Polyphasic Sleep Cycles

[Forevernade]

Knowing there are a lot of nerds and geek types on these boards I would assume one or two of you will have played around with, or are using PSC's.

I just began my Everyman Cycle today! I was up at 4:30am. I had a nap at 9:30am and I will have a nap at 4:30pm.

Having read up on it beforehand, it seems many people fail getting into the Cycle because they either dont hit it hard enough, or dont hit it softly enough. What I mean by that is this: the most successful people either go a day or two of sleep deprivation, or they slowly periodize their patterns leading into the cycle. People who just stroll into something like Everyman or Uberman tend to get massive lag, or they give up.

3 Things I will do for Adaptation:

I will easy into the cycle. This will mean starting on E2 with extended naps, then E2 with reduced naps which will force me to start E3. One tip is to center the Core sleep around the middle of your normal monosleep, or at the start. Often people stay up really really late, like 3 in the morning, just so they can get up at 6am for work/school. I am going to bed at 10:30, which means I will eventually get up at 1:30am. It will feel like early in the morning, rather than late at night. Also, I remember getting my best study done early in the morning, rather than late at night (night is a time for browsing forums and enjoying time off).
I am eating more. Initially the period, where you are most tired, should be supplimented with extra food. Often people do one of two things. They 'graze' all day and all night, eating way too much food, and put on weight. Or they forget to eat at night time because of monophasic habits. I will be having a proper meal every 3 hours.
I am using a sunlamp with a timer. People underestimate the power of the natural sun. I remember when I was waking up with the sunlight, those times would be the most comfortable wakings.


Also, I have a theory that Dymaxion PSC is just a pile of junk. There has only been one person to have stayed on the cycle, and he would often cheat the cycle, and maybe he had something wrong with his body clock. Uberman and Everyman seem to be much more stable. What do you think?

Tell us about your predictions, theories, your anecdotes or your queries concerning PSC's!

[Gullara]

I like to think I'm one of the nerdy/geeky types, but I need more info on this particular topic.

[Forevernade]

Eventually I will split my core sleep into two 1.5 hour sleeps.
Then I will reduce them to 45 minutes each and add a 4th nap in between.
Lastly I will reduce the two core sleeps into 20 minute naps, and my transition from Mono to Everyman to Uberman.

[Gullara]

Eventually I will split my core sleep into two 1.5 hour sleeps.
Then I will reduce them to 45 minutes each and add a 4th nap in between.
Lastly I will reduce the two core sleeps into 20 minute naps, and my transition from Mono to Everyman to Uberman.

So your replacing "normal sleep" with shorter periods of sleep over the course of a 24 hour period. What is supposed to be the overall benefit of this?

EDIT: Wikipedia is my friend. So overall less sleep needed.

How practical is this? Does it interfer with your day to day activities?

[Kiren]

So your replacing "normal sleep" with shorter periods of sleep over the course of a 24 hour period. What is supposed to be the overall benefit of this?

To my knowledge, there are different phases of sleep, the most important is Stage 5 REM sleep, and by cutting up your sleep, you force your body to speed right to this stage.

[Forevernade]

That's right. We basically replace overall time sleeping with frequency of sleeping. You get more hours in the day to do more things. I like to do most of my study in the mornings, and more hours in the morning = more hours to study effectively!

Everyman2 consists of 4.5h core sleep, and two 20 minute naps throughout the day.
Everyman3 consists of 3h core sleep, and three 20 minute naps.
The theoretical Everyman4 consists of 1.5h core sleep and four 20 minute naps.
Then the most popular, Uberman Cycle, consists of 20 minute naps 6 times a day, spaced equally throughout the day.

You can use it as a selling point if trying to get a job that needs an early riser, recently I applied for a job at a swimming centre, which needed very early shifts, and I could say on my cover letter that I regularly wake up at 4:30 every day!

[factotum]

It must be nice to have a boss who'll let you nap in the middle of the day--or don't you have to worry about such things yet? :smallwink:

[Deth Muncher]

I actually wrote a paper on polyphasic sleep last semester. PM me if you want it. Basic things to know about going to monophasic to polyphasic sleep:

-Doing this for gits and shiggles is a bad idea. Claudio Stampi, the guy who's pretty much done all the research in this field, did his studies on people who did extended solo sailing - y'know, the kind of sailing that if you sleep for more than 10 minutes at a time, you die. So unless you happen to have a paper for school that has to be five hundred pages and you have to research every book in your school's library, I caution you against this.

-The period of time between 1-3 AM/PM is the best time to take a nap, since all of your sleep cycles are lined up. It would be better to take a 2 hour nap there than to be doing 30 minute naps, IMHO.

Bunch of other stuff I can't remember. But PM me your email and I'll shoot it to you.

EDIT: If you have access to the Men's Health magazine archives (I do, as a college student), there's an article they ran a while back on this. It did not speak highly.

EDIT EDIT: Also, though there is but a limited amount of literature on the topic, I highly suggest you read up on all kinds of polyphasic sleep jank, not just the Everyman or the Uberman.

[Haruki-kun]

EDIT: If you have access to the Men's Health magazine archives (I do, as a college student), there's an article they ran a while back on this. It did not speak highly.

IIRC, it's not the best thing for athletes.

Actually, I think I'm also part of this school of thought....

[Deth Muncher]

IIRC, it's not the best thing for athletes.

Actually, I think I'm also part of this school of thought....

Well, the MH article basically said that the guy went into it with high hopes of stuff like learning guitar and 47 languages. He ended up being a zombie and barely haing the energy required to fold his socks. Furthermore, his health started to decline - he said that he intermittently broke out in pimples as well as getting sick randomly too (he did this over the course of a month). Now, these may be from unrelated or slightly related things - perhaps the constantly awakeness weakened his immune system, or perhaps he ended up not eating as well as he should (a common mistake).

[Haruki-kun]

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer sleeping at night.

[Deth Muncher]

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer sleeping at night.

Meh. Stampi is in his mid-60s, and I think he said he sleeps from 4-6AM, and then a 30 minute nap around 2PM and he's good.

[Zen Monkey]

Unless you are self-employed or unemployed, how many careers let you have a nap during the day, much less multiple naps? This doesn't seem to be a very realistic fit for modern society.

[Deth Muncher]

Unless you are self-employed or unemployed, how many careers let you have a nap during the day, much less multiple naps? This doesn't seem to be a very realistic fit for modern society.

Works out quasi-well for college kids, assuming their schedules coincide. I, for example, have class today from 11-12 and 2-3:15. So were I so inclined, I could do an ubernap from 1-2 and be good. (I'm not so inclined, however.)

[Winter_Wolf]

Yes, but it still begs the question what do you do when your employer expects you to put in 8-10 hour days? Most All employers I know of will FIRE you for sleeping on the job.

Not for or against that sleeping method, it's just that I only know of one person who can and does do that as part of his life, and he's self employed and a commercial fisherman in Alaska. Actually most of us who've worked on the fishing boats have to use that sleep method at some point during the season, but we don't keep to it beyond what we HAVE to, because it really, really doesn't do your body any favors, in my experience.

[Icewalker]

I love this kind of thing. Although I do think it's not the best plan, it does work to some extent. There's two issues: first off, just rewriting your whole circadian rhythm (especially into such an odd shape) is never going to be an easy process. Second, and more importantly, while Theta state REM sleep is the part which our minds uses to repair and recover, Delta state deep sleep is probably also important, we just don't know as much about how or about how much we need. So, cutting your sleep pattern from the standard (6 hours Delta and 2 hours Theta) into Everyman (Which looks to me like it probably ends up with 2 hours Theta and about 2-3 hours Delta) is going to probably start screwing up your body somewhere, as something isn't getting as much rest and repair as it needs to.

One can easily get away with getting like 2 hours of each every once in a while, or maybe regularly getting an hour less delta, but putting together a particularly extreme pattern and then holding it constantly (the only option for a polyphasic sleep cycle) is probably going to screw with your physiology in unpleasant ways.

Personally, I prefer to attempt to replicate the same effect using binaural beats. I haven't tried much of this yet, but the general idea is that you pull yourself into a Theta state, rather meditative, for half an hour or so just before sleeping, then go straight to bed. That half hour of Theta kicks off the process, and the brain decides that you're rested after you've finished 4 Theta cycles as normal, but this is only six hours of sleep instead of eight, because you basically cheated the first two hour cycle to be only the 30 minutes of Theta, rather than 30 minutes Theta and 1.5 hours Delta. I'm pretty sure that this process may also be accomplished using hypnosis, because when you reach third state of hypnosis or so you can be getting into the Theta brainwave range. So I want to figure out if that's usable (and then practice self-hypnosis more...)

[Jaxon]

I was on the Uberman cycle for about 1.5-2 months at the begining of the year.

I'd recommend it to anyone interested. While I was doing it I felt better overall; more alert, happier & my health actually improved (probably because I used some of the extra time I had each day to excersize).

I didn't notice any drawbacks in terms of health, some of the ones I had heard could be problems were an inability to recover from excersize and a slowed rate of healing as well as a general decline in health. I observed none of these and in fact felt that my health had improved overall.

The only reasons I stopped are:
1. It does take some effort, you have to pay attention to when you sleep etc. Even once you've fully adjusted it still takes some monitoring.
2. It doesn't mesh very well with the rest of society (For me this was a fairly minor concern but it could be important to others).
3. I don't really need the extra time right now.

When first switching to the Uberman cycle I just jumped straight into it, no easing in period or anything.
I found that this worked well for me; I was fully adjusted after about 3-5 days and suffered only about a day of being really tired.
Of course your own results will vary somewhat, I found that my experience differed at least a little from those which I had read about.

Hope I was helpful.

EDIT: I just want to be clear that I feel that the benefits of a polyphasic sleep schedule greatly outweigh the drawbacks and I intend to start again when I get to a point when I could use the extra time, probably college.

[Deth Muncher]

I'm gonna go ahead and post my annotated bibliography, so you can see what my sauces ( :smalltongue: ) are and what I thought about them.

Campbell, Scott S. and Patricia J. Murphy. “The nature of spontaneous sleep across adulthood.”
Journal of Sleep Research 16.1 (2007): 24-32. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Feb. 2010.
As it turns out, this article is not directly related to the topic of ultrashort sleep, though it does have to do with how the older one gets, the more humans tend toward polyphasic sleeping schedules. It is, however, a fairly technical article, as well as was mentioned previously about it not pertaining to ultrashort sleep, and as such I would only recommend this to someone who is trying to study the differences in adult and youth sleep, as that appears it was the intended audience anyway.
Capellini, I. et al. “Energetic constraints, not predation, influence the evolution of sleep
patterning in mammals.” Functional Ecology 22.5 (2008): 847-853. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Feb. 2010.
This article disproves the thought that mammals tend toward polyphasic sleep patterns as a defense mechanism against predators, and rather do so because of their metabolisms. Although a good portion of the article is technical and thus unsuitable for the untrained reader, the article is summed up in laymen’s terms. Reveals some interesting facts about polyphasic sleep not necessarily being the best form of sleep. As such, I would recommend this to people interested strictly in polyphasic sleep, as they may find some interesting facts.


DB, Joe. “5 Ways To Hack Your Brain Into Awesomeness.” Cracked.com. Cracked
Entertainment, Inc. 21 Sep, 2009. Web. 5 Jan, 2010.
<http://www.cracked.com/article/127_5-ways-to-hack-your-brain-into-awesomeness>
Cracked.com is a humor website, and all articles contained therein are to be taken with a grain of salt. This particular article talks not only about the Überman Sleep Schedule, but also other things to do to your brain in order to achieve strange results. This article is written for people who are on the Internet looking for strange and weird facts without necessarily wanting a credible source. I would not recommend this to anyone looking for a legitimate scholarly resource, but as a springboard to better ideas, there are few finer repositories of trivia.
de Martino, MM. “The architecture of day sleeping and the sleep-wake cycle in nurses in their
working shifts.” Revista Da Escola De Enfermagem Da USP 43.1 (2009): 194-199. MEDLINE. Web. 10 Feb 2010.
This article is about a study done on nurses in the Hospital de Clínicas da Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto, gauging what kind of sleepers they are and what happens to them when their circadian rhythms are tampered with, such as by changing shifts. This is a very good article for someone who has already done a bit of research and understands basic concepts of chronobiology, as it is mostly written without jargon – and the bits of jargon that are used are quickly explained. As such, it could be argued that it could be written for not only the scientific community, but also for inquiring minds of the layfolk – like a student writing a paper, for example.


Diniz Behn, Celia G. and Victoria Booth. “Simulating Microinjection Experiments in a Novel
Model of the Rat Sleep Wake Regulatory Network.” Journal of Neurophysiology 27 Jan, 2010: 1-59. PubMed. Web. 7 Feb, 2010.
This work, while it appears to be promising, is a full-on scientific lab report – as in, it is technical to the utmost degree, and only those with some sort of science degree – or at least a very good knowledge of the anatomy of the brain and how the endocrine and nervous systems work – have any sort of chance of puzzling this out. As such, I cannot recommend this to anyone, as I can barely make sense of it myself.
Inoué, Shojiro and Zili Luo. “A short daytime nap modulates levels of emotions objectively
evaluated by the emotion spectrum analysis method.” Psychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences 54.2 (2000): 207-212. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Feb. 2010
This article addresses how peoples’ moods are affected by napping. Although slightly technical, it becomes easier to read as it goes on, and appears to be written for a mid to upper level psychology class. I would suggest it to someone looking for information on how to improve their own mood, as it says that naps improve emotions (that is, from angry to happy).
Lahl, Olaf, et al. “An ultra short episode of sleep is sufficient to promote declarative memory
Performance.” Journal of Sleep Research 17.1, Mar 2008: 3-10. PsycINFO. Web. Feb 10, 2010.
This article addresses the benefits of napping on memory – that is, it answers the question of “does napping help a person remember things?” (The answer is yes, incidentally.) It seems like an article that a low level psychology class could review, as it is very easy to read, and any of the few technical terms are either explained or able to be reasoned through with a bit of logic: For example, the word “polysomnography” comes up. Though it is not explained, a bit of knowledge of Latin roots would tell a reader that it has to do with recording sleep. I would recommend this to someone who needs a good scientific lab report, but does not necessarily have a lot of expertise in the field, as it is written so as to be understandable by most.
Mednick, Sara, and Mark Ehrman. Take a Nap! Change Your Life. Workman Pub
Co, 2006. Print.
Mednick and Ehrman have put together quite the informative guide for the napper on the run. This appears to be the perfect combination of writers to create such an informative work: Mednick, being a Harvard graduate and actually having pioneered some of the experiments leading to some of the information in the book; Ehrman, a popular journalist who knows how to write for the people. I find it particularly palatable, given it is not written as an essay, but occasionally dips into a detailed outline sort of format. Someone who wants a “How-To” on napping and does not want a lot of jargon should read this.
Moreno, C.R.C et al. “Truck Drivers Sleep-Wake Arrangements.” Biological Rhythm Research
34.2 (2003): 137-143. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Feb 2010.
This article, which deals with judging how and why people choose polyphasic or monophasic sleep patterns, reaffirms several points on sleep deprivation and different phasic sleep as is brought up in Why We Nap. In fact, the article cites that very book. Very little jargon, very easy to read, this article is likely meant for a psychology class, or perhaps to be presented at a board meeting to help explain why it is important not to schedule workers to the point of depriving them of sleep, as it reduces efficiency. I would recommend this to someone trying to prove the aforementioned point at a board meeting, or perhaps someone who is interested in a career as a truck driver, as it might prepare them to the sleeping schedule they may face.
Rybarczyk, Bruce D. “Polyphasic Sleep Research.” Message to the author. 26 Feb, 2010
This was an email between Dr. Rybarczyk of VCU’s Psychology Department and myself. It is fairly useless for any sort of academic use, other than him introducing me to the phrase “sleep inertia,” which led me to re-examine my sources to find more data thereupon. I would not recommend this email to anyone, because, as I said, it was a very short email with little information.
Stampi, Claudio, ed. Why We Nap: Evolution, Chronobiology, and Functions of Polyphasic and
Ultrashort Sleep. Birkhäuser: Boston, 1992. Print.
This book is basically a collection of reports on polyphasic and ultrashort sleep, what they mean and how they relate to animals (and humans, depending on your definition of animal). The reports vary from being very technical to fairly easy to read, so although someone with little knowledge of the topic (read: me, to begin with) can appreciate the data, it would either take someone well versed in the field of chronobiology or at least someone with a very good scientific dictionary to take full advantage of it. Although this is the quintessential text on the subject (it is referenced in roughly half of the other sources I have used here), it is so arcane a text given that it is no longer printed that acquiring it outside of a very good library will prove to be nigh-impossible, so the benefit of having one of the best texts versus its availability should factor into someone’s attempt to use it.


Stoddard, Grant. “Is Sleep Really Necessary?” Men’s Health 23.5 (2008): 132-137. Health
Nursing/Academic Edition. Web. 7 Feb. 2010
In the article, the author reports his month-long trial of the Überman sleep schedule, in an attempt to gain more wakeful, productive hours. He consults well known chronobiologist Claudio Stampi, as well as Sara C. Mednick, Ph.D., the author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life and W. Christopher Winter, M.D., a sleep medicine specialist. The article is written for the readership of Men’s Health magazine, men from ages 18-50. Furthermore, it was rather informal, but entertaining and still informative. Given its informal and easy to read nature, I would recommend this to someone who wants to find a good stepping stone into researching polyphasic sleep.
United States. “Healthy Sleep Tips.” Sleep Foundation. National Sleep Foundation, 2009. Web.
7 Feb, 2010. <http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/sleep-topics/healthy-sleep-tips>
Just like it sounds, this article from the US Government is on tips for healthy sleep. This is intended for the public at large, and uses no technical terms. I would recommend it to someone who needs a bit of help getting to sleep, but does not know about how to go about it.
United States. “Napping.” Sleep Foundation. National Sleep Foundation, 2009. Web. 7 Feb,
2010. <http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/sleep-topics/napping>
This article put out by the US Government is essentially a dumbed down version of what this paper is: giving the pros and cons of napping, albeit that this article puts it in very simplistic terms and does not go into much detail. As with the rest of the National Sleep Foundation website, it is intended for the general public, and is a great springboard for a researcher such as myself to jump from to get to more in depth articles on the subject, as it does introduce basic ideas on the topic of napping.
Zimmerman, Tim. “Miles to Go Before I Sleep.” Outside Online. Outside Magazine, April 2005.
Web. 19 Feb, 2010 <http://outside.away.com/outside/bodywork/200504/sleep-training_1.html>
This article, in addition to giving a little bit of background on Claudio Stampi, gives a good look at practical applications of polyphasic napping – that is, this is the perfect end result that this paper is trying to achieve: to show the positives from polyphasic sleep, and showing how they can outweigh the negatives. As it appears in an outdoors magazine, it is probably intended for the active, outdoorsy bracket of people from roughly age twenty to fifty. I would recommend it to just those people, as it seems they would likely get the most use out of it, though people looking to get a bit more information on Stampi might enjoy it as well.

[Raistlin1040]

That Cracked article makes me REALLY want to try the hallucination thing. I want to hang with Ben Franklin and Harold the Unicorn in the Gumdrop forest. On-topic, this doesn't seem like a great idea. I don't sleep much at night anyway, but I need my precious 4-5 hours. With 2 hours, spaced out through the day, I wouldn't be able to function.

[Deth Muncher]

That Cracked article makes me REALLY want to try the hallucination thing. I want to hang with Ben Franklin and Harold the Unicorn in the Gumdrop forest. On-topic, this doesn't seem like a great idea. I don't sleep much at night anyway, but I need my precious 4-5 hours. With 2 hours, spaced out through the day, I wouldn't be able to function.

The Cracked article is the one that inspired me to write the paper.

[Forevernade]

Thanks Deth, for posting that!

Update: day 4.

Woke up at 3:30am by myself, a minute before my alarm went off.
So far I have had 1 lucid dream (already!) where my girlfriend was nagging me to get up, and the REM cycle paralysis carried over into my dream so I couldn't do anything (disappointing), but then I finally woke from the dream, and the alarm was beeping and my girlfriend was still asleep murmuring to herself! ha-ha. :smallbiggrin:

Not feeling sleep deprived yet. Interesting.

Differences I have noticed just whilst living:

Hungrier
My breakfast at 3:30 consists of a large bowl of cereal and a side of 4 eggs. I am getting even hungrier still, these days. When I would usually get morning sickness and skip breakfast, no such thing is occuring any more so I wolf it down in 10 minutes.
Thirstier
MUCH thirstier... I dont know why, I expect its because I am eating more, to counterbalance the increased volume of food.
Digestive problems
Probably caused by the increase in volume of food, and bad water retention from the increase in water intake. It might take me a few days of drinking this amount of water before my body actually starts taking in the right amount of water into the digestive system. I could have rock hard excretions for a few days, we will see.
Hightened Sense of Awareness
Sleep deprivation style jitteryness and talkativeness without the drawbacks of a dead short term memory. Sharpened focus, brighter colours (slightly).
Lucid Dream w/ REM paralysis
As talked about above, my first lucid dream. It felt as if I had two consciousnesses. TWO! First I could 'see' my girlfriend with my hearing that she was asleep in real life, but then I ALSO had the perspective from within the dream where I could 'see' she was awake and talking. BOTH were happening at the same time, and with no loss of focus on one, when I focused on the other, though neither were completely discernible. It was very confusing.


So I seem to be REMing on my first nap for the day, and non-REMing on my second nap for the day.
I am falling asleep faster than previously mono.
About 1 hour in every 6 I feel tired... I lay down to have a 45 minute nap yesterday, and I woke up in 20 minutes. It seem my body, although it is adjusting to the Everyman cycle, is actually trying to change to the uberman cycle. We will see how things turn out.


A little about my lifestyle:

I am a university student, 150lb / 5'9" / good health, etc, etc.
The E2 cycle fits in with my 4 subject timetable because I can have a nap before the first class of the day, and have my second nap after my last class. At university I am sleeping in the Student Union storage room, where there are a big pile of chairs which I line up side by side and sleep on. Quite comfy compared to the ground or any single chair alone :smallwink: I am organising with the Union a change over of the old Woman's Room, to a Quiet Room, for meditation, non-homework related silent activities, and mid-day napping. If I get this room I will probably bring in a beanbag from home and sleep on the beanbag.

[Moofaa]

Yes, but it still begs the question what do you do when your employer expects you to put in 8-10 hour days? Most All employers I know of will FIRE you for sleeping on the job.

Not for or against that sleeping method, it's just that I only know of one person who can and does do that as part of his life, and he's self employed and a commercial fisherman in Alaska. Actually most of us who've worked on the fishing boats have to use that sleep method at some point during the season, but we don't keep to it beyond what we HAVE to, because it really, really doesn't do your body any favors, in my experience.

Not everyone works 9-5! I currently work 2nd shift from 3pm-10:30. Before that I worked 9:45pm-7am (I actually preferred the third shift).

When on third shift I slept from about 8am - 3:30pm. On second I have been getting to bed around 2:30am and getting up around 10:30am.

Unless you are planning to do some stunt like sailing alone across the pacific or something this sounds like a pretty bad idea health-wise.

[Lord Loss]

My friend's brother attempted some version of this, I'll ask my friend for the specifics on how it went tomorrow.

[Syka]

It's an interesting concept, but one I could never try. My body doesn't react well to sleep deprivation (it results in absence seizures; definitely not microsleep, they did an EEG after they kept me awake for 24 hours).

I actually tend towards a biphasic sleep cycle. If allowed to do as I will, I'll get 8-10 hours at night and another 1-2 in the mid afternoon (beginning somewhere between 1-3PM). It's just what my body likes. Like today, I got to sleep at 10:30PM last night, and woke up at 6:45. Right abouts 8 hours. I then got home around 1PM and napped until about 3PM. It has nothing to do with sleep deprivation, my body just really wants it. I can function on 7 hours, though. Anything less I'm a zombie, and if it's less than 6 hours I risk triggering the seizures.

[Forevernade]

An update:


Lower overall body temperature
It is not that you are cold all the time. Often when you sleep your body's temperature dives below that of when you are awake. As I am napping twice a day at the moment I have noticed my body temperature dives down to that of my normal sleeping temperature every nap. This leaves me feeling cold more often throughout the day. Being 'colder' should burn less calories than being warm, unless you are shivering, but should burn more calories than you are awake.
I will be playing with this idea, to see roughly what my caloric needs are compared to what they were. I would estimate only about a 60% increase in calories over the 24h, but that is a guess.
If this bothers you then you will probably not like doing nap sleep cycles.
Excretion Frequency rises
I know you might think I am talking about my **** a little bit too often, but I have noticed I need to go to the toilet more often, so I did a little research. It seems about half an hour after you fall asleep, your body naturally wants to take a ****. Napping so often is making me want to **** more often. Anyways.... :smallbiggrin: onto the real problem...
Lower immune system integrity
This is based on researching the phases of sleep. Whilst REM sleep helps with repairing muscle, memory retention and helps repair in some way almost every bodily function at an increased rate to that of the other phases, the immune system functions seem to be exclusively in action in the deep-sleep stages, such as 3 and 4.


The above information leads me to beleive that stage 4 sleep (a more intense version of stage 3) is going to be needed for overall health in a long term plan.

I plan on fiddling with a few methods to induce deep sleep throughout one of my naps. The idea is that I would make my core sleep start with stage 4, and finish with stage 5. This would reduce sleep inertia (grogginess) when I woke up.
Now, REM sleep takes 20% of our entire cycle. In Uberman there are the 6 periods of 20 minute REM, this equals the same amount of time in REM sleeping normally, it just takes longer to accumulate those REM hours in normal sleep.
But if we want stage 4 for immune responses, and s4 is 13% of our cycle (lets assume there is a neurological requirement of s3 to get to s4, then lets say/hope 2% s3 is required to get to the 13% s4, thats a total of 15%) that means the Uberman cycle is probably really unhealthy in the long run because it lacks any s3/4.
For an alternate more healthy lifestyle, a core sleep is required, containing the 15% s3/4. That means 1.5h of s3/4 and 2h of REM sleep is required to have an equivilent of 10h sleep, which would include the 'core sleep' of 110 minutes (s3/4 +1x20 minute s5). Uberman was close to getting it right, but not close enough for my liking. I would rather loose 1.5h a day to be able to live healthily, work out, and stay strong. That is a total of 3.5 hours a night, which is much better than 8-10 :smallamused:

I hope that wasn't too complex, it makes sense to me, so I am going to follow it. If you have any queries or you disagree with me then please go ahead lol, I am by no means an expert at this yet, but I am doing my best.

Anyways, I will try to get one of the Biomedical Engineer Grads to do a test for me, measuring my s3/4 and REM in my naps once I am in a routine of getting to sleep straight away. I will be using those beats to guide my brain into stage 3/4/5, whichever stage I need. I will probably need to make a 110minute track on a tape/cd for my core nap and a 20minute track fr my naps.

Wish me luck!

[Icewalker]

Fascinating and excellent. You address a few concerns I had expressed, and I am curious for more details.

The 3/4 sleep you mention is Delta state, deeper sleep, I assume. Where did you find that that's what we need for immune system work? I absolutely believe it, but had heard we didn't have specific knowledge of why it was necessary, and sources are good.

Also, what makes you think that 1.5 hours of deeper sleep, as opposed to the 6 hours in the standard 8 hour night, will be sufficient for this kind of recovery?

Never mind, 45 seconds of research has given me the context to ask MUCH more educated questions, now that I know the terms you are using, compared to the ones I know. ANYWAY. First off, I'm curious where you read that we need S4 for immune system work (I believe it, but would like to see the source). Additionally, keep in mind we don't know that s2 and s3 aren't important as well, we actually don't know all that much about sleep. They're probably useful for something...

Now, on to the last part. So, you're intending to use binaural beats to try to induce stage 3/4 more rapidly, so as to skip over 2? Interesting thought. It may well work, but I'm not sure how well entrainment works for pulling one down all the way into delta state sleep like s3 and s4, I think it's much easier to reach Theta (which is our REM). Still, I don't know, it could work. Very well thought our, using binaural beats in combination with sleep cycles to force the deepest sleep and the REM periods. Sounds like it could well work quite effectively.

I think the only sketchiness to your setup is the assumption that you can run without any s2 and s3 sleep. For that matter, simply having a larger percentage of active time may damage the body: things like carpal tunnel, shin splints, or plantar fasciitis, develop simply due to extensive use of certain parts of the body. Increasing your percentage time active may make you far more prone to these, as you'll be standing, moving, typing more than an average person.

[Forevernade]

So... some sources and logic:

"stage 4 being more intense than Stage 3... the body repairs and regenerates tissues, builds bone and muscle, and appears to strengthen the immune system. As you get older, you sleep more lightly and get less deep sleep. Aging is also associated with shorter time spans of sleep, although studies show the amount of sleep needed doesn't appear to diminish with age."
- National Institutes of Health.
- National Sleep Foundation.
- Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD on January 08, 2010

This leads me to beleive that stage 4 sleep is important to maintaining a youthful body, regulating the immune system and building bone. Muscle growth is a moot point because you also grow muscle when you are awake. Muscle growth would be more concerned with REM sleep, which is when you release such substances as Human Growth Hormone (HGH).

Stage 1 and 2 (and partially 3) do not concern me so much for these reasons:

"...spindles are seen in the brain as a burst of activity immediately following muscle twitching. Researchers think the brain, particularly in the young, is learning about what nerves control what specific muscles when asleep."
- "To sleep, perchance to twitch"
- "Wiring your brain at college – a new perspective on sleep"

As an adult your brain should already have learned what nerves control what specific muscles. With regular exercise one will notice if they are loosing motor control, so when I start exercising after adaptation it will become apparent whether s2 is needed or not. I predict it is not needed.

S1 has no notable effects on the body other than showing symptoms of certain diseases. I will certainly not have an army of scientists watching my every nap, so really I dont care about it.

To give you some perspective about REM and NREM sleep, it seems that NREM sleep evolved from ancestors as a building process. Much like how genes are added to, and mutated, my hypothesis is that stage 1 sleep came about when brains were first observable low down in the evolutionary tree. S2 sleep became important when multi-celled organisms required more precise movements, such as mammals needing to climb trees, 3 dimentional motor control, etc etc. S3 came about as a result of the need of a few things including hybernation and increased cell repair, and S4 is just an improved version of S3.

I cannot find the source from which I previously read, but one did suggest that animals requiring more rest from complex exercise such as predatory actions requiring less REM sleep and more stage 3 and 4 sleep.

"findings have led some scientists to suggest that REM sleep may be a later evolutionary development related to warm-blooded animals.
"
Eventually REM sleep appeared in the evolutionary line, where higher functions were required of the brain, and the rest of the goodies that come with REM sleep.

Thus I conclude that stage 1 and 2 sleep is only part of your development as a child, once you have stopped actively growing you need less or none. Stage 3 is just a worse version of stage 4, so much that they often coin stage 3 and 4 as one stage, where s3 is a type of transport from s2 to s4. This is why I want to get from stage 1 to 4 as quickly as possible.

"In children, delta sleep can occupy up to 40% of all sleep time and this is what makes children unwakeable or "dead asleep" during most of the night. "

Some maths for you to show you how I got my figures...

REM sleep normally goes for 20% of a 10h sleep. that means it is 2h. This is why people aim for 2h worth of REM naps.
Stage 4 goes for 13% of the 10h sleep, and thus allowing for a 2% difference, 15% of 10h is 1.5h total
So you have 1.5h of stage 4 sleep, and 2 hours of REM.

Hope that helps.

[Icewalker]

VERY. That's fantastic. There are some notes which come to mind reading through all of that though.

Well, first off, combat aging by forcing a larger percentage of deeper sleep. Sounds like a pretty fantastic idea. :smallbiggrin: So that's potentially amazing.

As to not needing s2, I'm still unsure. The only question is, does coordination improvement stop, or does it keep getting more precise? If we weren't losing muscle tone and mental reflexes due to age, our coordination might be improving constantly throughout our lifetimes, on a small enough scale that you probably wouldn't notice it's lack (also, you wouldn't know to expect it, if it was missing improvement, not decay). Throughout the first 20 years of our life, there is very extensive improvement in coordination. If we could keep our bodies healthy in muscle and mental reflex through older years, might we see further improvement later on?

Personally, I think an ideal setup for this would be to get something like 2 hours REM, 1.5 hours s3/4, and then like 1-2 hours s2 for good measure, which probably means one regular 2 hour block cycle at night (1.5 hours deep, 30 minutes REM) instead of four regular blocks at night like a normal person, and then space in the extra REM naps with some additional fix to get some more s3/4 in there somewhere...

Also, what do you think about the wear and tear issue? That spending 20 hours out of 24 active instead of 16 out of 24 will result in a much greater risk of problems caused by overuse of the body, things like carpal tunnel or shin splints?

[Forevernade]

So. I did a little research on s1 and s2, their importance and such.

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1690 - Sarah Ledux, 2001 (at the time a 2nd year undergraduate)

As she is an undergrad at this point, and since her postdoc has not reiterated any point of those facts, this article can be taken with a grain of salt.

She talks about the i-function (a made up term for the conscious state of self-awareness, as I understand it) being awake in both dream state consciousness and awakened consciousness. The sections of the brain attributed to this i-function, therefore, is active all times throughout the day or night, bar non-conscious sleep, or non-dream sleep. REM sleep is a dream-state sleep and therefore does not rest the i-functions. Dreaming can happen at any stage of sleep, but s1 and s2 are the two stages which are least likely to contain dreams, and therefore the most likely times to let the i-function and it's related anatomical sections repair.

"...neurons, under pressure to continue functioning but unable to perform optimally, create an image useful enough for a person to see most of his or her surroundings. Metabolic activity in the prefrontal cortex can drop as much as eleven percent after a person has missed sleep for only twenty four hours. As a person loses more sleep or continues to receive less-than-adequate amounts of sleep the neurons become even more taxed and the I-function may begin to generate even less coherent images possibly resulting in temporary insanity.."

She is, of course, talking about this in the context of an 'all-stage' sleep deprivation, and not a s1/s2 deprived state. This is of course speculation, though, whilst she cites sources, she makes claims that are implications, rather than facts. Let you remind you that I also am making claims based on implications rather than facts. You decide what you want to beleive. I, personally, still do not believe s1/s2 are required for the integrity of the brain, as s3/4 will replace their function.

She also cites that the longer a person is awake for a single period of time, the longer s1 is prolonged in the following sleep deprived sleep. This implies that the less time you spend awake the less you will need. If you are not awake for very long (hint: 4-6 hours) the body is not in need of s1 sleep. Remember that even when aiming for pure s4 sleep, you will still go through s1, s2, and s3 to get there.

Thanks.

[Forevernade]

Update: day 4

Emotions are harder to control.
I woke up after my core sleep, and because I was at a party (I had my core sleep AT the party), I had some scotch whiskey for breakfast, a couple of sausages, and some lollies. After everyone went to bed I had a nap, and woke up early again. Whilst everyone was asleep I decided to watch I am Legend with Will Smith, on my laptop. Having watched the movie before, I knew what to expect, and whilst I did become heartbroken and a little teary the first time I watched the scene where his dog died, I cried throughout all emotional scenes in the movie this time around. I seem to have had less control over my emotional state :smallsigh:

After a period of feeling like ****, everyone woke up, and by the time I was surrounded by people, I was completely in control and perfectly fine again (as if I was not sleep deprived). It seems that the alcohol I drank did not let me nap in REM properly, but it also seems that when I am surrounded by people that I can talk to I feel much less sleep deprived and I am in a much better mood and energy level.

Things just get stranger. I predict that the above symptoms will get worse over the next 2 days, and then I will ease off. Hopefully with my auto-regulated naps I can prove my predictions wrong.

[Forevernade]

Personally, I think an ideal setup for this would be to get something like 2 hours REM, 1.5 hours s3/4, and then like 1-2 hours s2 for good measure, which probably means one regular 2 hour block cycle at night (1.5 hours deep, 30 minutes REM) instead of four regular blocks at night like a normal person, and then space in the extra REM naps with some additional fix to get some more s3/4 in there somewhere...

I don't blame you for not understanding the logistics behind setting up a timetable, you haven't tried changing your circadian cycle before. You could not so perfectly teach your brain to have 1.5h deep sleep, then follow it directly by 30 minutes REM sleep. REM sleep has erratic wave functions and does not have a band of frequencies associated with it, and therefore you cannot use binaural beats to help induce it. Secondly if you only had one single 'block' of stages then you would only be getting 1/5 of the deep sleep you need because of the irritable tenancy for your brain to induce s2. Your proposed outline you would have 1.5 of deep using binaural, a 30 minute REM. Then you propose to have another 2h sleep so you can get stage 2? Then have the naps as well... That is 2h +2h +1.5h = 5.5h total.
"Stages 2 and 3 repeat backwards before REM sleep is attained. So, a normal sleep cycle has this pattern: waking, stage 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, REM. Usually, REM sleep occurs 90 minutes after sleep onset."
A more efficient way would be to simply have a 4.5 core block, starting with s4 delta waves that quickly accelerate backward to s2 frequencies.

As you can see, just because you force more s4 sleep into your sleeping patterns, you cannot avoid the other stages.

Of course if you still want MORE s2 sleep, you can design your own binaural track using Gnaural, so that frequencies do what you want them to. Remember that binaural beats take several minutes to induce changes in the brain waves, so there could be up to a 10 minute lag between the beats it hears and the beats you want, which makes things difficult considering we are trying to sleep for as little time as possible.


Also, what do you think about the wear and tear issue? That spending 20 hours out of 24 active instead of 16 out of 24 will result in a much greater risk of problems caused by overuse of the body, things like carpal tunnel or shin splints?

I am not a medical doctor, so I cannot say. Even an MD probably wouldn't have an idea, many causes of things such as carpal tunnel syndrome are either strangely related, or not well understood in any case.
Shin splints? I wouldn't know why those are the worst of your concerns, those are just the overstretching and displacement of muscle so that it wraps around the bone wrongly. Either way, stress related, or compact related syndromes (like compartment syndrome) are easily avoidable. You can do homework in a restful state and the body is repairing these things. As long as you are in a restful state for the hours you are spending awake instead of asleep, I would assume you would not have problems. Actively stretch, do not overstretch, walk and sit with correct posture. Do not become overweight, do not involve yourself in high impact sports or activities... though this can be applied to anyone with any sleep cycle. How safe do you want to play it? Only as safe as you can be bothered to play it.

[onthetown]

Woke up at 3:30am by myself, a minute before my alarm went off.
So far I have had 1 lucid dream (already!) where my girlfriend was nagging me to get up, and the REM cycle paralysis carried over into my dream so I couldn't do anything (disappointing), but then I finally woke from the dream, and the alarm was beeping and my girlfriend was still asleep murmuring to herself! ha-ha. :smallbiggrin:


I think if my boyfriend started waking up at 3:30 every morning, I would kill him slowly and torturously within two days of the sleep project thing. Lucky she's a heavy sleeper.

Not something I'll try myself, but I'm very interested in this and seeing how you've progressed and noticed the changes in some aspects of your life.

[Icewalker]

As to the first bit, I think you misunderstood me. When I said 1.5 hours deep and 30 min REM I didn't mean deep as in 3/4, but deep as in NREM. When we sleep our natural cycle is a two hour block which is laid out as you are fully aware: 1 2 3 4 3 2 REM. I was suggesting grabbing one of these two hour blocks for good measure.

As to the second part about wear and tear problems, the first answer is what you suggested, yeah: spend your extra time in a relaxed manner. Which may well work perfectly. It makes me wonder though if sleep still beats time resting but awake. Basically, will 16 hours active, 4 hours resting, and 4 hours sleeping be noticeably worse for your body than 16 hours active and 8 hours sleeping? I don't know, it's interesting that we know so little about sleep. Personally, I am somewhat interested in trying a polyphasic sleep cycle myself, but I'm not sure. It's not that I'm unsure about whether it works (it totally does) but rather just how well I could handle it and how it would line up with everyone else's regular schedule. I may try it sometime in the far future, when I may be living in an environment more suited to such an experiment, and when our knowledge may be able to better optimize the system. I am definitely going to look into extending s4 sleep as a potential method of fighting aging.

[Forevernade]

It is 5.18am on day 5. Earlier this morning was the first time so far where I was consciously fighting falling asleep an hour and a half after waking from my core sleep. Not able to study, cognitive functions limited, and I struggle to read from my anatomy book. I am doing squats and lunges in front of my computer listening to metal in the hopes of waking myself up, and it seems to be working. I have noticed I have not been eating as much as I normally would, because my parents are home and it is hard to go rummaging around the house at all hours without disturbing them.

I have not had a coffee or a beer since I started, and I am glad, because for some reason I am not craving either, so it is good to know that I am staying awake and alert, or sleeping soundly unaffected by a stimulant/depressant.

3.5h after waking I am beginning to regain my wakefulness. Also Pancake Parlour with my auntie later today. Hooray for more food!

[Forevernade]

I am definitely going to look into extending s4 sleep as a potential method of fighting aging.

I was playing around with Gnaural last night before going to bed at 11pm. It seems the delta waves did have some sort of depressant effect, but I found it HARDER to get to sleep. I think that is because the brain can only fall asleep whilst in an alpha wave state, so I had to wait for it to change from pseudo-delta to alpha again.

I think when using binaural beats you have to induce 'accelerated change' not 'instant change'. For example in the Gnaural 'example' java script beat (you can find it on their website) they graph a steep slope from alpha into delta. Using this example beat, you would have to begin with adeclining alpha beat for 8 minutes, whilst trying to get to sleep, then with the presumption that you are asleep after 8 minutes (and you certainly should be, if sleeping polyphasically) the slope can change to delta accordingly.
I am not sure why they spike it every 5 minutes, I will have to look into that.

[nihilism]

it seems like a lot to go through for a few extra hours but whatever people works for peoples lifestyle.

as for the hyper emotional thing, something similar happens to me during chronotherapy. I remember trying not to cry to loudly so as not to disturb my family.

[Tamburlaine]

Though I know next to nothing about the subject, I have to say that I am finding this thread absolutely fascinating on multiple levels. Forevernade, I wish you the best of luck, and await more reports with great interest.

EDIT: A friend of mine would like to know how the system you're using would cope with an extended period of forced wakefulness (the example he gave was 3 days dealing with a storm while sailing) and how you would regain the lost sleep - what does happen when your schedule is disrupted?

[Forevernade]

Further research suggests large spikes are only found in epileptic patients, or patients with some kind of disorder, and they are a retardation of natural sine waves in eeg readings. Although they might look pretty for a tutorial beat, a sudden spike in frequency may not be the safest practice whilst using binaural beats and sleeping.

Two of many sources:
http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/98/18/1937
http://www.binaural-beat.net/page/2/
For more informations google 'spike and wave eeg'

[Icewalker]

Yup yup, you have to use binaural beats for gradual shift, nothing quick: it works through entrainment, so it has to drag you down slowly. Oh, another thing I forgot to mention, that thing you talked about where you were much more awake when other people were around. I've noticed that too, just with regular sleep pattern. I'll be talking to someone way late, and I'll feel perfectly awake, and if they leave I'll be almost immediately struggling to stay awake.

Oh, and those spikes in Gnaural's default are there to stop you from falling asleep.

[MelWhite]

Hmm.

Although not QUITE the same, people with sleep apnea can go through a similar process where they have interrupted sleep. The difference is that they usually don't wake up and go do something before returning to sleep.

People with gastric reflux problems, however, will get up. Ditto chronic pain sufferers.

I bring this up as examples where interrupting the sleep cycle has detrimental effects. These folks aren't perfectly healthy, and the lack of sleep will worsen the symptoms and will often add additional complications.

If you're perfectly healthy and young, it might not affect you (to achieve the same result, just acquire a newborn baby OR become a certified wildlife rehabilitation specialist and keep up with the feeding schedule for a baby squirrel or baby raccoon (as often as once every 20 minutes).) It is a strain on you as you grow older or have stress in your life.

Interestingly enough, I've heard it said that as you age you need less sleep.

Meh... just random thoughts here. Interesting topic.

[Forevernade]

Yup yup, you have to use binaural beats for gradual shift, nothing quick: it works through entrainment, so it has to drag you down slowly. Oh, another thing I forgot to mention, that thing you talked about where you were much more awake when other people were around. I've noticed that too, just with regular sleep pattern. I'll be talking to someone way late, and I'll feel perfectly awake, and if they leave I'll be almost immediately struggling to stay awake.

Oh, and those spikes in Gnaural's default are there to stop you from falling asleep.

Ah! I didn't think about that. Reading more about Gnaural's personal uses for beats, he doesn't want to fall asleep if he is meditating. I do want variation (undulations within the slow descent), to help replicate natural imperfections.




EDIT: A friend of mine would like to know how the system you're using would cope with an extended period of forced wakefulness (the example he gave was 3 days dealing with a storm while sailing) and how you would regain the lost sleep - what does happen when your schedule is disrupted?

Bloody hell! 3 days awake must be one of the biggest trials I could think of.
I would highly recommend learning to REM nap before he set off sailing. This is simply done by taking the easiest polyphasic, Everyman2 for up to 4 weeks before he sails. Once he knows he is dream-sleeping every time he naps, or at least 80% of the time, he will be ready to handle a post-storm recovery period.
After THAT much (3 days) REM debt built up, when the storm has calmed, I would be best to nap for 20 minutes, wake for 20 minutes, nap for 20 minutes, wake for 20 minutes etc for a total of 6-8 hours. Basically 2h for every 24.

2h *3 days = 6h debt

Remember REM debt doesn't accumulate linearly, so that could be completely off the mark.

EDIT: because the 20 minute naps can be replaced with 45 minute naps if the person feels he requires more, then he could do instead two 20 minute naps, one straight after the other in a 45 min period, with 5 minutes in between.

[Forevernade]

Hmm.
Interestingly enough, I've heard it said that as you age you need less sleep.


Sorry but that is a myth. The truth is as you age you get less sleep, you require the same amount though.

It may be that a monophasic sleeper's requirements reduces from 9 to 7 as he ages, but not more than that. And that is usually because a change in lifestyle, such as being less active, rather than the change in age itself.

[Lord Loss]

I'll ask my friend how his brother's sleep-cycle-thing went, he's coming over...

[Cespenar]

I personally think that the research made on sleep in general isn't very conclusive, and seriously lacking when long-term side effects are considered. That's why I can't dare to play with cycles and such. Sure, occasionally I had pulled off things similar to Everyman cycles before I even heard those terms, but I don't trust the mechanics behind them enough to make it a routine.

[Forevernade]

Day 6. The core sleeps are beginning to feel less and less restful. It is harder to stay up in the early mornings, the first two hours after waking and I am sitting here like a zombie unable to focus my eyes much. By the two hour mark I feel like I am normal again. I think I can put this down to the changing core sleep:
Wed: 4.5 felt good
Thur: 4.5 felt good
Fri: 3 felt good
Sat: 3 felt ok
Sun: 4.5 felt bad in the morning
Mon: felt bad in the morning.

Feels like I am going to the toilet all the time, but I am also drinking a lot more, and eating a lot more. It reminds me about the times I started bodybuilding. I was astounded by the amount of poop one man could muster... I asked "When does my body stop ****ting out all the food I eat, and start absorbing it?"
The (correct) response was "You are eating more food, you will make more waste. You are probably absorbing everything correctly." and it took me a while to accept that.

A few tips on digestion anyway:
Take a multivitamin.
Increase intake of fibre with increased intake of meat.
Each meal, look at your food and make a list from 1-x from softest to hardest. Eat the softest things first, then eat the hardest stuff after, then eat your meat last. This will make sure your soft food doesn't get 'caught' behind the slow-absorbing food in your digestive tract, which would make it rot from inside you (causing massive amounts of FARTS!)
Drink water with your food, diuretic drinks separate from food. Diuretic means it 'dehydrates you' by making you pee more. Such drinks as tea, coffee, soft drink etc etc. Caffeine is a diuretic.


Something for all you city slicking savvy slackers with REAL jobs :smallamused: Aeia's video blog on youtube is about an Afgan/American girl with a twin. She did Uber and her twin did E3. It seems she could quite successfully hold a non-equidistant timetable, whereby the gaps between naps were 3,3,3,6,6,3 or some such.
It is nice to note that she partially did the same as me, whereby she started on Uberman to learn how to nap, then she eased off into E3, then started cutting her core E3 nap into E4, E5 and then back into Uberman. I already know how to nap (I have years of practice catching a train to school in my earlier years), so that's why I dont' need to do a week of Uberman at the start.
Naps: I have heard of people taking 1 minute to get to sleep and sleeping 19 minutes, and I have heard of people taking 5 minutes to get to sleep, and sleeping for 20 minutes. The more skilled a napper you are the more efficient your naps will be, but generally they will go for the same amount of time (19-21 minutes).

I have been using this technique to nap faster: REM-like eye movements. I lie down and get comfy, and as soon as I close my eyes I part-consciously being to roll my eyes left right and in diagonals irregularly/randomly. After doing this for a few days it has become a habit, and I can start thinking about different stuff like stories, images and incidents etc. The eyemovement is now a natural flicker, much faster than when I first started, and as long as I dont consciously sit there thinking "I have to go to sleep now" then I will sleep. Imagination > Force of Will, when it comes to napping.

[Forevernade]

Another last thing: I will be playing around with Gnaural and making inverted peak spikes, the opposite to the meditation samples, and when I get my bluetooth set up at home I can transfer some beats to my mobile and play them while I sleep to see if I sleep more soundly. Inverted peaks should help lower the consciousness rather than keep it awake like normal spikes do.

[Forevernade]

Napping and Autoregulation

Let me tell you a little bit about autoregulation in different contexts. I am a personal trainer, so I train people in the gym for a living. An important aspect of training the body is training the connection between body and mind (and I am talking about this in a completely scientific context, nothing to do with hippie ****).
Before you can build muscle you must build strength, before you must build a mind-body connection. A beginner may well know how to do a bicep curl with a weight, but an intermediate will be able to tense his biceps so that 'more' of the bicep is activated at once, even when there is no weight. An advanced trainee will be able to impose seperation in his muscles, he will understand how to flex so that the inner head of the bicep is activated more than the outer, and vice versa.
Once you become an intermediate flexor you will understand how hard your bicep has been ripped, how much recovery is going to be needed, and you will eventually have a favourite bicep exercise which is 'optimal' vs all others. All this is personal, and changes from person to person.
Autoregulating your training is for when you understand how much recovery you will need, and rather than training on a specific day of the week at a specific time, you will train when the muscle is ready to be trained again. A beginner cannot do this, and this is why a beginner starts with a timetable and a list of things to do.

Sleeping is much the same, I suspect. Sleeping is a physiological recovery method, and so is part of the same autoregulation system.
When you first begin to do E2 or E3, you must stick with your nap times strictly until you understand what napping is (much like until the beginner understands what, exactly, the bicep curl is), until you can control the nap (or control the bicep). Once you can control the nap, if you know what your mind needs to do to nap within 0-5 minutes of lying down, then you can begin to autoregulate the naps.
Having the advantage of controlling my nap already, I began to autoregulate my naps. Nap when you feel you are tired, not when you have to nap, to an extent. I will edit in my source when I get home, but I was reading a blog about one guy who was autoregulating his sleep patterns, and after a week of autoregulation he found his Uberman pattern had so vastly changed that he was sleeping 2x20 minutes a day. If you read along his blog, I am not sure if it is bad english, but he doesnt justify his intellegence with good vocabulary, and by the end of his blog the ideas he is coming up with are just bat**** crazy. I assume this is a badly played autoregulation, as he had not been doing uberman very long so that when he began autoregulating his naps he even found that when he WOULd nap he wouldnt always REM nap. That shows that he was a beginner in the first place, so he trained his body to accept his badly regulated sleep patterns, without realising he was screwing himself up.
Even in the gym, if you are feeling sore after a particularly punishing arms session, you will autoregulate your recovery, but only so much. There comes a point where you actually need to say 'alright, I am still sore, but I have been sore for way too long' and you do a light training session to help blood pump into your arms, induce hormones and make sure your repairing systems actaully realise your arms arent recovering. You may feel pain, but that doesnt mean you will gain.
Someone who autoregulated their training will find that there is a routine within the autoregulation.
Sleeping should probably be very much the same when autoregulated, you may have learned to uberman with 6x20 min, but after a week or two of autoregulating you might find you have 1x30, 4x20, 3x10 or something (I am just makign numbers up there).

A direct example of the most organised (and thus most optimal) way to autoregulate is this way:
I normally nap 3 times a day. I feel tired before my first nap, so I nap for 20 minutes when I am tired. I nap again on all 3 of my scheduled naps, so that I have napped 4 times a day today, and go to bed normally. If I am tired at the same time the next day, and the previous day I struggled to sleep on my first timetabled nap, then the autoregulated nap replaces the timetabled nap. If I had no trouble sleeping through any of the naps then remove the last or middle nap of the day. Making a single nap ajustment a day in this manner will slowly reform your timetable so that you are taking naps at times your body needs them to be. I do not let my autoregulated nap take any longer than any of my normal naps, otherwise it throws the rest of my timetable off, so I limit it to 19-20 minutes.

Hope this helps.

Forevernade

[Icewalker]

Sounds right. Gotta say, I didn't know that stuff about bodybuilding and learning your regulation to such a degree. I feel I should look into that a little with the extent of physical training of different varieties I'm interested in pursuing.

I would also like to offer another potential help, more for others than you, as I think you're getting past the point where you need it. That being hypnosis. Having done a bit myself, as both a subject and hypnotist, with some research into the science of it, I can say it's remarkably applicable. Deep trance is actually Theta state brainwaves, so it's actually a really easy and apt thing to simply self-induce a trance to get to sleep, and you definitely notice the REM eye flicker. In fact, it is standard for hypnotists to point out the flickering to their subject, because it helps convince the subject they are in trance (and, by drawing attention to it, it strengthens the effect). Once you've been into a trance a couple times, the feeling is familiar, and it's easy to pull yourself down, especially if you have studied the methods a bit yourself. It sounds like you're self-inducing a trance state already to get into REM.

[Forevernade]

pre: I am going to kill someone if this pc crashes for a 3rd time....

So I will probably keep spamming this thread with my every thought and theory, not because I am an attention whore, but just so I know I have a place to record everything I will have forgotten 6 months later.

Maybe eventually I will come back to this thread and make a pdf containing all my correct findings, scrap all the anecdotal and experimental ramblings, and have an errata'd formatted document to publish containing advice and wisdom etc.

Sleeping in on Poly

Can you sleep in on polyphasic cycles? No, not really... thats dissapointing for sure. But if you are especially tired for some reason or other or you need more sleep because you are sick, then fear not. You CAN sleep more, but it must remain broken.
Feeling bad today (I am entering the end of my first week, so the symptoms of sleep deprevation are expected to be worse about now), though I did feel better than yester... jklasdf wait a second. I feel better than this morning hehe. It feels like this morning was yesterday. Time dialation is coming into effect! They day is getting longer and but my perception of time is not. Feelsgoodman.
I digress. Feeling not-so-good, I decided to sleep on the train travelling to uni today, so I set my alarm on the train and slept for 20 minutes. I then had my morning nap, my afternoon nap, and I have not had a problem, both times I woke up 20 minutes into the dream.

As long as you keep extra sleep at 20 minute intervals, you will not allow the body to forget that 20 minutes is all you are allowed in other naps. These extra 'sleep ins' are additional naps, and you must still nap at your timetable's allocated times.

Forevernade

[Icewalker]

Makes sense, and I wouldn't worry about posting, using the thread as communal storage is often useful, also, I am learning new information all the time :smalltongue:

By the way, it's easy to tell that you're feeling out of it: your typing is off. Some mistakes in there which you haven't been making before at all.

[Forevernade]

Yep, you are right. I just came out from a maths class, and I could follow everything they were teaching us, but none of it sunk in... Also I made more silly errors than usual when I was practicing last week's practice problems.

I talked to my Sleep Disorders Prof. in Life and Social Sciences Faculty and he seems too busy mid-term to deal with me, so he is going to suggest a few texts for me to read for the next month, then I can organise a forum with him and a few grad students over the summer.

It would be good to have more feedback about my writing style changing as my mental state changes. An outside observer is always a good thing.

[Icewalker]

Well, I was pointing to a few simple grammatical mistakes in the last post, but the general flow was different, it's true. Much more train of thought and random, and less structured observationalist.

I'm interested, certainly. If you could pass on the text suggestions you get I may look into some of them as well myself.

[Forevernade]

Source for the bat**** crazy man only sleeping several hours a week.
http://consciousflex.blogspot.com/2009/01/powiull-sleep-day-2-by-nicholas-powiull.html

Also this, for lolz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_Ngoc

Also found this:
http://www.lumosity.com/brain-grade/test
Could be a useful tool in measuring basic mental states. It can judge the difference in speed, attention, problem solving and short term memory according to Emperor. (http://www.stevepavlina.com/forums/health-fitness/17363-polyphasic-specifically-uberman-personal-study.html)

Today I had micronaps throughout my biology class. I think that micronaps are directly caused by sleep deprivation, but more importantly posture and breathing. The sleep debt is the cause for the degredation in posture and shallow breathing, but if you can sit up straight and take deep breaths when you are most drowzy the microsleeping goes away instantly! I remember my spine being like a jack in the box as I would forget my posture, slump, remember again, correct myself, forget, slump, etc etc. Lasted about 10 minutes bobbing up and down hahah. :smallbiggrin:

[rakkoon]

It's not because I have nothing to add that I don't enjoy reading about this kind of stuff. My worry would be that the side-affects of this experiment only show themselves after ten years or such. But only one way to find out so keep on trucking!

[vcvc]

All of you, I think this information would be useful:


Compression of sleep stages

One of the myths of "Uberman sleep schedule" is that it makes it possible to enter REM sleep and skip non-REM sleep stages entirely. That myth is derived from another false claim that implies a non-essential role of deep sleep. I will ignore these claims as standing in total disagreement with laboratory findings and models of sleep. Instead, let us focus on a more plausible claim of the possibility of compressing sleep stages.
Dr Piotr Wozniak - January 2005
Polyphasic Sleep: Facts and Myths (http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm)

I'm interested alot in Polyphasic Sleep and from what I remember Stampi also had his subjects on an EEG and came to the conclusion that you sleep through all the same sleep- phases, just in 20 minutes instead of 1,5 hours

[Icewalker]

The first thing I learned beginning to read this paper is that chronobiologist must be one of the most badass job titles ever.

:smallbiggrin:

Reading on...

Alright, I read through the first half of the paper (and am now getting tired. It is 1:30 and I'm certainly a monophasic sleeper myself. :smalltongue: ). The general impression I've gotten is the following: the information provided is good, well backed up, and researched (probably. I see no reason to believe otherwise, and it's clearly written by someone who knows what they are talking about). However, it is also clearly being written not to provide unbiased information, but to make a point, that polyphasic sleep is not beneficial. I feel that most of his points towards that answer are correct. However I also feel that he relies a little bit too much on lack of evidence of benefits rather than presence of evidence of detriments. There is evidence of lack of benefits, and of detriments, but there is little enough field testing I believe for his statements to be considered absolute. Nonetheless, they are well supported statements, and to me, they say that polyphasic sleep is not something to try for benefits, but for the time being likely only something to try for science and research (or for the specific situations he mentioned: optimizing mental function in a situation which FORCES very small amounts of sleep). I do believe pretty surely that there are ways to optimize our sleep patterns beyond the natural, if only slightly, but I think there is evidence enough to suggest (but not prove) that most current polyphasic sleep schedules take it too far to be truly beneficial.

...Also I really want to study enough that I can write a paper or two like this and be considered, at least remotely, a chronobiologist...

[Fable Wright]

An outside view on this: I would not, personally, attempt to just skip into a 3-hour sleep cycle. I'd personally start by trying to space out my normal 8-10 hours of sleep over a period of time, and then slowly shorten it more and more. While your approach is trying to get your body to suddenly adapt to a 3 hour cycle, you seem to be taking naps in between. I'd personally try to have a core block, as with the regular everyman cycle, and several main naps throughout the day. Then, when I would feel tired, take a 20 minute nap. Doing this would help your body adapt to it more naturally, I think. It's probably better to let your body get the sleep it needs, but spacing it out over time may let you get closer to the uberman sleep cycle. With the 20 minute blocks when you're tired, you'd begin to train your body to sleep in 20 minute intervals. Then, you could attempt to convert more and more time from the core blocks into just plain 20 minute naps, and see how it goes.

That's my take on the matter, anyways. Take that how you will.

[Forevernade]

An outside view on this: I would not, personally, attempt to just skip into a 3-hour sleep cycle. I'd personally start by trying to space out my normal 8-10 hours of sleep over a period of time, and then slowly shorten it more and more. While your approach is trying to get your body to suddenly adapt to a 3 hour cycle, you seem to be taking naps in between. I'd personally try to have a core block, as with the regular everyman cycle, and several main naps throughout the day. Then, when I would feel tired, take a 20 minute nap. Doing this would help your body adapt to it more naturally, I think. It's probably better to let your body get the sleep it needs, but spacing it out over time may let you get closer to the uberman sleep cycle. With the 20 minute blocks when you're tired, you'd begin to train your body to sleep in 20 minute intervals. Then, you could attempt to convert more and more time from the core blocks into just plain 20 minute naps, and see how it goes.

That's my take on the matter, anyways. Take that how you will.

Maybe I was not clear in my earlier posts, but that is what I am doing. I am separating the adaptation into several stages:
Stage 0: monophasic 9h core, 1 nap (my original sleeping habits)
Stage 1: siesta 6h sleep, 1 nap (45min)
Stage 2: polyphasic 4.5h core, 2 naps (45min)
Stage 3: polyphasic 4.5h core, 2 naps (45/20min)
Stage 4: polyphasic 3h core, 3 naps (45/20/20min)
Stage 5: auto-regulative adjustment
Stage 6: polyphasic 1.5h core, 4 naps (45/20/20/20min)
Stage 7: auto-regulative adjustment
Stage 8: polyphasic 1.5h core, 5 naps (20min)
Stage 9: take measures to increase deep sleep over core nap

I am actually trying to organise having an eeg done on one or more of my naps. The Prof. has not got back to me yet. I am waiting on the edge of my seat :smalltongue:

[Forevernade]

All of you, I think this information would be useful:
I'm interested alot in Polyphasic Sleep and from what I remember Stampi also had his subjects on an EEG and came to the conclusion that you sleep through all the same sleep- phases, just in 20 minutes instead of 1,5 hours

Thanks, I have read through that before. I probably should have posted it before now, but I am constantly reading new things so it didn't cross my mind to specifically post this article.
It is a good article, but like Icewalker said, a lot of it is based on lack of evidence, rather than evidence against it.

Food for thought:
If you could assume you died 25 years younger from sleep deprivation related disease, would that stop you from polyphasic sleeping when the sleep cycle gives you an average of 25 more years in your youth from being awake so long? Personally I would rather 25 more years in my youth than 25 years as a crippled old man. Even if the lifespan is less polyphasic sleeping, the waking lifespan is the same.

[Fable Wright]

Ah. I missed that; from your original posts, it sounded like you were sleeping 3 hours a night from day 1.

[Forevernade]

Ah. I missed that; from your original posts, it sounded like you were sleeping 3 hours a night from day 1.

Yep, I started recording my progress as I transitioned from 4.5 to 3. I had already done a few days of Stage 2.
I am at Stage 4 now. There is no method to my madness relating to Stage Progression. I just go to the next stage when I feel it is appropriate, if I think making the change would not be too painful. I am surprising myself how fast I am adjusting, though I fear other people would not adjust so well. If someone was to try my method then I might suggest taking it slower with more than just a few days on each stage...

[Forevernade]

Ok, so you guys will laugh at this one:

I was zombie walking along my driveway, engaged in a battle of pure willpower vs sleepiness, when a bird exploded out from a bush and onto the driveway a meter in front of me, floundered around for a microsecond before shooting off toward my head.

OHHSHIIIIIIIIIIIII-

Massive adrenaline rush (massive compared to my zombie-like state)! So what is the point in my near-bird related death story? It made me feel GREAT afterward. 45 minutes later and I am wide awake and thinking "why was I so sleepy before now?"

So, and idea is, that you could have a housemate set up boobytraps around the house/garden in your first week of adjustment, so when you are zombie walking around trying to stay awake, and unable to concentrate on anything, BAM you trip a wire and a fly-swat hits you in the face or something. Too bad I dont have a housemate to do that for me (I live alone). But I do have a pool, so tomorrow morning I might go for a 4am FREEZING COLD SWIM. before jumping in the shower. I will tell you how that works out for me tomorrow.

http://videosift.com/video/Mother-Son-Moving-Company

EDIT: I swear since I have been listening to binaural beats my ears are going weird. You know when you can pop your ears, they pop at the same time unless you are sick. Well they do not feel blocked but they pop at different times now, the right faster than the left, every time.

[Icewalker]

Wow, booby traps to force adrenaline to keep oneself awake.

This is the best idea ever and I love it. Could be well applied to simple attempts to stay awake for extended periods of time. Fun...

[Cespenar]

I'm sorry but if the plan is depending on adrenaline rushes to stay awake (if that's not just a transient phase), that feels pretty unhealthy to me.

[Forevernade]

I doubt the zombification is anything to do with my overall health. I am waking up 5-7 hours earlier than I normally do. The body will take a while to adjust to the 'new day'. Actually once I am out of zombie-mode I stay completely alert and awake the rest of the day, even after naps, and I can assure you that the adrenaline is non-existent then. It may be that I need to adjust the timing of my core sleep so that I wake up at a time that interacts with my circadian cycle better.
There are advantages to waking up at your normal time, and going to sleep at your normal time. The first will have a higher chance of not being a zombie in the mornings, but you will most likely be a zombie in the afternoons. The latter will have a higher chance of you getting to sleep at night, but you feel like a zombie about half an hour after you wake up. I chose the latter.

[Forevernade]

Day 7.

Had a contrast shower this morning. Not feeling any drowziness. Can still feel an urge to sleep this early in the morning, but cravings only come half an hour to an hour after I wake up. Not getting as hungry as I was the first few days.
Waking up at 2, then going back to sleep for 1.5h to wake again at 3. Hopefully when I cut back the extra 1.5h in 3-4 days I will be fine. I decided to go back up from the 3 to the 4.5 because of the way I crashed yesterday. Feelin good right now :smallsmile:'

EDIT
I have an idea about sleeping habits. Naps either come in 15 minute blocks or 20 minute blocks. Thats why there are some who nap for 30 minutes, because tehy have two 15 minute naps where they wake slightly, then go back to sleep because their alarm has not gone off. I seem to be a 15 minute napper, after getting up before my alarm goes off. So are you a 15min or 20 min napper?

[Forevernade]

Day 8

So i accidentally slept in, BUT I had so many alarms going off, and thus 5 minute breaks in between each sleep, it seemed every single one of them was REM!

(3h core) 11pm-2am then wake 5
(1.5h nap) 2:05am-3:30am then wake 5
(30min nap) 3:35 - 4:05
(15min nap) 7:45-8:00

AND WOW I feel like the 5.25h I slept was a 10h sleep in back when I was monophasic sleeping. So far my days look like this
Day - hours

4.5 +45 +45
4.5 +45 + 45
4.5 +45 +20
4.5 +45 +20
3 +45 +20 +15
3 +15 +15 +15
3 +1.5 +15 +15 +15
3 +1.5 + 30 +15 +15 +15


Even though I have had less sleep than I ever had, the first 3 days I was feeling twice as good compared to mono, and the last 2 days I have been feeling slightly better than mono.
I think a daily periodization might be the key to feeling good throughout the week whilst adapting to the sleep plan. The core sleeps undulate in length, but you always break it up (by waking up in between) into several smaller key blocks. eg 3 (core), 1.5 (extension), 30 (sleep in), 15 (nap) then if you want to you can extend your sleep for extra recovery, you can sleep in, and take extra naps. Doing this has not presented a problem to me yet.

I am going to start reducing the overall sleep again, to see if the periodization works. As the end of this week comes to a close I will increase the core sleep slightly, and then week 3 I will reduce it again.

As long as THE NAPS are strictly on time (within 20 minutes of timetable) then you should be able to adapt perfectly.

[Fable Wright]

Interestingly enough, you seem to forget to capitalize things. Also, this seems to become more and more like an instructive manual for how to adjust, rather than a record of how you handled it.

Also, how are your math grades doing?

[Forevernade]

Haha, yeah I am starting to write it like a manual on purpose. It is more friendly to read IMO, and it helps me understand what I am ACTUALLY doing, rather than what I 'feel' I am doing. Thats partly because I am using 'you' instead of 'I'. *shrug*

My math:
Days 1-3 Incredible
days 4-6 bad
days 7-8 good

So I came back from a maths lecture today, and I understood everything, even felt like making a few comments to contribute to the class. Which is a huge improvement from a few days ago, where I was just copying off the board and hoping I would understand it later haha.

Today I have a sense of wellbeing I normally lack, and also when I was driving in the car everything seemed like "I was going normal speed and everything else is going slowly". Can't completely describe the feeling.

[Forevernade]

So I am on day 12 of my journey (started my first wake up on a tuesday morning).

Feeling great. Elevated mood (noticably, my mum commented on it over the last week). Maths skills back to normal. Literature skills almost back to normal (I still get the occasional vocabulary mind-derp).

I have been able to drink alcohol without destroying my pattern (had a couple of scotches last night).

I will be commencing cardio exercise and then deadlifts as an initial test for the integrity of my muscular system.

Also: a neat little source on resetting your circadian cycle with food. Much better to be food deprived than sleep deprived.
http://parentingsquad.com/easy-way-to-reset-your-sleep-cycle-stop-eating

[Forevernade]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myi2sRph69A&p=9829B316CB3FD693&playnext=1&index=3

Sleep Pressure: a concept which judges how much pressure there is on the body/mind to sleep.

Sleep Bonus: he introduces a bonus sleep into the sleeping pattern, performance increases, but pressure increases too.

I had another 'fragmented sleep in' today and actually felt worse for it. It seems my initial hypothesis was right, a bonus is only a bonus if there is a direct comparison to the deprived state. I am best to undulate my sleeping patterns. I thought maybe if I slept for 5.5 AND the 3 naps I would have continuous increased performance but it only seems to create sleep pressure, and also it decreases the QUALITY of my naps from thereon in. I have been dreaming less since sleeping in. I am going to edge back to 4.5, then 3h and see how performance changes.

[ForzaFiori]

My friend and I are both going to try out polyphasic sleep starting here soon. I"m gonna go for E3 probably, since with my class scheduals, uberman and dymaxian are impossible (I'd have to sleep in class). My friend, however, plans on trying to get to uber or dymaxian, since he isn't taking classes and want's to see if he can, since he feels like sleep is for wusses.

[Forevernade]

Well, Forza.
I don't believe Dymaxion is a suitable sleeping cycle for anyone, really. It just doesnt add up. I have tried sleeping for 30 minutes and it just doesnt work. I have seen other people sleep for 30 minutes and they only get 15-20 REM before they pass on to deep sleep. If he insists on doing Dymaxion, I would suggest 4x2x15min blocks. By breaking up the 30 into 15s there is a higher chance he will dream through the entire 30 minutes.
I still think Uberman is unhealthy. Stage 3 and 4 sleep activates the immune system, so without it your immune responses are going to be poor. This will mean you actually feel better, because none of the symptoms of getting sick will appear (symptoms are USUALLY caused by the body's response, rather than the actual disease) so you may be walking around feeling great, but, in reality you are walking around carrying a thousand bugs/viruses/diseases without knowing. :smallsigh:


Well, the last few nights I have been getting more sleep. 3+1.5+15 +3x15. I have been feeling more rested than I ever have in my entire teenage life, and so I have been wondering WHY?!
So I did the math: core sleep is 3 REMs, extension is 1 REM, sleep-in is 1 REM, and then I get my 3 nap REMs... that is 8 REM sleeps!
I am only sleeping 5.25h a night, but I am getting a THIRD MORE REM sleep than I used to get when I was mono!
When I first started this I was interested in 'optimizing' my time, and so I was intent on cutting my sleep back as much as I could, aiming for 2 or 3 hours a night. As my journey went on this last few weeks, I have come to realise this: 'optimizing' your time can be more than less sleep, it can be increasing the quality of your hours awake. At the moment I am awake 2.75h more than I normally would have been, which is STILL AN IMPROVEMENT. But since my increased REM, the quality of my wakefulness has increased by a guesstimate of ~+15%.

I will still continue to experiment with my sleep schedule when I have a bright idea, but until then I think I will keep the schedule I have now, where I undulate between 6 and 8 REMs a night (every second day or two, adding the extension and the sleep in), because it WORKS. :smallbiggrin:

EDIT:

I have been thinking of different way to help wake up, other than the adrenaline rush. Plyometric Exercise is often used to 'excite' the nervous system before actual weight training or athletics. Plyometrics are fast, powerful movements such as 'jumping squat, box jump, medicine ball throw' just to name a few. Today I had a sleep paralysis dream, and woke up extremely dead-bodied. My mind was awake, but the body kept wanting to go back to sleep, so I began with a brisk walk up and down my hallway a few times, then ended with 5x3 jumping squats, so my breathing returned to normal and my body was completely awake.

[Forevernade]

Almost at the end of week 3 and it is going well. Mental capacity has steadied out at original level. Focus has increased, except at certain times when sleep pressure is greatest. Probably balances out to even.

I am sleeping a lot more lightly since I introduced the sleep in. It is hard to tell whether I am sleeping or not! But I know that I am in a REM state (really this is what is important, whether I loose 'awareness' or not) because of my rock hard boner upon awakening.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnal_penile_tumescence

For all males, it is a good sign you are getting good sleep if you wake up with an erection. In fact, this is what you WANT. For females, things might be a bit harder, when discerning if you are dreaming or deep-thinking, for you, I have no suggestions.

I have been working on my posture a lot. I was getting some posture related stress in my back, shoulders, and hips, due to the increased amount of time I had spent in front of the computer. Now, after a week of postural correction I feel a lot more relaxed and comfortable.

Keep on keepin' on.

Forevernade

[Forevernade]

Earggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I overslept today and yesterday morning! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I was feeling really guilty, because I was staying at my parents house for the night and I didnt want to get up and make lots of noise, so I bunkered down in my room and did some study. Without the breakfast and moving about I accidentally fell asleep in my books about an hour in. :( a random hour of sleep then, and then a second accidental nap.

Today I woke up at 2 as normal, and decided I would have an extension, but then I slept through the extension! I should have just got up at 2am in the first place!

Luckily I have a mid term break from university, so I will use that week to reset and go back to 3h+3-4naps without any extensions. I reckon I will have a drowsy few days. We will see.

Continue the research. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winged_monkeys#References_in_popular_culture)

[TSGames]

It doesn't sound like this experiment is working out all that well...

[Forevernade]

Oversleeping is just habit. Like learning a motor pattern or having a psychological addiction. Breaking a habit takes 21-30 days (depending on what source you look at) and I have not been doing this for that long yet. It will take me a while before I reset my habits. Hopefully in another week or two I will some new insight.

What makes you think that it is 'not working out that well'?

It seems you want it to be an easy process switching to something like this. If it is not an easy process then it is not healthy, or it is not 'right'? Adaptation takes time. Look at weights training. You do not lift 100kg on your first day, you try to do the best you can, and then you wait until your body recovers, and you bear with the pain the training has inflicted on you. You finally adapt and you can lift 100kg? It does not take much more than habit to keep that 100kg lift.
The change is hard part, progress is hard, once you are there it is easy

I am going to be experimenting with different over the counter drugs to see which effect me most positively. Here are some things I will try out (if anyone knows anything about them or has experience using them please tell me!)
Melatonin
ZMA
Z-12
DMAE
Vinpocetine
Aniracetam

[TSGames]

What makes you think that it is 'not working out that well'?

Spoilerred for length



Differences I have noticed just whilst living:
Hungrier
My breakfast at 3:30 consists of a large bowl of cereal and a side of 4 eggs. I am getting even hungrier still, these days. When I would usually get morning sickness and skip breakfast, no such thing is occuring any more so I wolf it down in 10 minutes.
Thirstier
MUCH thirstier... I dont know why, I expect its because I am eating more, to counterbalance the increased volume of food.
Digestive problems
Probably caused by the increase in volume of food, and bad water retention from the increase in water intake. It might take me a few days of drinking this amount of water before my body actually starts taking in the right amount of water into the digestive system. I could have rock hard excretions for a few days, we will see.



Lower overall body temperature
It is not that you are cold all the time. Often when you sleep your body's temperature dives below that of when you are awake. As I am napping twice a day at the moment I have noticed my body temperature dives down to that of my normal sleeping temperature every nap. This leaves me feeling cold more often throughout the day. Being 'colder' should burn less calories than being warm, unless you are shivering, but should burn more calories than you are awake.
I will be playing with this idea, to see roughly what my caloric needs are compared to what they were. I would estimate only about a 60% increase in calories over the 24h, but that is a guess.
If this bothers you then you will probably not like doing nap sleep cycles.
Excretion Frequency rises
I know you might think I am talking about my **** a little bit too often, but I have noticed I need to go to the toilet more often, so I did a little research. It seems about half an hour after you fall asleep, your body naturally wants to take a ****. Napping so often is making me want to **** more often. Anyways.... onto the real problem...
Lower immune system integrity
This is based on researching the phases of sleep. Whilst REM sleep helps with repairing muscle, memory retention and helps repair in some way almost every bodily function at an increased rate to that of the other phases, the immune system functions seem to be exclusively in action in the deep-sleep stages, such as 3 and 4.



Update: day 4

Emotions are harder to control.
...
Things just get stranger. I predict that the above symptoms will get worse over the next 2 days, and then I will ease off. Hopefully with my auto-regulated naps I can prove my predictions wrong.



Day 6. The core sleeps are beginning to feel less and less restful. It is harder to stay up in the early mornings, the first two hours after waking and I am sitting here like a zombie unable to focus my eyes much. By the two hour mark I feel like I am normal again. I think I can put this down to the changing core sleep:
Wed: 4.5 felt good
Thur: 4.5 felt good
Fri: 3 felt good
Sat: 3 felt ok
Sun: 4.5 felt bad in the morning
Mon: felt bad in the morning.



Feeling bad today (I am entering the end of my first week, so the symptoms of sleep deprevation are expected to be worse about now), though I did feel better than yester... jklasdf wait a second. I feel better than this morning hehe. It feels like this morning was yesterday. Time dialation is coming into effect! They day is getting longer and but my perception of time is not. Feelsgoodman.
I digress. Feeling not-so-good, I decided to sleep on the train travelling to uni today, so I set my alarm on the train and slept for 20 minutes. I then had my morning nap, my afternoon nap, and I have not had a problem, both times I woke up 20 minutes into the dream.



Yep, you are right. I just came out from a maths class, and I could follow everything they were teaching us, but none of it sunk in... Also I made more silly errors than usual when I was practicing last week's practice problems.



I was zombie walking along my driveway, engaged in a battle of pure willpower vs sleepiness, when a bird exploded out from a bush and onto the driveway a meter in front of me, floundered around for a microsecond before shooting off toward my head.

OHHSHIIIIIIIIIIIII-

Massive adrenaline rush (massive compared to my zombie-like state)! So what is the point in my near-bird related death story? It made me feel GREAT afterward. 45 minutes later and I am wide awake and thinking "why was I so sleepy before now?"

So, and idea is, that you could have a housemate set up boobytraps around the house/garden in your first week of adjustment, so when you are zombie walking around trying to stay awake, and unable to concentrate on anything, BAM you trip a wire and a fly-swat hits you in the face or something. Too bad I dont have a housemate to do that for me (I live alone). But I do have a pool, so tomorrow morning I might go for a 4am FREEZING COLD SWIM. before jumping in the shower. I will tell you how that works out for me tomorrow.



I had another 'fragmented sleep in' today and actually felt worse for it. It seems my initial hypothesis was right, a bonus is only a bonus if there is a direct comparison to the deprived state. I am best to undulate my sleeping patterns.



I have been thinking of different way to help wake up, other than the adrenaline rush. Plyometric Exercise is often used to 'excite' the nervous system before actual weight training or athletics. Plyometrics are fast, powerful movements such as 'jumping squat, box jump, medicine ball throw' just to name a few. Today I had a sleep paralysis dream, and woke up extremely dead-bodied. My mind was awake, but the body kept wanting to go back to sleep, so I began with a brisk walk up and down my hallway a few times, then ended with 5x3 jumping squats, so my breathing returned to normal and my body was completely awake.



Almost at the end of week 3 and it is going well. Mental capacity has steadied out at original level. Focus has increased, except at certain times when sleep pressure is greatest. Probably balances out to even.

I am sleeping a lot more lightly since I introduced the sleep in. It is hard to tell whether I am sleeping or not!

...

I have been working on my posture a lot. I was getting some posture related stress in my back, shoulders, and hips, due to the increased amount of time I had spent in front of the computer. Now, after a week of postural correction I feel a lot more relaxed and comfortable.



Earggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I overslept today and yesterday morning! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I was feeling really guilty, because I was staying at my parents house for the night and I didnt want to get up and make lots of noise, so I bunkered down in my room and did some study. Without the breakfast and moving about I accidentally fell asleep in my books about an hour in. :( a random hour of sleep then, and then a second accidental nap.

Today I woke up at 2 as normal, and decided I would have an extension, but then I slept through the extension! I should have just got up at 2am in the first place!

Luckily I have a mid term break from university, so I will use that week to reset and go back to 3h+3-4naps without any extensions. I reckon I will have a drowsy few days. We will see.


Certainly you have your ups and downs. For myself, your writings have done an excellent job convincing me not to try a Polyphasic Sleep Cycle. It doesn't help that the U.S. Airforce does not consider Polyphasic Sleep as a viable option. (http://www.asma.org/pdf/compendium/2009/fatigue-counters.pdf)
Spoilerred for length, again

No, I will not reformat this, just see section "ii. Napping".


Another important factor is nap length . A relationship
between nap length and performance was reported by
Bonnet ( 23 ) based on a study in which subjects were allowed
either a 2-, 4-, or 8-h nap before 52 h of continuous
operations. The results indicated a dose-response relationship
between the length of the nap and performance
during the fi rst 24 h of sleep deprivation. Bonnet concluded
that the nap before an all-night shift should be as
long as possible to produce maximum performance benefi
ts and that prophylactic naps were better than naps
designed to replace sleep that was already lost due to
the requirement for continuous wakefulness. This conclusion
was supported in a study by Brooks and Lack
( 30 ), who tested afternoon naps of 5, 10, 20, and 30 min
following nighttime sleep of 5 h. The longer 20- and 30-
min naps showed improvement in overall cognitive performance
for as long as 155 min compared to the 10-min
nap which showed cognitive performance effects for
only 95 min. This fi nding is consistent with a recent
meta-analysis on the effi cacy of naps as a fatigue countermeasure
( 75 ). This meta-analysis of 12 studies consisting
of a total of 178 tests not only concluded that
naps led to performance benefi ts equal to, and sometimes
greater than, baseline performance levels, but also
that the length of performance benefi t was directly proportional
to the length of the nap (e.g., a 15-min nap led
to 2 h of benefi t while a 4-h nap led to 10 h of benefi t).
However, it was also noted that, regardless of nap length,
the performance benefi t decreased as postnap interval
increased (i.e., the benefi ts of a 4-h nap were greater
shortly after awakening than after 10 h, though performance
at the later time still met or exceeded baseline
performance).


There is a direct correlation between the benefit of a nap and the duration of the nap. At best, this Polyphasic Sleep Cycle is a glorified system of power-napping. It was found in the paper that "a 15-min nap led to 2 h of benefit", from this is apparent that the naps throughout the day do lead to a minimum and temporary benefit, and by spacing the naps out, one can postpone feeling the fatigue or suffering the side effects of sleep deprivation. However, even a 4 hour nap led only to a 10 hour benefit. Even if you breakdown the sleep cycle into 4hrs +4*15mins, you have only accounted for 4+10+4*2+4*(.25) = 23 hours. Doing any less than this is insane, especially when you consider that the study uses these numbers to measure hours until fatigue becomes problematic, not hours until sleep debt is accrued. In addition, as you're well aware, circadian phase comes into play and makes some times far more optimal than others.

I don't doubt that Polyphasic Sleep can be utilized with careful management, discipline, and consideration. However, if you have a social life, a job, or a family, it is not practical. Just my opinion, but it does seem that for someone with such intimate knowledge of the self, that nearly two and half weeks should be enough time to comfortably adjust a sleep cycle. I can, at this point, see almost no benefit to Polyphasic Sleep when it is weighed against the occasional powernap. Keep us updated, and best of luck!

[Forevernade]

"2-, 4-, or 8-h nap before 52 h of continuous operations"
No periods included are periods that synchronize with natural sleeping cycles. A proper study would have used 1.5, 3, 4.5, 6, 7.5, 9 or 10.5 hour sleeps. At no point does a 'lifestyle' polyphasic sleeper have to have an extended period of sleep deprivation such as 52h of continuous operations.


The length of performance benefi t was directly proportional to the length of the nap (e.g., a 15-min nap led to 2 h of benefi t while a 4-h nap led to 10 h of benefi t).

As you can see the benefit to nap length is not linear. This clearly shows that shorter sleeps are ''worth more for their weight" than longer sleeps. 15 mins is implied to be worth 6 times it's length in short term rest, whereas a 4h nap is implied to be worth only 1.5 times it's length in short term rest.


(i.e., the benefi ts of a 4-h nap were greater
shortly after awakening than after 10 h, though performance
at the later time still met or exceeded baseline
performance).

The idea behind frequent naps is there is no later time to exceed the decrease in later performance, and the benefit of the nap is still reaped.


Examining the impact of various individual factors
(circadian phase, sleep need, etc.) on susceptibility to
decrements and the effi cacy of countermeasures will
facilitate optimal fatigue management in the aviation
environment.

Lastly, they made no attempt whatsoever to change the circadian cycle of any of their test subjects, and instead accepted the fact that they will be fighting against the circadian cycle the entire test. Therefore, although the publication is directly applicable to those who are unwilling to change their circadian cycle, the research is void for anyone who is willing to change.


In case I didn't make it clear, all of the detrimental effects experienced in the first 7 days have completely gone. I am not suffering emotional instability, nor do I have cognitive problems or digestive problems. All these things sorted them selves out.

[TSGames]

Lastly, they made no attempt whatsoever to change the circadian cycle of any of their test subjects, and instead accepted the fact that they will be fighting against the circadian cycle the entire test. Therefore, although the publication is directly applicable to those who are unwilling to change their circadian cycle, the research is void for anyone who is willing to change.

Perhaps it is just me, but for myself, and most of the people I know, adjusting circadian cycle to account for four naps throughout the day is simply not an option. Napping at the same time every day, four times a day, is quite nearly impossible for an airplane pilot, anyone who works variable shifts often, or anyone that works 40+ hours per week, not to mention people with a lot of friends. As I am not aware of any data showing that the circadian cycle can be adjusted without any consistency, it seems to me that assuming that people in general will be able to adjust their circadian cycle is an unreasonable assumption. I therefore purport that this data is, in fact, more relevant to most people exactly because it does not rely on adjusting the circadian cycle.

Just my two cents. Hope the experiment continues to go well for you; keep us posted.

[ForzaFiori]

As I am not aware of any data showing that the circadian cycle can be adjusted without any consistency, it seems to me that assuming that people in general will be able to adjust their circadian cycle is an unreasonable assumption.

Have you ever met a person who works 3rd shift? Or an infant? or someone from Spain/Latin America who takes a siesta? All three have changed their circadian cycle at some point. The person on 3rd shift has reversed when the sleepiness kicks in from when the sun goes down to when it comes up. An infant goes from a polyphasic cycle to a monophasic cycle. People who take siestas get rid of the normal monophasic cycle for a byphasic cycle, sleeping less at night, and having a short nap around 2ish. It happens naturally all over. People who do polyphasic cycles are just taking it to the next level.

[TSGames]

Have you ever met a person who works 3rd shift? Or an infant? or someone from Spain/Latin America who takes a siesta? All three have changed their circadian cycle at some point. The person on 3rd shift has reversed when the sleepiness kicks in from when the sun goes down to when it comes up. An infant goes from a polyphasic cycle to a monophasic cycle. People who take siestas get rid of the normal monophasic cycle for a byphasic cycle, sleeping less at night, and having a short nap around 2ish. It happens naturally all over. People who do polyphasic cycles are just taking it to the next level.
That's very good for those who are able to do it. In my experience, those who can do this are in a distinct minority. Polyphasic Sleep is not something that a majority of people can manage even if they try; schedules simply don't allow for it. On a side note, a siesta falls much closer to a powernap than a polyphasic sleep cycle, and is therefore much more manageable and practical. It is easy to change a circadian cycle, but it is not possible to change it without a consistent base. It is possible, however, to manage for short durations without any consistency, just like the pilots mentioned in the study would operate for 52 hour continuous periods. However, there is no data to suggest that just because it can be managed for short periods, that it could or should be managed for long periods, rather the data suggests exactly the opposite.

[EDIT]
Upon further reading, it seems there is a misunderstanding here. I was not claiming that people are unable to change their circadian cycle due to any biological or psychological inability. Rather, most people are unable to alter their circadian cycle because their cycle is based around something like a job, and is heavily influenced by things like friends and family. Altering a circadian cycle, independent of these factors, is in every way biologically and psychologically possible for almost every human, it is not, however, practically possible for the great majority of humans. Powernapping, on the other hand, is possible for most, and seems to have more than enough benefits to make it a viable, if not preferable, alternative to a Polyphasic Sleep Cycle.

[Forevernade]

Does power napping give you more hours in the day? I thought it gave you less hours in the day. If that is the case, then that is what makes polyphasic more preferable than power napping.

Update: I woke up at 2am after a 3h nap and felt much better today. Napped at 4am and again at 8am. I will nap at lunch and dinner, so it seems I naturally want 4x15min naps for a 3h core.

[Forevernade]

So I am watching a show on TV called "10 things you should know about sleep"

summarised:
Do not drink alcohol before sleep.
Carbs before sleeping, and before workouts. Insulin makes you sleepy.
Protein after sleeping. Amino acids make you more alert.
Whole body tense/relax routine for up to 20 mins.
Starve yourself half a day to reset your circadian cycle. Sort of...
The power of daylight and melatonin.
Have a structured timetable for sleep.
Smell of lavendar and digestion of valerium increases quality and quantity (in order) of sleep.
Reduce sleep (or, time in bed and lying down) to help reduce symptoms of insomnia.
Bath before bed lowers core temperature and thus helps you sleep.

[Iferus]

I was on the Uberman cycle for about 1.5-2 months at the begining of the year.

I'd recommend it to anyone interested. While I was doing it I felt better overall; more alert, happier & my health actually improved (probably because I used some of the extra time I had each day to excersize).

I didn't notice any drawbacks in terms of health, some of the ones I had heard could be problems were an inability to recover from excersize and a slowed rate of healing as well as a general decline in health. I observed none of these and in fact felt that my health had improved overall.

The only reasons I stopped are:
1. It does take some effort, you have to pay attention to when you sleep etc. Even once you've fully adjusted it still takes some monitoring.
2. It doesn't mesh very well with the rest of society (For me this was a fairly minor concern but it could be important to others).
3. I don't really need the extra time right now.

When first switching to the Uberman cycle I just jumped straight into it, no easing in period or anything.
I found that this worked well for me; I was fully adjusted after about 3-5 days and suffered only about a day of being really tired.
Of course your own results will vary somewhat, I found that my experience differed at least a little from those which I had read about.

Hope I was helpful.

EDIT: I just want to be clear that I feel that the benefits of a polyphasic sleep schedule greatly outweigh the drawbacks and I intend to start again when I get to a point when I could use the extra time, probably college.


That was my experience as well. Unfortunately, problem number two was a major problem to me. You just can't skip a nap. The extra time to excersize is great though.

[Forevernade]

Hmm, I havent had many problems meshing with society... I tried to organise my core sleep so that I went to bed when everyone else did (11-11:30pm). All my extra hours are in the wee hours of the morning, so I am not taking a 3h sleep at a disturbing time. Naps are after breakfast, after lunch and after dinner, so no one I know is doing anything in particular at those times anyways.

[Forevernade]

GASP! gasp... its amazing! I am so excited.
Its the 3rd time i have lucid dreamt since I began polysleeping and this is the first time i have been able to actually maniplate the events, consciously
:smalltongue:
This is a big step for me, and hopefully I will have more lucid dreams in the future, and hopefully some better quality ones too... So far I have only had nightmare-material lucid dreams. This is how the dream went:

It was night and I stood on the driveway looking for my dog. Instead, there was a giant-sized ferret with dangerous porcupine spines coming from it's fur, on my drive way. The ferret was approaching me like it was hunting me, passively aggressive. There was an intensity in the atmosphere, and then the darkness began to feel thick. I felt an intense numbness, things began to enter into a pseudo slow motion and the thickness of the darkness began to give me clustophobia... so it was going to turn into a nightmare!
And then.... then I realised I was dreaming!
And I said to myself that I was dreaming and that I should force lightning the ferret. So i tried and tried, and whilst my own body was in my control, no powers came of my efforts. I couldnt do anything until the ferret was really close and about to attack me, at which point lightning jumped out of my fingers and electricuted it! Success! I was a Sith force user!
The ferret was hurt and angry and tried to get to me so I jumped into the air and bounced on top of it like a mario character, but it all still felt so viscous.
Instead of being in 3rd person or platform, like my dreams normally were, I realised afterward that i was in 1st person... this is new.
When I woke up and I was looking at something in the dream, that part of the dream-vision stayed in my vision, even though I was awake. A clothes line was swaying gently in a non-existent breeze entering my room. This kind of hallucination I have experienced before, waking up out of a hyper-real dream state - That one time was when I happened to sleep at an angle that meant my head was below my waist and a lot of blood was pooling in my brain, I presume.
Eventually it faded, after 10 seconds of staring intently trying to will it to stay in my vision. Some really peaceful sci-fi music that was playing in the background the whole time, but I never noticed, and that eventually faded too.

:smallbiggrin:

[Fable Wright]

...so let me get this straight. You went to sleep, and then dreamed you were stalked by a huge porcupine-ferret that ate your dog, and then zapped it with force lightning in a first-person shooter style.

I now no longer believe that polyphasic sleep cycles cut down on your creativity.

And it would be really cool to dream like that. :smalltongue:

[Forevernade]

...so let me get this straight. You went to sleep, and then dreamed you were stalked by a huge porcupine-ferret that ate your dog, and then zapped it with force lightning in a first-person shooter style.

I now no longer believe that polyphasic sleep cycles cut down on your creativity.

And it would be really cool to dream like that. :smalltongue:

Yeah it was awesome! I feel relived that I pretty much saved myself from having a nightmare. Normally I would be frozen to the ground and unable to move, or I was start running away in super-viscous slow motion with erratic emotions of panic and anxiety. The dream would never end because the thing that chases me never catches me, even though it is faster than me, and the chase would never end. But with my conscious thought, I manned up and faced my fears! Dealt with that mo'fo spikey ferret the only way a true nerd can. LIGHTNINGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!! Strangely though, the lightning was much thinner in my dream than in the movies and games. I think I was assuming the thinness and the fact that I could only attack the ferret at close range because I was only an amateur force user, a beginner.

[TFT]

This seems like the best place to ask this:

So going to college, I've had to adjust my schedule. It goes something like this.

Work Mondays and Wednesdays (Wake up at 6) 7-11 A.M., class at 3:30 P.M.-6:30
Classes Tuesday (Wake up at 7) 9A.M.-9P.M., with scattered breaks in between
Classes Thursday (Wake up at 7) 9 A.M. - 4:30 P.M., scattered breaks
Work Friday (Wake up at 6) 7-11 A.M., no class.

So, I figured that going to sleep by 12 and just powernapping my way through on weekdays to make up the sleep would become routine and work.

However, my question comes in on the weekends: I like sleeping in. I also like staying up later. Is it going to hurt me if I go to sleep around 1 A.M. and wake up around 11 or 12? Is it going to negatively affect my weekdays?

...That's about it.

[Forevernade]

This seems like the best place to ask this:

So going to college, I've had to adjust my schedule. It goes something like this.

Work Mondays and Wednesdays (Wake up at 6) 7-11 A.M., class at 3:30 P.M.-6:30
Classes Tuesday (Wake up at 7) 9A.M.-9P.M., with scattered breaks in between
Classes Thursday (Wake up at 7) 9 A.M. - 4:30 P.M., scattered breaks
Work Friday (Wake up at 6) 7-11 A.M., no class.

So, I figured that going to sleep by 12 and just powernapping my way through on weekdays to make up the sleep would become routine and work.

However, my question comes in on the weekends: I like sleeping in. I also like staying up later. Is it going to hurt me if I go to sleep around 1 A.M. and wake up around 11 or 12? Is it going to negatively affect my weekdays?

...That's about it.

If you are following polyphasic logic, then you would be best to get up at the same time every day, go to bed at 1AM and get up at 5:30AM, get up, go back for 20 minutes, get up again every day. That will feel like you have a 20 minute sleep in every day, and you will have an extra 15 mins in the mornings to use at your pleasure.
Then you need to look at the gaps in your timetable and work out when you can fit in an extra 45 min or 1.5h, and/or an extra 20 minute nap or three.

I find napping at the same time every day is not very important, but going to having my core sleep at the same time every day IS.
For example you may want to try get a 45min nap in at 2:30, if your timetable allows a 45min break on tuesdays and thursdays, you can shift those naps by up to an hour either way.

As for sleeping in... you may not like it at first, but simply don't sleep in! You won't miss them once you start dreaming in nap times. Just keep having that 45 min nap at 2:30, or whatever, on weekends.

[TSGames]

So, I figured that going to sleep by 12 and just powernapping my way through on weekdays to make up the sleep would become routine and work.

However, my question comes in on the weekends: I like sleeping in. I also like staying up later. Is it going to hurt me if I go to sleep around 1 A.M. and wake up around 11 or 12? Is it going to negatively affect my weekdays?

...That's about it.

You seem to have about a four and a half hour break on Monday and Wednesday. Assuming two hours for transit and lunch, that still leaves you with 2 hours of nap time. You also seem to have time for a nap on Friday afternoon(sidenote:that way you can be ready for the parties!). Since you're already planning on getting between 5 and 7 hours sleep per night, you should be fine on this schedule. On the weekends, when you sleep in over 9 hours, I would recommend getting in the habit of doing some kind of physical activity after you wake up, in order to remove fatigue from sleeping for too long. For myself, I found that a thorough set of stretches would work wonders after waking up from a 10 or 14 hour sleep, and I would feel great the rest of the day(what? I was in college once, too).

[TFT]

You seem to have about a four and a half hour break on Monday and Wednesday. Assuming two hours for transit and lunch, that still leaves you with 2 hours of nap time. You also seem to have time for a nap on Friday afternoon(sidenote:that way you can be ready for the parties!). Since you're already planning on getting between 5 and 7 hours sleep per night, you should be fine on this schedule. On the weekends, when you sleep in over 9 hours, I would recommend getting in the habit of doing some kind of physical activity after you wake up, in order to remove fatigue from sleeping for too long. For myself, I found that a thorough set of stretches would work wonders after waking up from a 10 or 14 hour sleep, and I would feel great the rest of the day(what? I was in college once, too).

I actually don't go home on Mondays and Wednesdays. However, there are some pretty comfy chairs in the Student Union :smallbiggrin:. The idea of doing something after I wake up is one I didn't think of, however. That might help me actually feel awake even when I'm actually trying to make up sleep, kind of.

@Forevernade: I guess that makes sense. The only way for that to actually work well would be to make it constant. Depending on how well what I'm doing now works out, that is probably what I'll end up adjusting to.

[Forevernade]

I slept in today... 10 hours! :smallsigh:
Don't worry, hehe I meant to...

I was about to go on a rant as to why you can't sleep in on the weekends

Instead, I decided to ask my self "how can you get sleeping in on weekends to work?" A much more scientifically creative reaction. So reviewing all the information I have gathered, I noticed one experiment "Circadian Fasting" .
If you fast for 15-16 hours before going on an international flight, you can reduce the symptoms of jet-lag. You habitually eat breakfast at the same time every morning, for the last million years, right? Your body knows breakfast time is wake up time, so if you eat, that must be the start of your day. The circadian cycle aligns itself with your breakfast time. In the experiment they make their test subject fast for 16 hours, and then eat breakfast at the start of the new day. I ate at 7:30AM today and go to bed at 12 midnight, and I will be waking up at 4:30 to eat as big a breakfast as I can handle. Thats' 21 hours, hopefully the difference isn't important.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZbpCUivDPc&feature=related

Oh man! I want that chicken burrito.... EXTRA CHEESE!!!!

So, sleeping 10 hours should screw everything up, according to all my experiences. But if the circadian fast works, nothing should go wrong, or at least, less should go wrong than I expect.

"...the persons in the fasted state were permitted black coffee..." (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WN4-4C4FN8G-S3&_user=10&_coverDate=05/31/1970&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1471922350&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=02b2eeb931006425780215945f33b5c5&searchtype=a)

So, later tonight, when I am at a party, I am going to have a black coffee, and nothing else!

Wish me luck.

[Forevernade]

Fasted Reset Day 1

Seems to be going completely fine, as if I had slept from 11-3:30. but a total shift of 1h, which I have done before and felt bad from, does not seem to have the same effect this time.

I napped lightly morning and afternoon, I will see how I am tomorrow.

EDIT: I must say, the fast was very very painful, I would not want to do this every weekend lol. So even though it shows the evidence supports the circadian fast article, I still dont think it would be sustainable, or healthy, to fast every sunday. Though there are religions that have a fast sunday. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Sunday) Refer to the medical section at the bottom of the page.

[CrazedMalarite]

I am going to be experimenting with different over the counter drugs to see which effect me most positively.

This seems to me like a terrible time to try this. As you introduce more variables (different sleep cycle, drugs, whatever else), you can't tell for sure what is causing any effects you might see. I understand you want to find the best option as fast as possible, but it would be better to finish the sleep experiment (whether you stick with polyphasic sleep or not, get to the point you're set on a cycle and fully adjusted) and THEN introduce other variables.

I've only skimmed, but you seem to be using dreams as (the?) method of determining whether you get REM. What about people who never remember their dreams, what would they do to judge which sleep they're getting?

[Forevernade]

This seems to me like a terrible time to try this. As you introduce more variables (different sleep cycle, drugs, whatever else), you can't tell for sure what is causing any effects you might see. I understand you want to find the best option as fast as possible, but it would be better to finish the sleep experiment (whether you stick with polyphasic sleep or not, get to the point you're set on a cycle and fully adjusted) and THEN introduce other variables.

I've only skimmed, but you seem to be using dreams as (the?) method of determining whether you get REM. What about people who never remember their dreams, what would they do to judge which sleep they're getting?

Don't worry about the over-the-counter drugs. I am not going to be testing them yet. I will probably start them over Christmas.

I guess you have to practice remembering your dreams. The fact that you sort-of-remember you were dreaming at all is enough to know you were getting decent quality sleep.
If you don't remember any of your dreams, the chances are you either aren't consciously trying to remember them, or you are forcing yourself to wake from a non-dream stage of sleep. To fix this, change your alarm so that you wake up earlier or later, until you reach a point where you are waking up from dream sleep.
As I said previously, as you begin to nap, if you actually need the nap-time, then your body will automatically allocate nap times for REM sleep, so begin napping and see if you can remember dreams? You need to create a habit of 'remember your dream' the first thing you think of as you wake up, it is what I do.

From the reviews I have been reading, ZMA makes you dream a lot more than usual, more intensely, if anyone in America wants to try that out for me? I would appreciate it.

[Lioness]

Just a question regarding this whole thing.

Do polyphasic sleep cycles incorporate slow wave (Stage 4) sleep at all? If not, what are the negative effects of going without it?

[Coidzor]

Just a question regarding this whole thing.

Do polyphasic sleep cycles incorporate slow wave (Stage 4) sleep at all? If not, what are the negative effects of going without it?

Well, here at least, the powers that be seem to have eliminated Stage 4 by folding it in with Stage 3, so...

REM is when we dream, so if he's dreaming, he's got to get to REM which normally involves proceeding through to Stage 3 then back down to Stage 2 and then on to REM.

[Forevernade]

Well, here at least, the powers that be seem to have eliminated Stage 4 by folding it in with Stage 3, so...

REM is when we dream, so if he's dreaming, he's got to get to REM which normally involves proceeding through to Stage 3 then back down to Stage 2 and then on to REM.

Without having done an EEG, I can't say that I am certainly getting stage 4 sleep, but I know that I am getting deep sleep (stage 3) when I have my core sleep of 4.5 hours (now my standard). My girlfriend has poked me and I haven't responded, and I have dreamless states throughout the night.

In a 6-nap cycle, you would be forgoing any kind of deep sleep, skipping straight to REM. I have mentioned a few times in my earlier posts that I would assume this is physiologically dangerous. Certain processes are directly associated (and triggered) by the Night Sleep Sequence, which is only triggered by entering deep sleep. Preventing your body from getting any deep sleep might be detrimental to your immune system, increasing the chance of disease and cancer, and may be detrimental to your cardiovascular system (deep sleep triggers a 'muscle tone relaxation', which may mean the heart's cells use this time to repair), and you will be losing out on the large spike of HGH which occurs 1 hour after the onset of sleep.

tldr; I would think you need deep sleep, and for that, a core sleep. 1.5h or 3h core sleep probably is the minimum core sleep to function healthily.

For those of you who are interested in reading a negative review, a biologist has written (http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm) 2 articles (http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic2010.htm#what_changed_in_5_years)on polyphasic sleep and why it is unsafe/does not work. There is also this chart (http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic2010.htm#alertness_circadian), for those interested in optimizing their naps.


EDIT It is interesting Stampi's chart shows that the 'napping windows' of his polyphasic sleeper is at the 3h, 10h, 17h and 20h marks. Remember that Stampi's study only contained a single person, and ymmv.

[Forevernade]

:smallsigh: I woke today.... 7 hours after sleeping.
Unfortunately fasting is not the cure-all I hoped it would be. It reduced symptoms of sleep deprivation, so it is still useful in that regard, for adaptation, but it did not instantly reset my circadian cycle. I am probably going to have to reintroduce my body to 4.5h of sleep, after mid-term exams (begin in a couple of days).

I am still going to timing my meals so that I eat only after my naps. Small sugary snack before naps to help settle cravings, and a large protein meal after naps should wake me up. Now I need to wait until 8 before I can have breakfast

EDIT: I will probably give Stempi more credit than usualy, because since I woke at 7:30, and it is now 11, his prediction on the chart shows that I should be sleepy 3.5 hours after waking, and its 3.5h. Interesting. I will make more comparisons later today and tomoz.
According his predictions I should be sleepy at 11:30, 3, 6:30 and then should be wakeful for up to 6 hours.
What is interesting, is that if you napped according to Stampi's charts, then it is not an equidistant napping pattern like the standard template.


<table border="1">
<tr>
<td>12:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>12:30</td>
<td>Sleep</td>
</tr>
<td>1:00</td>
<td>Sleep</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1:30</td>
<td>Sleep</td>
</tr>
<td>2:00</td>
<td>Sleep</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2:30</td>
<td>Sleep</td>
</tr>
<td>3:00</td>
<td>Sleep</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>3:30</td>
<td>Sleep</td>
</tr>
<td>4:00</td>
<td>Sleep</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4:30</td>
<td>Sleep</td>
</tr>
<td>5:00</td>
<td>Wake</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>5:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>6:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>6:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>7:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>7:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>8:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>8:30</td>
<td>Nap</td>
</tr>
<td>9:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>9:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>10:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>10:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>11:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>11:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>12:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>12:30</td>
<td>Nap</td>
<td>:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>1:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>2:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>3:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>3:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>5:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>5:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>6:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>6:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>7:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>7:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>8:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>8:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>9:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>9:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>10:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>10:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<td>11:00</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>11:30</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>

How do you html table?

EDIT: I think I sleep best with my beanie on, covering my eyes.

[Forevernade]

Well, the second adjustment has gone terribly! I tried waking up at 3:00 and 4:30 today, as opposed to the normal 2:00 and 3:30 and it really DID NOT WORK. The post-fasted day was perfectly fine, but my body clock really wants to drag me back into my old 2/3.30 time.
They say that it is easiest to shift your circadian cycle by 30 minute blocks or less. Considering I shifted an hour, I am not suprised I am having trouble. I will persist by shifting an hour and a half, which should be a complete sleep cycle for me, so I should be waking up at the end of my REM again. I have realised your Stage Sleep is dependant on when you wake up, not when you go to bed, so consistent waking time as much more important than consistent sleeping times. Remember that!

Anyway I dont reccomend doing the sleep-in on weekends thing, just from personal experience it is not nice on polyphasic sleep.

Also, I had another Lucid Dream today! I was at a train station trying to work out where I was, because I made a strange turn at my local park and somehow found this alternate train station that I never knew existed. Of course all the station names were completely made up by my creativity, so everything was new! Anyways, I was about to backtrack to my local park, when I realised I was dreaming and suddenly shout "Cool so then I can FLY!!!!!" :smallbiggrin: and tried flying straight away. It seems I am still on my training wheels, because I floated quickly about 3-4 meters into the air before having to flap wildly or else fall back down. I grabbed onto a nearby pole in fright, and climbed back down.
Well, inevitably, as all boy's lucid dreams are prone to be, I quickly and selfishly altered the dream to be as sexual as possible :smallredface:, and after sustaining that for a couple of minutes I woke up. :smallfrown:

So yeah, more lucid dreams, failed experiments and logical alterations. Tomoz I will wake up later, and see if my 1.5h blcok theory works for me.

[Fable Wright]

{table=head]Time|nap|Awakeness|Other
2:00|Yes|Asleep|
3:00|No|Tired|
4:00|No|Awake|Bird attacked me.
5:00|Yes|Asleep|[/table]

Here's a better format for the table, if you wanted one. It makes it more legible. And it could give a more accurate representation of how you feel in the day, if you chose to use it regularly.

[onthetown]

I think it's great that you're experimenting and providing us with all sorts of information about this, which some of us can't try because of schedule conflicts and whatnot. This is really interesting...

But I really, really don't think it's a good idea to experiment with your health.

Sleep and overall health are closely related. You can find studies about being able to heal and restore your health faster and being less likely to have heart problems because of the proper amount of sleep. I understand that polyphasic sleep is normal in the animal kingdom (even baby humans live on it), but we live in a monophasic world and you have been sleeping monophasically for your entire life.

I wasn't going to comment because it seemed pretty harmless at first, but the forced sleep deprivation fasting thing just stunned me, not to mention your comment about trying over-the-counter drugs later this year.

It's your decision, but this is my two cents: I sincerely hope that this works out well for you, because the thought of people risking their health to try something they saw on the internet terrifies me.

[Forevernade]

Pretty much anything I do has been done before. I am just recording my own journey and making my own notes and observations. Often I find people do not make observations, and instead blunder through their journy blindly.

I am basing my over-the-counter drug experiment on evidence provided by an entire forum dedicated to mental health, and I am basing polyphasic sleep on the success of others. The fasting experiment is hardly dangerous at all. Some religions fast every sunday, others fast an entire day every few months, it is not an unheard idea. What I do may scare some of you occasionally, but I put that down to the fact that you are scared of change. Like a daredevil attempting to dive out of a plane, or a wild-life show host wrestling a crocodile, you should consider this entertainment. There are worse things I could be doing.

I have applied to enter into a sleep study at my local clinic. If my request is passed, it will be interesting to see the results.

[rakkoon]

I'm guessing you girlfriend is not joining the experiment, how is she handling your different time schedule?

[Forevernade]

Good news everyone! I have organised a 24h sleep study to be performed on me. It is a "hospital grade" sleep lab, including EEG, infrared and a whole bunch of other things which judge quantity, quality, and questionability of stage sleep, duration and all the other little details in between. It will cost 110AU and is subsidized by Medicare, so I am very excited! I will be scheduling it for in 2 weeks, so that my sleeping patterns are settled again, and no important exams are coming up.


I'm guessing you girlfriend is not joining the experiment, how is she handling your different time schedule?

No she is not partaking in the experiment. She doesn't seem to mind though. We still sleep together, but when I get up I don't disturb her and she just sleeps through until her normal time. The alarm wakes her up, but she is awake only for a couple of seconds and just goes back to sleep, forgetting anything happened by the morning. I am going to bed at the same time as her, so there are no problems with keeping her up. It is even good, because I can bring her breakfast in bed sometimes!

[onthetown]

What I do may scare some of you occasionally, but I put that down to the fact that you are scared of change.

There's a difference between fear of change and concern about somebody's health.

[Forevernade]

Today I woke up perfectly fine, at 5am! The 1.5h interval shift seems to have worked, and I might even go as far as to say I could probably shift it another 1.5h forward if I really needed to, without suffering much consequence.

Today I woke up out of an incredibly vivid dream. I could remember so many details! I was an egyptian boy who was part of a very large family, and we were part of the main city's bridge-building project, so together we experimented with different ways to construct bridged without having crossed the actual river. It all ended quite comically, with us shooting one end of the bridge to the other using bow and arrow, or using a rail-balloon to drift it over to the right length.

After a while we decided to move out into the desert, and so we bought a house. Whilst we were moving to our new house, it was incredibly windy and dangerous and we were blown off our feet into the sky if we were not careful. When we finally arrived at our new home, I began shuffling furniture around and optimizing the geometric shapes within the room to optimize space, much to my familiy's surprise I was successful.
But then one of my brothers was playing around with a fire-cracker and sparks began to fly everywhere, and because our new home was made of wood and tree-fur (don't ask me why) when the wind blew one of his crackers back into our house things began to catch on fire! Everyone froze in panic, but my little Egyptian kid character suddenly shouted "Spit!" and began spitting on the small pieces of ember which were beginning to glow all around the house. The wind was helping ignite the little embers, and my father was in danger because an ember was in his beard! So I started spitting into his beard to put out the flame... and a horrendous battle ensued of spit vs wind, igniting and dousing the embers! I was spitting on walls, spitting in my fathers face and all over the place! Once everyone else caught on to WTH I was doing, they began to spit too, and together we saved our new home from burning down! And then I woke....

EDIT

A neat little rule: "have naps, and only sleep in 20, 45, 1.5 or 3 hours blocks that interject an interval that is a multiple of 1.5h after your normal waking time"

I will be testing this rule after another 4 days reregulation period. If after 5 days I have not suffered bad sleep or inefficient waking times, I spend a single night on an altered timetable, sleeping 1.5h ahead of my schedule, before reverting back.
Then, after another reregulation period of 5 days I will spend a single night sleeping 3h ahead of my normal schedule, before reverting back.

[Forevernade]

A bit of self-advertising here.

http://thegeck.blogspot.com/

My new blog has hit the interwebs. It is an informal informational that covers the latest technology, mental and physical health, and anything that relates to the guidence of humans toward posthumanism.

[TSGames]

I hope nothing has befallen our polyphasic chronicler. It has been several days without an update....surely our enterprising poster has time for another update?

[VanBuren]

I hope nothing has befallen our polyphasic chronicler. It has been several days without an update....surely our enterprising poster has time for another update?

He's probably pulling a Rip Van Winkle and catching up on all that lost sleep.

Maybe we'll have hovercars by the time he wakes up?

EDIT: Of course his blog updated earlier today, but that doesn't prove anything. It could be a ghost writer. Ghost writer!

[Forevernade]

Fear not, my fledgelings! I am still here. I have had little to update on, and since the start of my new blog, and the mid-semester exams, I have been distracted.

I am still polyphasically sleeping. Unfortunately daylight savings has just begun here in Australia, so I have had to do another push forward by an hour. Earlier, since my 10 hour sleep many days ago, I decided to do the nice thing for my girlfriend and change my sleep to 12:30-5AM. I am also doing interviews for a job, so I can afford the EEG and study that was offered to me a while back.

I have decided that the third sleep in my day, on 4.5h is not always necessary, and I have only been taking my third nap when I feel I am tired, rather than forced napping every afternoon. I am napping at 8:30AM and 1:30pm.

It turns out the 1.5 hour shift to 5AM did take a toll on my napping. I have not been napping very efficiently lately, and have taken 10 minutes of my 20 to get to sleep. Reduced nap times have made me want to sleep in longer, and today because of daylight savings, in my confusion I accidentally did. my phone automatically bumped forward 1h, and because of the 1h change, I woke up at the wrong time, before my second alarm went off, and so I ended up waking 4-5 times though-out the morning, which ruined my napping even more today.

It seems that my system works, but it is hard to stick to because of the changes in everyday life. I am happy to deal with these changes, as I am enjoying being up at 3:30/5AM every morning! Hopefully I can relearn to nap again.

EDIT: It is nice when my threads are encouraged with posts from other people. Sometimes I feel like I am writing to myself, even though the view-count says otherwise. Or maybe it's a bot constantly visiting my page? Do you think a robot will be my friend?

[VanBuren]

EDIT: It is nice when my threads are encouraged with posts from other people. Sometimes I feel like I am writing to myself, even though the view-count says otherwise. Or maybe it's a bot constantly visiting my page? Do you think a robot will be my friend?

I think the rational thing would be to invoke Occam's Razor; the simples explanation is usually the best after all.

And what makes as much sense as the idea that your polyphasic sleep has rendered you retroactively insane and that all of us are merely pieces of your fractured psyche?

Nothing. Nothing makes as much sense.

[Forevernade]

Haha, I knew it was inevitable. I am now the token crazy guy of Giantitp? No naps make Forever go something something...

[VanBuren]

Haha, I knew it was inevitable. I am now the token crazy guy of Giantitp? No naps make Forever go something something...

No, of course not. Giantitp doesn't exist. Not outside your head anyway.

[Adumbration]

Just popping in to say that I, for one, read your posts occasionally. (Mostly when I'm bored).

So yeah. Do post how the medicals went after they're done. Those ought to be interesting. :smallsmile:

[TSGames]

Or maybe it's a bot constantly visiting my page? Do you think a robot will be my friend?
We call him Friendroid #A264F, he would love to be your friend.

http://www.soyacincau.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/android_heart.jpg

Then, there's this guy....

http://www.fondostv.com/bulkupload/wallpapers-futurama/Caricaturas/Futurama/Rapero%20Bender_800.jpg
You wish he was your friend.

[Forevernade]

I had a really strange sleep this morning. It seems it was an intense Dreamstate Deep Sleep. But it was easy to come out of? Which suggests that it was light sleep. There was just enough noise and talking going on to keep me in a light sleep, but my body had sunk into a deep-sleep relaxation mode, where all your muscles go numb and floppy, or even paralized.

I wasn't paralized this time, so I wasnt deep Deep, but I was draeming incredibly hard about stupid things that could have happened this morning if things were slightly different, like if my girlfriend had stayed over last night, or if an extra person was in the room, or if I had no car, and there were heaps of different scenareos.

I beleive in the power of the mind, and now even moreso.
As I rose out of my deep sleep, my entire body was weak and untensile, but I had a thought, and decided to give my meditation techniques IN REVERSE! Instead of sending pretend energy from my limbs into my heart, I visualised pushing all that energy I had stored up in my heart, back into my limbs.
I had never done this before, so I didnt know what to expect, but as the visualization drew that pretend stuff into my hands, I could squeeze my hands incredibly hard and I could feel the lack of oxygen being crushed by my 'now incredibly active and energized hand'.
I do not have scientific explainations for these things, but I think I was simply changing the excitability of my neural pathways, somehow, and despite the lack of blood flow to my muscles, I was triggering my motor units incredibly fast and hard.

Try it yourself and tell me what you think. If you have never done the 'flow of energy' style meditation give it a go.
I start by imagining a soft white light as my energy stores, and really really slowly, I pretend I am pulling it away from my hands, up my arms, int my shoulders, along my chest, and it ends somewhere between my heart and my stomach. Then I do the same to my legs. As the energy moves, I pretend my muscles that are having energy taken away from them are relaxing more than they actually are. Eventually would learn to do both arms and legs at once.
Then I finish with my head. Then I begin to wiggle my eyes back and forth into a jitter, going random directions as fast as I can, and I keep that state.

Once you get the hang of this, try it in reverse, and see how hard you can tense your muscles. Doing this in reverse can be complemented by doing some tai chi... or what I call tai chi. I just do random movements that feel right. I probably look like an idiot, to both tai chi'ers and non-tai chi'ers alike, but it works for me so EH.

[Forevernade]

Ok this is an interesting one: I had a half-lucid dream. I knew, and kept on reminding myself that I was in dream, so I did two things.

I tried to memorize a couple of key words about something my mum was telling me, knowing that when I woke up I would most likely forget if I didn't
I was waiting for the right oppertunity to start properly lucidly dream


So... I found myself dreaming aware, but consciously not acting on it, and letting the dream run it's course as a normal dream anyway?

Has anyone had an extended 'aware' dream, but chosen not to lucidify it?

EDIT:

WOW now that is TWO lucid dreams in one day! I had another lucid dream at 2pm. I decided to try and draw out my dream as long as possible, so when I was in my house, I decided to explore my house until something changed. After a while of searching the house, my dream started to collapse. It was as if my vision was developing cataracts, and things were fading away from my peripherals inward. I don't remember what led me to this action, but I quickly closed my eyes and tried to meditate on stabilizing my dream-feeling, and when I opened my eyes again I was in a new place, a different dream!

This happened several times, and every time I would wake in a different room of my house, and it would be completely empty. I wanted to find a person to talk to in my dream (because those conversations seem the most interesting), so I kept on becoming hyperactive until my vision would fade, and I would close my eyes and meditate again, to reawaken. This happened about seven or eight times, and I think the dream drew out to about 15 minutes (the longest any of my lucid dreams have lasted has been about 3-4 minutes.)

The second time I tried re-dreaming, woke myself just enough to still be in dream-state, but I was completely in a non-dream. To explain this, let me say: I woke and I was aware of my room, but the room and bed I was in was not real. I quickly closed my eyes and much like I have been exercising before bed-time every night, I kept my eyes jerking back and forth in a seemingly random fashion to replicate the 'feeling' of REM-eyes. After 20 seconds of this, I went back into the lucid dream... mysterious!

Eventually I found my mum sitting in the study, and as she began to scold me for something or other, I decided to do the ultimate test: I began to undress myself and jump around naked!
But suddenly I doubted whether this was in fact a dream, and if it was real life! So I suddenly felt a pang of concern, what if what I was doing right now was going to have consequences for the rest of my life? Alas my mum continued to talk to me as if nothing was wrong, which led me to conclude I was in fact in a dream still, and so with a sigh of relief I woke up.

EDIT EDIT:
"REM-Eyes". First I do a pseudo meditation by pretending to draw my excitability from my limbs into my heart, and then I drain my thoughts of anything to do with real-life. Then when I am comfortable I begin to roll my eyes back and forth whilst keeping my mind blank. When the rolling feels comfortable I begin to erattically jerk my eyes in random directions until my eyes are jittering back and forth. After a while I become less wary about what my eyes are doing, and I can begin to let my mind wander. I try to keep my mind as visual as possible, exploring each thought as far as I can go before going to the next. All the while my eyes are still semi-consciously REMplicating. Eventually I fall asleep, and usually into a dream. If I am in the right state of mind I will become aware about half way through my normal dream, and the experiments begin!

[Forevernade]

http://thegeck.blogspot.com/2010/10/brain-entrainment.html

New Blog post about Brainwave Entrainment. I have found the study focus isochronics to be very useful, but I have not yet tested the delta waves ones. I cant really try it until I get my ipod fixed :(

[Forevernade]

My glandular is coming back, so I am wanting to sleep more often (sick = more sleep), so I have been having 1.5h naps whenever I get tired.

I have played through delta and theta waves on the brain entrainment program in each of these naps, and they are not so much 'more restful' but 'more blank'. Liiiiiike, it is hard to describe. If I am sleeping normally it will feel like sleep, I can remember that I slept, and I am aware that the period of time I was asleep had passed. But when I ran the wave tracks, it was as if the time I was asleep did not exist at all. I woke up and it felt like several minutes had passed, when in fact 90 minutes had passed, and this happened both times.

This doesn't say much about anything, other than there is a perceivable difference sleeping with waves. What is the difference? I won't know until I can organise a second (I still haven't gathered the money for the first) sleep study where I am sleeping with entrainment.

[Forevernade]

Well! I think it is time for an update:

Polyphasic sleep has become ingrained in my brain, and I can randomly do a normal 7.5 hour night without repercussions. The next day I just wake up at 5am and I am alive and kicking like normal...

I generally sleep in if I am sleeping with my girlfriend, or after a night of drinking.