Polyphasic Sleep / Sueño Polifasico

Day 2

by Jenny

So I only have about 15 minutes to write this post before we get to take our 2pm nap. I have been feeling really good today except for the first 30 or so minutes after our morning 8am nap. The sun certainly helps pick your energy up. Also I find that if I don’t have something to do I get to feeling a bit strange, light headed, slight naseau etc. But when I am doing something that seems to fade away and I feel almost normal.

Again, I think most of the strangeness of last night was our built in apprehension about the way we would feel. We have stayed up until dawn occasionally during a Friday night and didn’t feel half as strange. When I reminded myself of that it was as if my mind cleared and I felt fine.

09:00

I made my regular cup of java this morning but only drank about 1/3 of it. We are planning to follow the advice of the others and not eat before nap. This afternoon we will walk into the center. I think the hardest part will certainly be tonight when the sun goes down.

We are rapping up the last major items of work we needed to complete. We actually postponed starting the project until after a major job was finished. So we should be able to coast without major deadlines into the first week.

The most exciting thing about last night was that I got to read a bit more about the process and to my surprise we are doing the Buckminster Fuller version! He is one of my heros in life. He was an philosopher and invetor who had one of the most original and refreshing minds of the 20th century.

So there is some presedence behind the 4/30 system…which I was wondering as we had considered the Uberman 6/20. Fuller called his version “Dymaxion Sleep” and apparently practiced it for 2 years. He claimed he stopped because the other businessmen around him would not tolerate the schedule.

“Dymaxion is an abbreviation of “dynamic maximum tension” , however it has also been reported that the name is a combination of the words dynamic, maximum, and ion. Fuller was very excited about the word and used it for many of his inventions in the decades to follow, including the Dymaxion house, the Dymaxion car, and the Dymaxion World Map. He also renamed his elaborate journal, in which he sought to document his life as an experiment with the greatest possible detail, as the Dymaxion Chronofile.”

1:25 am

So this is technically Day 3…but to recap the latter part of Day 2, I will write here. I still felt fine most of the day with my mind’s point of view having a powerful effect on my physical state of being. For example,  if I get to thinking I should be tired, I feel tired. If I think, wait a minute I feel fine, I do feel fine, physically. I suspect this will decrease in the days to come as my mind will take a back seat to my body rather than the other way around. I haven’t noticed loss of cognative functions yet - I can read, do work etc. though I am a slight (9 on a scale of 10) bit physically clumsy and I assume that will increase in Day 3 through Day 5.

We have been following the advice of the others and today ate lunch right after we woke up from our 2pm. I felt drowsy for about 15 minutes after we awoke and wasn’t terribly hungry. In both the 2pm and 8pm naps I did “fall asleep” unlike day 1, where I was just tossing and turning without loosing conciousness. I don’t think I have experienced REM yet, but I am not sure as we have awoken twice with a start in the middle of our 30 min. Once with me waking up 10 minutes early and the last one with Lucas walking up 15 minutes in.

Some of the other people trying Polyphasic sleep have been recommending people to sleep on couches and floors…nothing too comfortable. For now (the first two days) , I have been trying to make myself VERY comfortable as I would when I normally go to bed (change clothes and brush teeth etc) , hoping to get to a relaxed and deep REM sooner than later. I also have thought at least in the first two days it helped to cover my eyes as well during the day and be in a darker room. Though this said, the recommendatiosn for not getting too comfortable were based on the risk over oversleeping which can delay the adaptation period. We are less concerned about tthe danger of oversleeping because we have the advantage of three alarm clock system plus eachother. (Yes, from all vantage points, it is great to be doing this with my boyfriend together).

In terms of the general ambiance…I feel like I am being dragged into some kind of …dimension. A sort of personal unchartered territory that I seem to be wading into gradually step by step. It is a strange feeling, and there are definietly times, like now, mintues before my 2am nap, where you want to turn back and just sleep.

I hope we can find enough things to do durring the 2nd wake cyle of the night. I think I need to do something semi active, to keep my blood flowing. Once again, I atticipate nighttime to be much harder than daytime. Tomorrow is supposed to be “zombie day”.