Day 5 of "Everyman" Polyphasic Sleep Schedule

Alright, so I'm going to let the cat out of the bag now that I feel at least somewhat adapted to my new sleeping schedule. I've tried twice to adapt to a polyphasic sleep schedule and failed twice. My wife thought I was on one of my crazy adventures and so she insisted I go to bed. That, and trying to fight my own internal clock proved too much. Both times were the exact same way. I didn't even last the night.

However, I just went to Italy. I always do a lot of reading on my vacations, and one of the books I read was "The Integral Trees" by Larry Niven. Essentially, humans have adapted to living within a smoke ring within a gas torus. Pretty heavy duty thinking. I occurred to me that the battle wasn't so much physiological as it was psychological. If something is all you know, then what else is there? But one the candle has been lit, an entire realm is opened to understand and partake of.

I made a plan to adapt to polyphasic sleeping as soon as I returned from Italy. The reason I chose such a time was due to the already occurring 6 hour jet lag that I had to endure whether or not I chose to adapt to polyphasic sleep.

The jet arrived in Washington D.C. at around 2 P.M. I felt like crap due to the amount of turbulence. Anyway, we took a taxi (also excruciating) back to my in-laws place to crash for the night. Keep in mind that to me, at that time (at around 4 P.M.), it felt like 10 P.M. The fridge at my in-laws broke, so we had to clean, sanitize, and deodorize everything before actually relaxing from the trip. Couldn't have worked better for me though, because 10 P.M. is the time I start waning in lucidity. Having to exert that much energy combined with the time differences masked my internal clock. By the time we were actually eating dinner, it was around 6 P.M. We watched an episode of Game of Thrones and at 8 P.M. we went to bed. Honestly, I was attempting to stay up, but was unable to as it felt like 2 A.M. to me.

I woke up at 4 A.M. and made some coffee. Slightly disappointed with myself, I was determined to (as I thought) try again. But I don't think that I was trying again, because, as I see it, going to bed at that time threw a third wrench in the works, thus enabling me to start sleeping from a clean slate (so to speak). I attempted naps at both 6 A.M. and 12 P.M. I was unable to sleep during both times. We left D.C. at 3 P.M. and didn't arrive home until almost 7 P.M. This put me in a pickle, because I was driving and missed my nap by an hour. I let my wife go into her sister's house and I attempted to nap in the car (again, no sleep). Then we drove home and unpacked. At 11 P.M. we went to bed. I set the alarm for 2 A.M. and actually woke up!

When I got up, I read books. I had no schedule or to do list written out, but I knew I needed to keep my mind occupied, so I drank some coffee and read until 6 A.M. It was the same for 2 days; reading only to keep myself awake.

At that point I decided that I needed to accomplish some goals. I came up with a list of things I wanted to do, but never "had the time for." I didn't want to overburden myself with any one thing, as mental stress would make me regress into old habits. So I mixed as many quiet activities as I could. Knitting, penmanship practice, and learning computer programming were a few of the things I decided I would get better at 1% everyday. It has worked marvelously!

Now its day 5 and I feel great! While I'm not sleeping through my naps completely, I have attained about a 50% sleep rate and am having dreams during them. I try not to drink coffee or alcohol 3 hours prior to any nap. I've found that if I drink anymore that 1 beer during any waking period, I feel absolutely terrible, although I've still been able to adhere to the schedule. I've also found that as my life is structured around 4 appointments everyday, I'm less prone to wasting time doing nothing. The way I see it, if I'm fighting to stay awake for more hours of the day, I owe it to myself to do something worthwhile during that time.