It begins!

Ever since I heard about the idea of a polyphasic sleeping schedule, I've been enamored. The idea of having so much time to pursue my interests, along with the idea of being simply being awake to experience the whole day/night cycle--it makes normal sleep start to seem more like a restraint on all that life could be, than a relaxing break.

I've tried adjusting to the uberman polyphasic sleeping schedule three times in the past, and failed each attempt. Each of my three attempts, I tried the traditional approach--just jump right in with no gradient, and see if you can wait out the sleep deprivation and emerge a changed sleeper. I only came close the last time--I got to 16 days with two oversleeps of an hour each--and then fell asleep for roughly a day. The account of that attempt (which started out as a video blog, and contains some very sleepy moments) can be found here.

The traditional approach to an uberman sleeping schedule is generally viewed as the only way you'll have a chance of succeeding; every success story I've ever heard of is done by simply sleeping as if you were already adjusted, starting day one. To say that the transition is hard is an understatement (with a few exceptions: Steve Pavlina only seemed to have only a moderately difficult adjustment, for example). Not only does the person have to deal with the feeling of being tired, but they are constantly fighting a battle of will with their own (very insistent) thalamus. And the thalamus can be damn tricky.

Within the few polyphasic communities I've been involved in, the idea of a more gradual adjustment to uberman is often brought up--but never successfully attempted. This is probably partly because two weeks alone is hard to get off, let alone any more time, and because two weeks of hell somehow simply seems easier than months of careful planning and execution.

My situation is this: I'm in college, taking over 18 credits, and taking Summer classes as well. By the time I won't be able to take any more Summer classes, I'll likely have an internship. What this means is that I really doubt I'll ever get a chance to try the traditional, all-out method of adjustment without seriously delaying the goals that I want to achieve. But, like I said, the idea of an uberman sleeping schedule really fascinates me. Near the end of my last attempt, when I was starting to feel genuinely more awake, it felt like a dream-come-true.

So, I'm going to try a gradual adjustment--a very gradual adjustment. Tomorrow I'm going to start taking naps roughly every four hours, at set times during the day, so my brain can start to expect and rely on them. During the night, I'm going to sleep normally, but also get up for a half hour or so when I'd normally get up for naps if I was already adjusted, so my brain can start to expect to get up at those times.

At first, I'm just going to try to get about 8-9 hours of sleep total each day, and keep it up until I feel like I'm used to the breaks in my normal sleeping time. Once I feel like I'm as alert as normal during the day, I'll take a small amount of time off each or one of my nightly chunks of sleep, and wait again until I feel like I'm used to the schedule. The plan is, I'll repeat this until I'm adjusted. I'm guessing that I can only take about 10 minutes off of my total sleep amount at one time if I want to stay functional for school, and I've heard it takes about two months to get fully adjusted to a new sleeping schedule. This means that at the worst I could easily be at this experiment for years. I'm hoping the fact that the changes will be small can decrease that two-month adjustment time, but even if it does take years--right now I feel like I could be up to it. The slow-but-steady increase in my free time would be pretty encouraging.

So. Tomorrow I sleep in, and once I wake up I'm taking each nap strictly at the scheduled time, and starting tomorrow night I'm waking up at the scheduled times. I've started this blog for a more scientific purpose, so that if I succeed others who want to can follow in my footsteps and learn anything that I did along the way. I'll probably update a few times in the beginning, but after that I'll update mostly just when I make another adjustment to my total sleeping time.

Here we go!