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[09:03 - 09:35] That was cool! I think it may have been the first time since I got home that I woke from a mid-to-late-morning nap feeling well-rested rahter than completely exhausted.
[13:14 - 13:49] Easy.
[17:05 - 17:39] Not at all tired.
[21:13 - 21:49] Just fine as usual.
[01:10 - 01:45] All the way through to the whole awake block here.
[05:07 - 05:41] Woke feeling rested. As 9am approached, it started catching up with me again.
[08:36 - 09:07] I was so tired I decided to go ahead and take this nap a bit earlier rather than force myself to stay awake for another half an hour. Had trouble waking and getting out of bed. It took the better part of an hour out of bed (and food) before I felt recovered.
Speaking of food...everybody who's ever tried this polyphasic thing mentioned that their food intake increased while they were on it. They weren't kidding. I've always been somebody who wants a lot of food, although I can get away with more normal amounts or even forgetting meals for extended periods of time. Well, I got caught up in some stuff I was doing (playing video game, talking to friends, updating kernel on laptop, futzing with and eventually trying to hack drivers for wireless card) and didn't do so much eating. By which I mean I've had three smallish meals in the last 24 hours. I feel like I'm starving.
I need to come up with more variety in my food, too. The good news is that I have all this "extra time" which I can theoretically use to cook. I haven't yet, but that's partly a timing thing and partly a not wanting to handle knives while sleep deprived thing. It looks like a lot of the time gained by not sleeping is going to go toward preparing and consuming food. On the plus side, that probably means the food will be healthier and tastier than it might otherwise be.
By the way, did you notice that bit in the parentheses a couple paragraphs ago? That's right, I'm actually programming again. I got sufficiently pissed off about something that I decided to go ahead and see if I could take it into my own hands and make it work. So far, not really, but it's kind of promising (it worked once, but not reliably...so I'm on the right track, but there are probably some serious flaws since I'm screwing with things I only half understand at the moment, and those things are a kernel module).
I noticed something yesterday. The neat thing about Polyphasic Sleep is that you don't actually have to go to sleep. You just have to take short breaks from whatever you're doing to go nap, but you don't have those huge, multi-hour interruptions in your life. And you get all this extra time to do those things you always wished you had more time to do. The kicker is that you can't just go to sleep, and you have to find things to do to fill all that extra time you have. At least during the adjustment period, there's no, "I don't really want to deal with anything, I'll just go lie down and shut the world out for a bit." You never get to shut the world out. There's a mental recuperation from sleep that comes of the chance to just get away from it all . . . I'd never realized that consciously before last night. I just reached the point where there wasn't anything I felt like doing. But I had to find something to do, because sleep wasn't an option or I was going to mess it all up. Something to keep in mind if you're considering this for yourself, too . . . being good at coming up with activities you can do alone which will keep you engaged mentally is an important skill for this. The irony of all this is delicious: I have all this time, and so I have to come up with ways to fill it. I no longer have to sleep for hours at a time, but I don't get to if I want to. I may revisit this topic as I get used to it.
[13:14 - 13:49] Easy.
[17:05 - 17:39] Not at all tired.
[21:13 - 21:49] Just fine as usual.
[01:10 - 01:45] All the way through to the whole awake block here.
[05:07 - 05:41] Woke feeling rested. As 9am approached, it started catching up with me again.
[08:36 - 09:07] I was so tired I decided to go ahead and take this nap a bit earlier rather than force myself to stay awake for another half an hour. Had trouble waking and getting out of bed. It took the better part of an hour out of bed (and food) before I felt recovered.
Speaking of food...everybody who's ever tried this polyphasic thing mentioned that their food intake increased while they were on it. They weren't kidding. I've always been somebody who wants a lot of food, although I can get away with more normal amounts or even forgetting meals for extended periods of time. Well, I got caught up in some stuff I was doing (playing video game, talking to friends, updating kernel on laptop, futzing with and eventually trying to hack drivers for wireless card) and didn't do so much eating. By which I mean I've had three smallish meals in the last 24 hours. I feel like I'm starving.
I need to come up with more variety in my food, too. The good news is that I have all this "extra time" which I can theoretically use to cook. I haven't yet, but that's partly a timing thing and partly a not wanting to handle knives while sleep deprived thing. It looks like a lot of the time gained by not sleeping is going to go toward preparing and consuming food. On the plus side, that probably means the food will be healthier and tastier than it might otherwise be.
By the way, did you notice that bit in the parentheses a couple paragraphs ago? That's right, I'm actually programming again. I got sufficiently pissed off about something that I decided to go ahead and see if I could take it into my own hands and make it work. So far, not really, but it's kind of promising (it worked once, but not reliably...so I'm on the right track, but there are probably some serious flaws since I'm screwing with things I only half understand at the moment, and those things are a kernel module).
I noticed something yesterday. The neat thing about Polyphasic Sleep is that you don't actually have to go to sleep. You just have to take short breaks from whatever you're doing to go nap, but you don't have those huge, multi-hour interruptions in your life. And you get all this extra time to do those things you always wished you had more time to do. The kicker is that you can't just go to sleep, and you have to find things to do to fill all that extra time you have. At least during the adjustment period, there's no, "I don't really want to deal with anything, I'll just go lie down and shut the world out for a bit." You never get to shut the world out. There's a mental recuperation from sleep that comes of the chance to just get away from it all . . . I'd never realized that consciously before last night. I just reached the point where there wasn't anything I felt like doing. But I had to find something to do, because sleep wasn't an option or I was going to mess it all up. Something to keep in mind if you're considering this for yourself, too . . . being good at coming up with activities you can do alone which will keep you engaged mentally is an important skill for this. The irony of all this is delicious: I have all this time, and so I have to come up with ways to fill it. I no longer have to sleep for hours at a time, but I don't get to if I want to. I may revisit this topic as I get used to it.
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Speaking of which, have you read Nancy Kress's Sleepless trilogy? It centers around a gene therapy that negates the need for sleep. Society has all sorts of unexpected problems with this, and some interesting economic and moral theory gets bandied about as well. The first novel is Beggars in Spain.
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