Polyphasic Sleep / Sueño Polifasico

Day 3

Well we almost gave in and slept last night. Thank goodness, when one of us wants to quit it all together, the other one holds the line and is supportive. We were really feeling the need to sleep especially in our 2am to 8am shift. It is really strange when the whole world outside the window is completely silent and still. Another problem is that when you are adjusting you don’t feel like doing much. For example reading a book would have put me to sleep. We definitely didn’t have enough physical activities to do, and as I said that is really important for that late night portion during adjustment. We ended up sorting through old CD’s and organizing our book shelf.

We had a long talk this morning about switching to the Everyman system, which can consist of for an exmple a 3 hour “core sleep” and three 20 minute naps throughout the day. This schedule is variable, some people do the core 2 or even 4 hours and the naps can be 2 to 4 etc. From what we have read about this variation on the Uberman is that you can ajust the time of your naps 1 hour in each direction. So for example if we set our core from 2am to 5am and kept our naps at 8am, 2pm and 8pm, we could ajust our nap to 8:30am or 9am some days if needed. The problem with Uberman and maybe even the one we are doing, Dymaxion, you don’t have much flexiblity. Your body has a hard time flexing the schedule without feeling it.

The other information we read about Uberman vs. Everyman is that Uberman is easier to initially adjust to, with total mental clarity in 2 weeks or less, where as with Everyman the total mental clarity can talk up to 4 weeks.

We have heard that it is very difficult to switch from one schedule to another once you have set your body to that scheulde. For example, Steve Pavlina claimed that he had problems trying to switch from Uberman to Dymaxion.

So we are still wondering if we should make the switch now to Everyman tonight before our body become totally set up for Dymaxion. The Everyman sounds more reasonable in the long term, however we would miss experiencing the Dymaxion, which would be a shame. It seems that the fact that your sleep expands to include more than REM in Everyman must be significant in terms of biological matters. Also, we have read that people like to experience the cosy feeling of sleeping those three hours. We also think that during the night we might want less time as well. We will be adding almost 40 hours more to our week which is a lot of time to do various things, but may be too much.

I think we will try to stick it out with Dymaxion, but hope that if we switch to Everyman mid stream that our keeping the other 3 naps at the exact time will help with the trauma the shift will cause.

Today I woke up after our 8am nap, feeling very tired and a little dizzy. I got a second wind after 30 plus minutes of feeling really drowsy. The good news is that we both entered REM sleep! We are getting closer to adapting. The shower didn’t help wake me up. I didn’t drink a coffee today. We are really going to have to plan for tonight, sitting in front of a computer or watching a movie is not going to work. We need to be doing something more active, such as cleaning or playing cards.

~5:00pm
After the initital drowseyness we made it through the day feeling really good. We worked all morning and in the afternoon went grocery shopping. We were tired after our 8pm nap, so we decided to start that stint off with a walk to the plaza, were we sat for 2 horus talking. This outside stimulous and being away form the computer was a great idea.