Polyphasic Sleep / Sueño Polifasico

Day 5

Well, we ran into a few hitches. The 5 days with only 2 hours of sleep per day finally took its toll. We invited friends over to help us stay up during the dreaded and at this point very difficult night shift.

Unfortuately I have not had much of an appetite since I started the project and Thursday and I didn’t eat all of my lunch. I snacked on popcorn and mellon but by the time we ate around 1am, I was green in the face. I felt feverish and like I was going to throw up. I think my blood sugar level was extremely low. I had a cramp in my side that lasted 2 plus hours and the sum of all of it mixed with sheer exhaustion, shut me down. We tried to regroup. We decided to take our 2am nap early, but by the time our shocked friends left, it was 1:50. We slept until 2:35…this was 15 extra minutes and we woke up a bit nausiated.

We found it almost impossible to stay up. I tried to sit down and organize some papers but we were nodding off. By 5am we decided that we needed to add an extra interval nap time to get us through the 2am 8am shift. We had heard that some people do this during the period of adjustment. We kept the nap to 30 min. This seemed like it worked fairly well. We made it to our regular nap at 8am, but we woke at 8:30 and then layed in bed half awake half alseep until 9:30.

This mistake, along with my low blood sugar meltdown hurt our esteem. We felt so sad that our system had been derailed and once again considered abandoning the project. Lucas was still feeling pretty good. We began to consider our options for the 99th time around.

We looked on the internet and to my surprise we couldnt’ find anyone who had really successfully been able to do the Dymaxion and wrote about it. I got the feeling that what we were attempting was very extreme and I began to think that we needed to down shift in the short term as we acclamate our bodies.

We still go back and forth but the plan is to stay as is, but add a core to our 2am nap and reduce our naps by 10 min. to 20 min. We stay on the same 8am, 2pm, 8pm, 2am schedule, but we give our bodies a 3 hour core in the short term to help us with the night times. We are going to pay for it after the first core, because I am sure our bodies will be very confused, over sleeping is what really makes you feel badly.

It is now Friday at 6pm. We have been awake now for 5 days, or around 105 hours and only slept 9.5 hours…

I felt fine all day today. I really look forward to the transition being over so we can enjoy our hard work…