The Nap Sent From Heaven

January 27th, 2010 by Vulfe

Just an interesting note, my previous polyphasic attempt had me REALLY desperate for sleep starting at 0400 until around 1200 or so.  This time, after sleeping without a schedule for a couple of weeks, it starts at 1700 when I wake from my nap, and goes till around 0100 the next day.  That tiredness is brutal, and has foiled me in the past numerous times.  Being that tired, with sore dry eyes that just want to be shut, the temptation to lie down is nearly irresistible for me.

So at 1830 (1.5 hours away from the previous nap), I set my alarm for 20 minutes and went down for an unscheduled nap.  It didn’t seem like I’d been asleep at all, in fact I actually sat up before my alarm went off for some reason.  Wow! That heavy horrid exhaustion had disappeared.  My eyes weren’t all red and dry anymore, what a relief I felt!  I may have had some dream activity, it’s hard to say, that nap felt like no time had passed at all.

Now this is interesting to me, because I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out how guys like Steve Pavlina are able to adapt to this schedule so easily when it’s such an insane struggle for everyone else.  I recall him talking about taking an extra nap when he needed it, and it seems like that’s key during these first days.  I would encourage anyone following a polyphasic sleep schedule to take that extra nap when you feel the need.  Experiment with the timing for yourself if you wish, but I would guess that it’s a good idea to keep it at least 1.5 hours away from any scheduled nap, in order to prevent yourself from falling into too deep of a torpor, and of course, 20 minutes or less.

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Posted in Adaptation, Uberman | 5 Comments »

A New Approach

January 25th, 2010 by Vulfe

Sleep deprivation is kinda funny, especially when you’re trying to nap at the same time. I wake up, no idea how I got where I am, with no idea how long I’ve been sleeping, or how the alarm got shut off, or whatever. The alarm is set for some wacked out time that doesn’t even make sense, the cell phone is lodged in the small of the back… Oi.

Anyways, I’ve decided to approach this the same way I quit smoking. Instead of trying to quit smoking I simply BECAME a non-smoker. It might seem like that wouldn’t really make a difference, but mentally it makes ALL the difference. That little trick made quitting so easy it was almost scary, I hardly even had a withdrawal craving after that (which is something to say considering I’d been smoking for 8 years up to that point). It’s the only way to do anything, just make up your mind and jump in.  JUST DO IT, as the slogan goes; trying to wade in just causes delays and problems.

So instead of trying to adapt to Uberman, I will simply BE Uberman. I won’t be keeping a time log stating how many days or hours it’s been since I started anymore, although I will continue to keep up the journaling. I did set a counting timer on my phone (neat little app that I just discovered) that I can glance at if I need a reference as to how long I’ve been doing this. There will be no more “Day X” in the title of the blog, in fact I won’t be keeping any sort of regular blogging schedule at all anymore. Rather I’ll simply keep notes on what I’m experiencing, and if it’s worth sharing then I’ll slam it up here, hey presto!

Speaking of the phone, looking through the “Tools” functions I discovered a “Scheduler” app in there that I can put all 6 of my wake up times, then set to repeat daily. Before that I’d been using the “Alarm” function, which would only allow me to set up three bells at a time. A hassle, to say the least. Dangerous at worst, since the mind has a way of mixing up certain numbers when it wants sleep…

Now, what would really be something is to create some sort of alarm with my computer that will do the same thing, with some extra bells and whistles. Something that would create some random math or word problem that I’d be forced to solve before the blaring music would shut off, or even a long complicated password would probably do the trick, and would also be easier to implement… Windows Task Scheduler is useful for that sort of thing, I betcha I could get it to load up a premade itunes playlist, crank the computer volume up to max, and then activate the screen saver, which I could put a long-ass annoying password on. Simple and to the point, I like it! But first I’d need to get some speakers, right now I’m operating on headphones alone. Looks like I’ve got a project. :)

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Posted in Uberman | 10 Comments »

48 Hours

January 21st, 2010 by Vulfe

I’ve been flipping through the video logs of an Ubersleeper who claims that his optimal nap time is 25 minutes. So I made this latest nap exactly 25 minutes to see what the result would be, and I’m not very happy with it. I woke feeling far more tired than I’d been pre-nap, and I’ve been fighting with extreme drowsiness ever since. My eyes are dry and red and all I wanna do is let them close for awhile. This is how the majority of my previous Uberman attempts went, so this is a good indicator of the cause. Oh well, only an hour and fifteen minutes till the next nap. The music (30 Seconds to Mars) is cranked and that helps a lot, hopefully keeping my next nap down to 20 minutes or less will put me back to the decently well rested state I was in just a few hours ago.

I just noticed what a strong association I have between this music and my experiences with Salvia Divinorum, and I recall one of my original reasons for adopting this sleep schedule; to experience REM sleep while in the afterglow of a strong Salvia dose. For those not familiar with this herb, it is a powerful disassociative (legal here in Canada) that tends to have an incredible amplifying effect on one’s dreams for days after a dose is consumed. Not only does it give the dreamscape an unprecedented level of realism and stability, but the perceptions there all go far beyond anything I’ve ever experienced in waking life. The colors are deeper and richer than my physical eyes can see, scents hit me in the dream as if I had a bloodhound’s nose, it’s like every sense is amped up 10x. That combined with the effect Uberman has on dreams should make for an interesting experience, especially for lucid dreams! Wow, I actually feel quite a bit better, it’s amazing the effect a little bit of motivation can have on one’s experience.

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36 Hours And Going Strong

January 21st, 2010 by Vulfe

Well this is my third time going after the elusive Uberbeast, and the experience has been gentler on me than in my past attempts. Usually once 24 hours is up I’m already starting to feel some sleep deprivation effects, and the naps are getting hard to pull myself out of, but not this time. Admittedly I think this may be because I shortened the length of the naps (involuntarily) down to about 15 minutes. I find those smaller naps to be much easier to wake up from than a 30 minute nap, which I now consider to be oversleeping. I definitely need to keep my nap length down to 20 minutes or less this time, any more and waking up becomes very difficult, and the following period gets pretty groggy and slow, and much more likely to cause a nod-off.

While I have had a couple of problems with nodding off, the vast majority of my past troubles with USS adaptation have been inability to wake up to my alarm, which I am sure is due to sleeping longer than 20 minutes at a time, since during those trials I went to bed 30 minutes before the alarm was to go off. This works for most of my naps since it generally takes about 10 minutes for me to get to sleep, sometimes more. But once I get to a certain point of exhaustion, I fall asleep almost immediately, which is disastrous and without fail leads to me being in such a deep state of torpor that when my alarms go off that I either somehow shut them off without waking up, or I don’t even bother getting up at all and just sleep right on through the blaring racket.

So the plan is to turn out the lights at the 30 minute mark as usual, but instead of curling up under the covers I’ll be up fighting off sleep for 5-10 minutes with meditation and music. This should have me ready to pass out within minutes of my head hitting the pillow at the 20-25 minute mark, and will prevent me from oversleeping, in theory anyways. I wonder if there’s some way I can set up my monitor to act as a sunset simulator to play as I meditate, I wouldn’t be surprised if that would enhance the effect. Anyone heard of something like this?

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Posted in Adaptation | 4 Comments »

Return of the UberVulfe

January 20th, 2010 by Vulfe

Well I’ve returned from 17 days of free sleep, fasting, and general rest and relaxation and I’m ready to give Uberman another go. It is now 17 hours since I last woke up from a full day’s sleep, and while I’ve been napping at my regular times (1,5,9), this most recent nap is the first one I’ve gotten any real sleep out of, but only about 15 minutes worth at the most. I’m feeling pretty sleepy still, and I’m looking forward to the next nap. Other than that, I have not a lot to report on the subject of polyphasic sleep, the rest of this entry is about my plans for the next while; feel free to skip on ahead, I only write at this point to get back into the community, for the accountability motivation! :)

I’ve got some heavy projects lined up that I’ve been meaning to get started with. The first one is learning to make, and keep to a schedule, which is admittedly not that heavy of a task, but rather a habit that I’ve been meaning to get into for awhile. I’ve started breaking up all my time into half hour segments and planning out my days ahead of time, and the first thing I noticed is how much time I normally waste in a day. Since I’ve started writing down what I want to get done in a day, I’ve been able to focus on my major tasks with much more effectiveness than before.

Those tasks are academic in nature, and involve working through a few books I’m interested in learning. One is a book on the Evelyn Wood method of speed reading, which I’m pretty impressed with considering I’ve been reading it for 3 days now and have increased my reading speed by just over 500%. Admittedly I’ve always been a slow careful reader, so my initial speed was only at around 100 WPM. This is a good one to start with, I think, because increasing the speed and comprehension I can read with will boost my efficiency with every other project I’m doing that involves reading. I also have some further material on the subject by Paul Scheele that I’ll dive into once I’m comfortable with this stuff.

The second book is one I’ve worked through partially in the past, and am looking to improve and refresh those skills I learned. It’s by Dominic O’brien, and called How To Develop A Perfect Memory. I was very impressed with the abilities I picked up the last time I studied from that book, from memorizing 45 digit numbers in just a few minutes, to the order of an entire deck of cards after flipping through it only 3 or 4 times. It also goes through easy ways of remembering all numbers, as well as practical issues like remembering faces and names together, and new languages.

The third is called 100% Brain Course, which is an all inclusive brain exercising jungle-gym. It covers everything from emotional control techniques to how to develop psychic abilities. While some of the stuff in there is pretty far out, there are certainly a lot of gems to be learned and I’m looking forward to having all this extra time to check them all out thoroughly.

I’m sure all this sounds far more interesting to me than it actually is. :P You’re a brave soul if you’ve made it all the way to the end of this post, and I salute your endurance.

Posted in Adaptation | 4 Comments »

Day 5 Couldn’t Get Started

January 2nd, 2010 by Vulfe

Well this’ll be my last post for the next few days. I got in the full nap on middle watch, but I woke from it dizzy and extremely tired and cold. I really wish I lived in a warmer climate, or at least had decided to do this in the summer time instead of the dead of winter. I made myself some tea, sat in front of the computer wrapped up in a blanket trying to get warm, and passed out there in the sitting position… I woke up still sitting there, I don’t know how long I was sleeping, but my tea was cold, so I decided that I will be good on my word and reset again. I feel I’ve made progress this time so I’m not too disheartened. I made it to the beginning of day 5 with only one 1.5 hour oversleep and I got a dream during a nap. Also, this attempt seemed to be quite a bit easier to make it through than my first one, so if that makes a trend then 3rd times a charm!

Thanks for reading, and good luck to all of you! See you when I’m bored of free sleeping. :)

Edit: Actually I’ve decided to take this break as an opportunity to try a 10 day water/juice fast. It’s something I read about a little after I discovered polyphasic sleeping and was interested in giving a shot. It’ll be nice to get something accomplished after the two failures at Uberman, cuz I’m pretty sure my brain won’t be able to trick me into eating like it does for sleeping. :P A good website on the topic is linked here if anyone else is interested in the subject.

Posted in Oversleeping | 5 Comments »

Day 4 – Hmm, Was That A Dream?

January 2nd, 2010 by Vulfe

Seems like my 1.5 hour oversleep yesterday didn’t affect me badly, the same nap today went well, and I may have begun having some limited sort of dream activity. About 3 minutes before my alarm went off, I found myself lying down in my brother’s room, and I was very confused. I tried to pull myself up to look at the clock, but I must have been rousing from sleep paralysis because my attempt to get up was like trying to push myself through molasses, and as I got up from the bed the room morphed into mine in a dreamy hallucination kinda way, since I was indeed sleeping in my room. This is very good news for me because it would mark my first napping dream and indicates that the adaptation is finally taking hold.

I’ve decided to try out Dan’s suggestion of calling my phases by the watch system names, which are listed here.

20:00-00:00 – First Watch
00:00-04:00 – Middle Watch
04:00-08:00 – Morning Watch
08:00-12:00 – Forenoon Watch
12:00-16:00 – Afternoon Watch
16:00-20:00 – Dog Watch

Of course, my schedule is an hour faster than this, so I’ll just start my first watch at 21:00 and go on from there.

Also interesting to note is that I only had a very short period of zombieness through this whole second attempt, and that was during Morning Watch yesterday. Since then my naps have been getting more and more restorative, but the PM naps are one thing, it’s the AM ones that are the true indicators of how tired I’m feeling. Again, I must suspect that my previous attempt at Uberman has given me a boost towards this one, and I’m feeling more confident that as long as I remain vigilant, it won’t be long before I’ll have this schedule down, and will be able to introduce some measure of flexibility to the system. What I’m really looking forward to though is a return to being able to dream and recall those dreams, not to mention become lucid in them. One of my biggest motivators for doing this schedule is the boost I’m expecting to see in lucid dream frequency, and the fact that I haven’t been able to dream during any naps till this point has been very discouraging. I can’t tell you how excited I am that dreams are making their way into my life while I’m doing this schedule! Seriously I can’t, I’m still too tired for stuff like excitement. :P

Posted in Adaptation, Dreams | 3 Comments »

Day 3 – And I Was Doing So Well

January 1st, 2010 by Vulfe

Well I had a full sleep cycle today. What happened was, I was sitting on a heat register trying to heat up, and I nodded off for 23 minutes. That wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d left it at that, but it was only half an hour till my scheduled nap time, so I decided to get that nap in as well. Turns out that’s pretty much the same as having back to back naps, and I didn’t wake for my alarms till the 1.5 hour emergency alarm went off. I always set an alarm for 1.5 hours past the time I fall asleep, as damage control in case I oversleep. Well I said earlier that if this happened I would do a full reset, but I feel like I’ve made good progress so far, maybe this isn’t too bad of a set back. And besides, what’s the point of setting a damage control alarm if you’re not planning on pushing forward? :P

So my three unbreakable rules for uberman adaptation are, no napping within 2 hours of any previous nap or doze, no sleeping for more than 25 minutes at a time, and no missing scheduled naps unless said nap would violate rule number 1. I’m giving myself one chance to pull through on this, but if I mess up again I’m doing a full reset, I don’t wanna have a repeat of my last uberman attempt.

Posted in Adaptation, Oversleeping | 8 Comments »

Day 2 – Boring…

December 31st, 2009 by Vulfe

Have you ever had 5 minutes just seem to drag on forever? It’s getting more difficult to put off the nap time those few extra minutes. Now that I’m starting to feel the exhaustion I’m falling asleep very quickly on my AM naps. If I go down more than 25 minutes before my alarm is set to go off there’s a real danger that I’ll sink into torpor and not wake up for my alarms. So I wait it out, and those few little minutes feel like they go on for hours. It’s worth it though. Reducing my nap time, and conditioning myself to always turn on the lights before I shut off my alarm have made adaptation quite a bit smoother this time around.

I finished Assassin’s Creed 2 today, anyone who had been watching me play would think I have severe anger management issues. I’m not sure if it’s just me and my sleep deprivation or not, but the character is so hard to control. I’ll be scaling the side of a tower, trying to jump up to a high ledge, and suddenly he’ll just leap backwards and fall to his death. Or trying to jump to a pole or something, and he’ll just go flying off to the side, typically into the water or the middle of a pack of guards. It just seems so counter-intuitive the way they have him move, unless it’s just me. And lately it doesn’t take much to make me fly off the handle… Sleep dep makes me quite irritable, and my PS3 controller now knows that intimately. :P I wish they’d made the game longer, 2 days seems like a pitiful amount of time for a game to last, although it doesn’t help that I’ve got such an incredible amount of time to play. I wonder how many hours I logged so far… I guess I’ll start in on God of War, and maybe pick up Fallout 3 again, now there’s a game that can eat time. Hmm, perhaps a fresh WoW subscription is in order… :P Think of the leveling I could do!

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments »

Vulfe Returns – Day 1, again

December 29th, 2009 by Vulfe

Here we go again! Going with the theme of constantly working new possibilities for success, I’ve made some small alterations to my sleep system. First off, after reading as much as I can on uberman, I’ve decided that I’m sleeping too long per nap sometimes. Looking back on my notes, every time I fail to wake up to my alarms, I also happen to fall asleep immediately on putting my head to the pillow. This means that 30 minutes elapses before my alarm goes off, and I’m sure that this is causing me to fall into a state of rest too deep for my alarms to rouse me from. So while I won’t be changing anything about my PM naps since I generally take 5-10 minutes to fall asleep for those anyways, my AM naps I’ll be starting 5 minutes later. Also, I’ve changed my nap wakeup times from 12,4,8 to 1,5,9. It’s too complicated setting an alarm for 12 when am and pm must be differentiated, I’m really surprised that I haven’t fudged that one up since the first day of my first uberman attempt.

I’m feeling pretty tired already, I woke from my last long period of free sleep at 4:00pm yesterday, and so far have napped twice today, 5:06-5:30 (a bit late, but I wasn’t tired at 4:30), and 8:38-9:00. When I woke at 9:00 I was confused and thought the alarm had gone off too early for some reason, thinking 9:30 was appropriate, and actually went through the process of resetting the alarm for 9:30 before I realized I was mistaken. I probably somehow had it mixed up because I’d taken the first nap of the day half an hour late.

I had been planning on getting started with this a few days earlier, but I went and saw Avatar, and decided it’d be best to wait till I saw it again (which I did last night :D ) before I began. It wasn’t as good the 2nd time. We got better seats this time, but I thought we’d be nearly first in line since we showed up over an hour early. So wrong, there were hundreds of people there already. :( Movie goers are so proactive these days!

I’m determined to make this attempt flawless, and this time through I’m not accepting oversleeps. If I sleep more than 30 minutes I’ll stop the experiment, do a full 48 hour reset, and then try again.

Well, I’m off to find something hot to drink.
****
It’s actually the start of Day 2 as I write this, but I thought I’d update day 1 since things are going extraordinarily well so far. I feel zero effects of sleep deprivation, which is different from previous attempts around this time (I’m at 35 hours since my last time sleeping more than 30 minutes). All I can think of to attribute it to is that I’ve had 2 unscheduled 20 minute naps today, very close to one another. The first happened as I was watching M play Assassin’s Creed 2, I was freezing cold and wrapped up in a blanket, feeling pretty damn tired, and I just nodded off for a bit. The clock was at 2:00 when I sat down, and I woke with a start when M got up to go upstairs, and the clock stated 2:20. I still felt tired, but it cleared up pretty quickly. The second one I was listening to tunes at 8:30 waiting for 5 minutes to pass so I could pass out, and I don’t even remember closing my eyes. When I woke up (unassisted) it was 8:48. In my foggy state I figured that I hadn’t really slept for that time, and I reset my alarm for 9:20. It took me a little bit to get to sleep, so the next nap was probably 25 minutes or so, and waking up for the alarm was no sweat at all, I felt totally well rested.

I was just reading about this sort of thing, someone calling it “lucidman” schedule, basically taking back-to-back 20 minute naps, but they hadn’t indicated any success at trying it. I can think of no other explanation for why I feel so well rested at this point, except that maybe Uberman attempt #1 was more successful than I’d previously thought. Maybe the first nap increases the quality of the sleep of the second nap somehow. I wish I had a brainwave scanner… Well I’m actually starting to fade a bit now, it’s 67 minutes till my next bed time. Here’s hoping everything continues to go so smoothly today.

Posted in Adaptation | 7 Comments »

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