakuza

My one goal in everything that I do this year is going to be total immersion. Total immersion is the obvious-yet-overlooked key to success and extreme productivity in life. I got the idea from language learning. In the world of language learning there are those few people who learn languages in two to six months. And you know what they apply to their lives? Total immersion.

To make it clear, total immersion is not about a balanced life. It’s not about doing a little of everything every single day. And it’s not about giving equal time to everything. Total immersion is about focusing on only one thing for an insane amount of time. It’s about letting everything else wither away in the meantime. And it’s about leading an unbalanced, yet highly passionate, and driven life.

Total immersion requires that you lose any and all sense of balance you hold dear to you. Repeat, any and all sense of balance. It means watching your social life dwindle to nothing while you focus entirely on your career. And on the contrary, it means watching your career dwindle down to nothing while you focus on your social life (a social life is necessary but it shouldn’t be all consuming, all the time).

Way too many people live the “I multi-task” lifestyle. Which I think is stupid given that it’s proven that when we stop concentrating on something for 5-15 minutes, it’s going to take a full hour for us to go back to that level of concentration. Calculating that the regular person checks their e-mail, Twitter, and/or Facebook every 5 minutes, it’s amazing that people get anything done (if they do). But, this does explain the 10 hours of ‘real’ productivity in 40 hours of work that these people usually get.

The thing about total immersion is that it’s basically the ultimate cheat code to life. When you spend 8 full hours totally immersed in something, you would think you got 8 hours of productivity right? Wrong. You get around 24. Yup, three times more work done in the same amount of time. And the thing is the longer you’re immersed, the higher that productivity ratio goes up. In fact, if you find yourself totally immersed and concentrated for a full 24 hours, you can find yourself having completed 186 (24 x 7) hours of work. I wonder how much can get done if you’re totally immersed for one full year .

So, how am I applying this to my own life? Well, for one thing, I’m cutting back my internet use (eMail, blog reading, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to only 1.5 hours a day:  12:00 AM – 1:30 AM. And, if I’m too busy with life to meet the time, I don’t use the internet at all that day.

Now you ask, why at 12:00 AM though and not at a normal time like oh say, when people are actually awake? Well, 12:00 AM allows me to concentrate without distractions, especially on answering comments and fully interacting with you guys, the passionate few who read my blog. This is my #1 priority. Screw everyone else, I think that if you deemed me worthy enough of your time, then I at least gotta try to live up to it, right?

And, believe me when I say how hard this is for an internet junky like me (the withdrawal is going to be painful). I am going to send the occasional tweet here and there though, through SMS only, during dead period in my life (such as sitting in traffic or listening to a certain self-righteous person speak for an hour), but outside of that, nada. All, the others hours of my life will be spent with me being totally immersed somewhere else.

I’m batching my tasks into weekly talks so that every week I am totally immersed in one thing. For example, all my blog posts are written at the end of the previous month (without internet), giving me a full three weeks to never worry about providing new content for you guys. Which, if you think about it gives you better content (three weeks totally immersed in other things allows me to get more information about them, and a full week immersed in writing allows me to convey my knowledge about them better). The only thing I can’t apply this to are my monthly Dymaxion Polyphasic Sleep and Ubervegan posts (for good reasons) which are done every Sunday, the day before they’re posted.

But believe me when I say that total immersion can apply to anything and everything if one chooses. And, as I said [and guarantee] this is one of those obvious-yet-overlooked keys to success that few people do. I am going to be one of those few. And so should you.

photo credit: orcmid

GOAL : 14 hours sleep per week

PROGRESS: 14.5 hours sleep this week

This week turned out to be much better than last week. Although, if you take into account the first few days in, you would have never noticed. If you saw my Twitter updates you would have noticed that I went through a rough patch where I felt like “screeching monkeys were in my head having a loudest screeching monkey contest”… basically ONE BIG HEADACHE. Due to this I overslept two of my first naps by 15 minutes adding 30 more minutes to my goal of 14 hours. My only times oversleeping. I kept going though, and life got better. Noting my earlier progress from week one, I can say I fixed most of the mistakes I had. For example:

• I no longer sleep on beds

This was weird at first, but I got used to it. Stupid mistake I made the first few times was sleeping on my arm. After waking up I always felt like blood had rushed to them. I can describe to you the fun I had in turning off alarms while feeling as if my arms were balloons, but I won’t.

And, yes. Alarms. As in plural. I got three . See the previous week, my body adapted to the one alarm system, and it got far too easy for me to turn off one alarm and go back to sleep. So I set up an elaborate alarm system:

1. One alarm on my computer that can only be turned off by entering a specific password.
2. One regular alarm set one minute after the others, and placed at a far off distance of where I’m taking a nap, so that I would have to actually walk in order to turn it off.
3. And my best system, the “throw-away” alarm. Let me explain. I got a wireless alarm clock (no extension cords), and every-time, right before I take a nap, I toss it/placed it somewhere without looking (best practice is throwing it behind your back). This leaves me with the task of finding it, in order to turn it off, and believe me when I say that finding an alarm clock, when you don’t know where it’s at is harder than it sounds (and it sounds hard).

All the alarm clocks are set on automatic schedules so that I don’t have to constantly input my times, or *wink* *wink* forget to set the times. A typical day spent home with me would look like this:

1. You’d see me take my 30 minute (feels like 8 hours) nap.
2. See me wake up to two alarm clocks and enter my password into the computer alarm clock first to shut it off (it’s the loudest).
3. You’d laugh at me while I stumble through the place looking for my “throw-away” alarm and watch me turn it off when I found it.
4. And if by chance, you see me trying to (unconsciously) get more sleep, you’d hear me curse the world when the third alarm (the one set one minute behind) went off.
5. Then you’d watch in horror (or ecstasy) as I stretch, or do a mini-exercise to get my heart rate up.

I give credit to this elaborate system for my drastic improvement from last weeks 22.5 hours.

• My dreams are becoming more and more lucid

I’m starting to realize that I am in fact dreaming, and this leads to ‘interesting’ dream experiments. Like the ten nap continuous dream where I learned how to fly step-by-step in each dream and improved onward. This is one of the best outcomes of this whole thing. I’ve gotten to the point where I want to go back to sleep not because I’m tired, but because I want to go back to all the fun I was having.

• My social life needs to be better handled though

I’m still trying to find someway to not keep having to interrupt my social life in order to go take a 30 minute nap somewhere by myself. I’m not particularly irritated by it, but I think it can go much smoother than it currently is. However, I can say that the trade off, having the night all to myself, is fantastic. It’s like I live in two world. One is the bright daytime where life is in constant motion and people are moving at breakneck speeds. And the other is the dark nighttime where I’m (usually) by myself in the wee hours of the night. I get to actually concentrate on my work like never before now; these have been my most productive hours by far. The only thing I have to fix thus far, is the whole “sex” thing (having to use up an hour of your life to explain to someone that you can’t just stay there and cuddle because you’ll end up sleeping isn’t fun).

• At least I look healthier

Another great thing that happened was that the bags under my eyes actually disappeared (or shrink-ed in size), which is great because now I don’t get the “you look so tired” statements from people anymore. And it’s kinda awesome to see people go to sleep and wake up bewildered at the fact that you’re still awake!

That’s pretty much it for my second week’s update. If you want to get daily (smaller) updates on my progress follow me on Twitter and look for comments with the #polyphasic hashtag. And as always you can check just how puffy my eyes are not by tracking my pictorial progress on Flickr. ‘Till next week.

photo credit: Steve Tolcher

GOAL : 14 hours sleep per week

PROGRESS: 22.5 hours sleep this week

Yup, I slept 8.5 hours more than what I wanted. But to make myself feel better I deducted that that comes down to 3.21428571 hours of sleep per day this week. Which if you think about it is better than all but two of the schedules (Uberman, and this one, Dymaxion). I’m not going to stop aiming for that two hours though. In fact I could have made it if it wasn’t for a few mistakes…

The MISTAKES (and solutions)

• Sleeping on the bed

It might sound weird, but if you really think about it it’s common sense; Sleeping on a bed makes you sleep for a looong time. The bed is comfortable, warm, cozy, snug, and all those other words that describe fluffy things. Sleeping on the bed accounted for 94.117647 % (8 hours) of my oversleeping time! I’ve decided that I’m no longer sleeping on beds. Who actually needs a bed for a 30 minute nap? Especially when it makes it harder to wake up.

• Drinking alcohol

On New Years I decided that I would go against my Ubervegan lifestyle and drink alcohol (none of the other rules were broken). I didn’t think far ahead enough to realize that I would be tired + not in the state of mind to control myself from oversleeping. This combined with the fact that I found a comfy bed accounted for me oversleeping 4.5 hours (out of the 8 mentioned earlier). The ubervegan lifestyle seems to be made for this schedule. All the things I don’t consume are the only things that would end up ruining my sleeping pattern; Meat and dairy would cause me to sleep longer due to their effect on the body, sugar intake would play havoc with my energy levels, and all the other foods would make my body focus more on processing food that on replenishing my energy levels when I’m sleeping.

• Being bored/doing boring activities

For a while I literally couldn’t connect the dots. And seeing as how I couldn’t do anything requiring a lot of brain activity I decided to do some simple coding, and movie watching. While coding/movie watching, twice I looked at the clock, blinked, and found myself transported 30 minutes into the future (which is not as fun as it sounds). This accounted for one hour of over sleeping (I count this as sleeping even though I was technically awake-ish). I decided that from now on if I feel tired and in a “boring” situation, I will do a little exercise (run in place, stretch, dance) to increase my blood flow.

• Not Sleeping exactly 30 minutes

If you were counting, so far I overslept for 9 hours. So how did I end up oversleeping 8.5 hours? Well I, being the experimentalist that I am (and work needing to be finished), ended up sleeping only 15 minutes for two of the naps. Bringing down my score to 8.5 hours. This was so, so, so very stupid. Due to this I experienced one of my hardest days, became ever slower in my thought process, became snappy, less productive, etc… let’s just say it was a very stupid idea. I now focus on the 30 minute rule religiously.

I didn’t just make mistakes though, along the way I made a few discoveries…

The DISCOVERIES

• It’s the extra two hours that are the hardest

I discovered why Uberman is easier than Dymaxion; That extra two hours of wake time. Throughout this whole thing I noticed that for the first four hours after a nap I was relatively energetic and awake. But, once I passed four hours, I had to constantly fight to stay awake. This imaginary time limit set by my body is one of the hardest things I need to overcome.

• I can’t tell time anymore/longer days are actually shorter days

Time no longer makes sense. It feels continuous now (in fact I’m not able to tell what day it is without checking a calendar). The worst/best thing is that my 30 minute naps feel 8 hours long and my days feel 6 hours long. Making me feel as if I’m sleeping longer now. See, this whole thing started with me wanting to get more hours out of each day and I accomplished that (relatively) but I don’t feel like I did. Since, days feel to only be 6 hours long (instead of 24) I feel rushed, because in the back of my head I keep telling myself I’m sleeping in 5.5 hours. This, in a unforseen way caused me to be extremely productive, because I end up focusing only on the things that matter. In the end I feel as if this week has actually been a month, and my most productive month at that… It must suck to be on the Uberman schedule, feeling as if everyday was only 3.5 hours long would drive me insane.

• I’m always hungry

I cleaned out my fridge. Due to the facts that I’m now awake more and consuming more energy, I’m eating a lot more than usual.

• More realistic dreams

The best and worst part of this whole things has been the dreams. The dreams are in a word, consuming. I’ve literary stopped being able to tell whether I’m dreaming or not. Coming from theaters after watching Avatar (an amazing movie btw) I literary had a dream where I was an Avatar. But not like in the movies… better! Instead of lasting two hours (like the movie), I felt as if I was an Avatar for years. Then out of nowhere, I hear my alarm clocks go off, and realize that I’m not in fact an Avatar (which is a sad fact to realize). See in the dreams I don’t get that “this is too amazing to be real” feeling anymore. I actually feel like the events happening, no matter how bizarre, are a normal part of life… You can imagine the havoc this plays with me, I’m literary living two lives.

Anyways, that’s my update from the first week. If you want to get daily (smaller) updates on my progress follow me on Twitter and look for comments with the #polyphasic hashtag. And as always you can check just how puffy my eyes my gotten by tracking my pictorial progress on Flickr. I’ll leave you with a list (made by two wayward-wellingtonians) of all the types of naps I’ve in someway experienced this week (if your a polyphasic sleeper you’ll find this hilariously accurate);

Top Eight Kinds of Nap

Since we started sleeping polyphasically, I’ve noticed the quality and nature of naps varies quite a bit. Most naps are just “standard” naps, but I get at least one of these naps each week or so:

• The Paradox (AKA The Traitor, The Pan Galactic Gargle Nap)

Everything seemed to go so well. You lay down on schedule, fell asleep right away, and had a lovely dream involving cake, meadows and fluffy animals. Yet you wake up feeling like someone stuffed your head full of polystyrene and poured bleach in your eyes. Luckily, the effect tends to fade away after a few minutes.

• The Time Warp (AKA The Forgotten Oversleep, The WTF Nap)

Three hours have passed, both alarm clocks have been switched off, along with the light and the MP3 player. You may also have had a drink and been to the bathroom at some point. The last thing you remember is lying down.

• The Newbie Nap (AKA Murphy’s Nap, The Coffee Victim)

Your eyes refuse to stay open. Your body is exhausted. Your brain feels like it’s been stuffed with cotton wool. You lie down expecting the best nap of your life. Instead, you spend 20 minutes thinking about how badly you want to get to sleep. The ticking clock, humming refrigerator, faint noises from next door and blinking LED on the VCR also don’t help.

• The Phantom Nap (AKA The Non-Nap, The Wake)

You were awake when you lay down. You were awake when the alarm went off. You don’t remember waking up. Did you sleep in between? No-one will ever know. Unless someone heard you snoring.

• The Nap-22 (AKA The No-Win-Nap, The Nap-And-A-Half-Without-The-Nap)

You wake up feeling pretty good. Eyes open, head clear. But there’s a problem. You still have half your time left. Do you get up, or go back to sleep? If you get up you’ll feel tired later. If you go back to sleep you’ll feel tired when you wake up. You may as well just give up and sleep through to the next nap (not really).

• The Micronap (AKA The Surprise, The iNap Nano)

Why did the hand of that clock jump forward two minutes?

• The Snap (AKA The Epiphany, The Crystal Pillow)

You suddenly snap awake, with one minute left on the clock. You feel like your whole life has been a lead-up to this one moment of startling and unexpected clarity. Work fast. You have about 5 minutes before you go back to normal.

• The Chrono-Nap (AKA The Bullet-Time, The Saga)

You fall asleep almost immediately and have an incredibly long and detailed dream. You wake up what feels like hours later, cursing yourself for oversleeping, only to realize you’ve been asleep five minutes. You resist the urge to call your monophasic friends and tell them how awesome polynapping is.

photo credit: fwooper

The INTRO

It seems as if I have once again decided to inflict more harm (self-discipline really) onto myself in the name of I-dunno-what (something provocative). I’ve decided that on top of being Ubervegan I’m going to be sleeping two hours a day. Yup, TWO HOURS A DAY, for at least three months (aiming for a full year).

Now, you may be wondering just how the f**k I’m going to live on two hours sleep per day for three months. The answer is simple really: through polyphasic sleeping. See “normal” people (referring to the majority) practice what is known as monophasic sleeping which more or less means “sleeping one time per day”. From this you can deduct that “biphasic” sleepers sleep twice per day, “triphasic” thrice per day, and “polyphasic” more than thrice.

Polyphasic sleepers usually go through five phases (the humor comes from realizing that they resemble the five stages of grief):

1. Pre-polyphasic phase (denial)- The soon to be polyphasic sleeper is extremely excited about final getting to master time and space, they “knew something like this HAD to exist”. Imagining all the things they will do with their new found extra time their blood pressure continues to rise.
2. Infected-pre-zombie phase (anger)- The polyphasic sleeper has began their nap schedules, was doing fine, but is now feeling the effects of sleep deprivation arriving.
3. Changing-into-zombie phase (bargaining)- the polyphasic sleeper now starts to desperately try everything to stay awake (picture someone chugging a whole case of red bull), even though they realize that things are slowly getting worse and worse.
4. Zombie phase (depression)- The polyphasic sleeper is now defeated. Now resembling a zombie (drooping arms/shoulders, slow paced, bloodshot/puffy eyes, murmured speech, etc.) they are drained of all energy and are only waking up from their naps by pure instinct.
5. Defeat phase (acceptance)- The polyphasic sleeper now believes that everything they read/heard was a lie, they “knew nobody could live on two hours of sleep per day”, and soon accept that they need sleep. They now proceed to take that 8-24 hour nap they’ve been desperately craving for.

…Wait, what? The outcome is a failure? Why the f**k do this then? Are you a masochist now Arsène?

Well… the truth is that there is a 6th phase few reach. In this stage the polyphasic sleepers (the few left) who had decided to (against all possible reasonable explanations) continue with their polyphasic sleeping just a little more are now rewarded. The have now passed the hardest stages of polyphasic sleeping and from here on out they are MASTERS OF TIME (nerdy title, I know).

There are more than three polyphasic sleep patterns, but in the interest of keeping this article short I’ll only focus on the three main patterns; Everyman, Uberman, and Dymaxion.

Everyman is probably my safest bet for polyphasic sleeping. It’s the only one of the three that has a “core nap”. The core nap can range from 1.5 hours to 3 hours while the rest of the naps range from 20-30 minutes. If you choose 3 hours you usually balance it with three short naps after, and if you choose 1.5 hours you can balance it with anywhere from 3-6 naps (more is necessary since you got less sleep). Since Everyman has a core period it is the most flexible of the three mentioned patterns because the core period can (over time) be interchanged with one of the other naps hence… flexible. But, although it is the most flexible due to the core nap, it is also the longest to adapt to because it is not as drastic of a change as the other two.

Uberman (rhymes with Ubervegan ) is the next safest for me. It consists of 6 twenty minute naps evenly distributed throughout the day, coming to one 20 minute nap every four hours. This is NOT a flexible schedule, if you miss one nap or push it farther/earlier you mess up your pattern, and get to experience the joys of sleep deprivation all over again. The good thing is that this provides you with the least amount of sleep required, two hours and that it is one of the quickest to adapt to (no longer than a week) due to how drastic it is.

Being the idiot that I am, I chose to go with the Dymaxion schedule. Like Uberman, Dymaxion sleep lasts a total of two hours a day, is not flexible, and is quickly adaptable. The only difference being that instead of 6 twenty minute naps, it consists of four 30 minute naps. This is the hardest schedule to adopt, so hard in fact that there is no documented proof of a modern person actually living on this long-term . So, I might die or go crazy… bummer.

The SCHEDULE

My nap times are going to be

1. 3:30 AM – 4:00 AM
2. 9:30 AM – 10:00 AM
3. 3:30 PM – 4:00 PM
4. 9:30 PM – 10:00 PM

These times work best with my schedule and hopefully there won’t be interruptions when I need to take a nap.

The PROOF

Throughout this whole thing I decided that I would need proof, no matter how small, of me actually doing this. Best system I can figure out for now is

1. Constant Twitter updates through my account @dancePROOF with a hashtag of #polyphasic attached (especially around my nap times). I decided that I wouldn’t blog daily about this because a daily post on this would quickly make this the major topic on this blog, which I don’t want. I’d rather you focus on other areas more than this (such as society & beliefs). But, I still wanted to constantly keep you in the know-how of how I’m doing, hence Twitter.
2. Daily Flickr self-portait pictures through my account ArsenePROOF. I decided to align this with my “365 day self-potrait” goal (something photographers do) and kill two birds with one stone. I’d rather you see the effect of Dymaxion sleep with your own eyes.
3. Weekly dancePROOF posts every Monday documenting, in detail, how the prior week went. I’ll keep a daily log of my discoveries and happenings then basically dump it all in one blog post per week. After two months (if I reach that) I will change this to a monthly update every first Monday as I did with the Ubervegan updates.

Well, that’s as far as I planned into this. Hopefully you enjoy my updates, don’t laugh too loudly at my pics, and generally learn something new (always my goal). PS- I officially started December 27, 2009, just couldn’t wait till January 2010.

Dymaxion Sleep- Week 1

Dymaxion Sleep- Week 2

Dymaxion Sleep- Month 1

Dymaxion Sleep- Month 2

photo credit: danielfoster437