I’ve been reading Steve Palina’s blog today. He successfully did polyphasic sleep for 5+ months and only stopped because he chose to. His polyphasic sleep blog posts are at http://www.stevepavlina.com/
There’s a few lessons I’ve learned from reading his work. One is that it’s ok to add in an extra nap during the tough period of the early morning. I’ve started implementing that.
Another is how important it is to not eat heavy meals. That’s one of the things he attributes a lot of his adjustment to. He’s vegan and there’s no way I’m doing that, but the principle of not overloading your digestive system is sound. I could probably stand to eat a bit more fresh fruit and veg. I do ok right now, but I’m probably a little short of fully healthy on that front, so I’ll be increasing that a bit.
I didn’t know what lucid dreams were until I read his blog. They’re times when you’re in a dream state and you’re aware you’re in a dream, but everything feels very real. From how he describes it, you have the conscious power to manipulate the dream. Well I just had a lucid dream. I have them fairly regularly. The most common theme for me is the ability to fly, using my hands (which are naturally large) to exert sufficient downwards pressure to allow me to float and direct my journey. It’s an incredible sensation.
I’ve gotten a much better understanding of how this whole polyphasic sleep thing works from reading Steve’s posts. I thought the goal was to reach deep sleep quickly, but Steve reckons the goal is to achieve REM sleep quickly. Dreaming and remembering your dreams is a sign you’re on the right track. If that’s the case, then I’m definitely on the right track.
Another thing he found important was not consuming any caffeine, even tea. I’ll try that for a bit and see if it helps.
I’ve been keeping a sleep diary, which is throwing up a few interesting patterns, like how tough it really is for me to stay awake between 4am and 9am. Perhaps that’s because before the challenge I used to sleep from about 1 or 2 am to 7 or 9 am. Hoping that having an extra nap in there will stop me oversleeping.
Steve also mentioned that as he adjusted to polyphasic sleep, he was able to stretch the time between some sleeps to be up to 7 hours apart, which would be a crucial ingredient of doing this long term.
It’s all an experiment and even if it were to fail for me, I’ve still learned a lot about myself and built some good habits. Jury’s still out on whether this experiment will be a success or not, but I’m going to keep pushing til the verdict is in 🙂