Rebuttal

Well it seems that Kelly has taken to filling the blog with insults toward me. I'll make a simple rebuttal here, and then consider it closed. Disputes in no way dominate the mood or relationship.

1. When I fall asleep, I don't remember afterwards. I had no idea how much extra I slept, because no one told me. It's not anyone's fault; I would expect to remember. But since I didn't know, I only recently was aware that I needed to watch out for this and take serious action to improve.
2. When I'm asleep, I have zero control over waking myself up. So if you, Kelly, know that I'm asleep, you're the only one who can do anything about it. It's true that I am responsible for staying awake, but I am certainly not responsible for waking up. Any reactions I have to your attempt at waking me or any difficulty you have is in no way voluntary or controllable on my part.
3. You fall asleep a lot too. I don't know how much relative to me, because I don't have memories of me falling asleep, but it's certainly not uncommon. I recently learned that you also might not be remembering it when you sleep, which would explain your feelings. However I make sure that I wake you up every time. I know how critical it is to not fall asleep, and I know how badly we need each other. It may be easier for me to wake you up, but it's certainly not a piece of cake; usually you fall asleep immediately after me waking you, so that the only solution is for us to take a walk for a while.
4. You cannot be confident about how close you are to being done to transitioning. You still fall asleep a lot; just yesterday, you were asleep immediately before and immediately after our nap. Feeling completely alert for much of the day is absolutely no sign of being close. When I was on a "regular" sleep schedule and stayed up all night, I could feel completely alert during the next day, as long as I was doing something. In fact, feeling any tiredness at all means you're not transitioned yet. As the original polyphasic sleeper says in her blog, until you're 30 whole days in you don't know anything.

I will say that we have definitely made progress. Since the very beginning, this time has felt very different from the other two times I've tried. It feels wonderful and I'm confident we will succeed. But we are scarily close to school starting, and we still get at least some kind of extra sleep every day. This is terribly unacceptable, and is the only reason we have not succeeded yet. But we still have a lot more time left; may the future dawn!

Kelly Day 12? I can't remember.

Some good news first. I feel like I'm pretty close to being fully transitioned. I've definitely gotten past the worst part. I'm getting immediate REM sleep during the day- the 3 pm, 7 pm and 11 pm naps leave me feeling refreshed and alert, when I do fall asleep. That's right, the 3 PM nap leaves me so refreshed that I can't fall asleep consistently during the 7 pm nap. When I do just lay there, I end up crashing right around 11:00, so it's coincident with a nap, almost. You might think this works out, but it seems as if the sleep debt accumulated is not dispersed enough by the 11 pm nap, so I feel pretty dead (though not as bad as during my stay at MIT) during the morning hours up to around 11 am, when it starts catching up again. So during the morning hours, oversleeping ocurrs and general microsleeping happens if I try to play video games or do anything comfortable. So alex and I still spend our mornings walking to stay alert.

I'm hoping this will change, though I fear it might be in some kind of equilibrium. I am getting REM sleep so, I can survive like this, just not comfortably. I need to be getting it more throughout the morning hours. I guess like, maybe it'll just change if I keep sleeping the cycle, and not screwing up. Alex and I overslept about 3 hours 3 days ago, somehow we forgot to set the our really good alarm. I'm getting small, 10 minute naps when left un-attended from microsleeping in my chair occassionally too. I don't know how much that is screwing me up, but if I'm getting rem in those tiny naps, then it probably will. Though, I can actually tell when I'm getting REM, because like they said, you have vivid dreams, and also, it feels much much much longer than 20 minutes sleeping. It's actually just like sleeping all night. It's magic. It's polyphasic.

I would be completely confident in saying that I'm polyphasic at this point. If I can get the night time sleep under control then I will call this experiment a success and become some kind of sleep superhero.

Unfortunately, I don't know how well Alex is doing. He has become more managable in his sleep-anywhere policy, but he's still consistently extra-napping. He expects me to wake him whenever he falls alseep on my floor, and I try to, but he's not very cooperative. I can fight him, but it gets to a point where I don't know how to wake him without violence or absurdity. Example: Last time he fell asleep on my floor, I piled everything on the floor in my room on top of him. This got to be quite an impressive stack, 4 text books, 3 large boxes of computer equipment (top heavy, stacked) a laundry hamper, some dirty clothes and miscellanious trash. I was going to put the lamp on him, but he woke up when I put my leather hat on his head. Yeah, you'd think it'd be the extreme weight of the stuff on him, but no, it was the hat. He wiggled around, confused (apparently he doesn't remember whats going on when he falls asleep) and I just rofl-coptered for about 5 minutes straight, because it was pretty hilarious looking. Then he complained that I should have taken a more direct route to waking him, but he fails to realize- this was the only and most direct route to waking him. Anyways...

I'm hoping to become a super hero some day soon, and with the power of anti-sleep, I will perform feats of immeasurable awesomeness.

Kelly - MIT and the last few days. (day 7 or 8?)

Alex and I decided to go to MIT and visit his friend there last friday. There is really no reason we have to be in worcester to transition and we think that there will be more to do in boston and cambridge. These assumptions were correct, we've had a lot more to do, and much less free time to just sit around and microsleep. For example, during my stay here I've climbed to the top of the dome, discovered a demonic entity, become an MIT fanboy, and made ice cream using liquid nitrogen.

It's been a lot of fun, and really the sleep thing is starting to stabilize. I mean, it's become stable, but not good. Alex is a sleepmonster. He will sleep anywhere and everywhere at anytime. In fact, he is currently sleeping in this room right now. Do you see that counter in the corner? No, he should not be asleep. When I try to rouse him he responds with "I don't see why I should get up." to which I have no response. It has become apparent to me that he will pepetually oscillate in incomplete sleep patterns if we stay here. His friend, the one we are staying with, is the only person that can persuade him to rise, but this wonderful man is not always available. I spent two hours fighting him last night to wake him. So he sleeps, getting REM and totally destroying the polyphasic sleep cycle we've built in the last week.

I know that when I become successfully transitioned in the next few days, if he is not there with me, then it is not due to any fault of mine.

Kelly - Day 3

First off, this morning sucked. By this morning I mean after our 7:20 AM nap. I was pretty ok before that, we had a lot of fun last night exploring Worcester, but this morning was freaky. A few conditions we're responsible for this. I moved my mildewey-terrible smelling thing into my room because I found that my body is broken in special ways. After walking around for an hour or two, I found that every right footfall was accompanied by a shooting pain in my lower back. This was probably because sleeping on Alex's hard floor screwed my back up or the walking aggravated it, it's chicken or the egg thing.

So, I moved in this smelly beast and slept on it to try to reduce/fix my back-ness. One fifth of it is still wet, but I covered the whole thing with my waterproof-ish sleeping bag and then slept on it that way. So, I hit sleep immediately and when I awoke I had no idea what was going on.

At first, I thought that I still sleeping! The first thing I remember actually is standing by the alarm. I don't remember turning off the alarm but it was deactivated. I had no idea where I was and everything was sort of hazy and my eyes wouldn't focus on anything. Alex was up too, but we were still both adjusting. I knew something was wrong, because I couldn't alert myself or concentrate on anything. It still seemed like a waking-dream. Every 45 seconds or so, I'd phase out and have a micro dream, weird stuff that actually blended reality with it.

I tried a lot of things to make it better. Any sitting position would cause me to hallucinate micro-dreams. Eating breakfast (chicken fingers and guacamole) was fraught with phantom voices and weird visions. I asked Alex at one point: "Do you think this is what being crazy feels like?"
I played the drums and still like phased out for periods while actually drumming - it was ridiculous. Eventually I opted for computer stuff, and sat down on the floor (I moved the mattresses up on their side during my non-nap periods) and kind of like dropped out of reality. I don't remember anything about that time but I do remember feeling great after it was over. Alex was there and he would have woken me if I was obviously sleeping, so I'm not sure what went on.

I'm still feeling okay-ish from after that experience, I was microsleeping earlier when I was trying to compute, but I found some internets to interest me. I believe the human body desires more to reproduce than to sleep, so it is a powerful instinct to involve.

Last Night
Alex was in a pretty bad state, grumbling and trying to sleep everywhere. I inserted all my drumsticks into the couch as to make it full of spikes. It is not easy to sleep on spikes, but Alex is a creative person. We decided to take a walk at the beginning of our 11:40 pm period. I didn't bring my phone, so we would be without its GPS functions if we were to become horribly lost. We walked forever and ever and ever. We passed by some awesome gothic churches; Alex decoded the roman numerals on it to say 1895. We found something called the "New England Dream Center" which sounds like a front organization- they had vans and stuff. We found a building with windows painted with letters to spell out "Wor" "Ces" and "Ter". My natural response is to pronounce those syllables by themselves as I read it, but the natives here say "wooster" which has two syllables, and I'm not sure how they'd go about pronouncing the above mentioned windows.

My back started hurting pretty badly when we came upon this ominous tower. It was called "Super tower luxury apartments" And it had leather seats in the lobby, and a magical lamp that looked different in the mirror than it did outside of the mirror. We stayed in the "call people you know to let you in" part of the building until some cleaning people showed up and we just followed them into the leathered paradise.

Sitting down, we found our burdens eased, but we didn't get too comfortable before we had to discover the whole of the sinister structure first hand. We took the elevators as high as they would take us, that is, the 24th floor. We then explored the top, looking for windows, but no luck, we could have actually just stood in a rumbling box for a minute and half. We descended the thousandstair allowing our pocket change to fall down the narrow void without great success.

and sleep wise, I feel pretty good still, it's not like last time at all, where by the 4th nap, I was really really really feeling crappy. I can almost forget that I'm doing poly during the day.

Day 4

Conditions of tiredness are very confusing. They're non-linear; I was very, very tired before 12 midnight today, but have been fine since then, even enough to read! I've still woken up fine after every nap, but my confusion immediately after each nap has increased. Once I thought that the alarm indicated that I was supposed to go back to sleep. I read someone else report this once. Both Kelly and I have had micro-hallucinations, with varying magnitude. To stay up we walked a lot. At first this tired me out physically, making me want to lay down. But after the next nap, I really enjoyed the walking, and it kept me refreshed. This was very strange, but I'm not complaining.

Kelly - Second day

I started the polyphasic sleep cycle yesterday. Apparently I'm sleeping on Alex's floor. My mattress got soaked to death from the rain on the trip down and is currently outside drying. I hear that mattresses die if they get wet, but we'll find that out later.

So, I'm like 5 naps in now? I can't remember, they all run together. My first nap was at 11:20 yesterday, so how many does that make? It's not been bad at all so far, I feel pretty alert right now (but from my previous experiences, you feel the effects less during daylight) and didn't have too much trouble staying awake last night.

I'm just beginning to settle in now. I've unpacked my computer and drums and some of the clothes. I've taken off the doors to my closet, to make my monstrous 6 (or 8 at the widest part) x 10 room seem even more cavernous. Of course, the floor is still littered with random crap and boxes of computer equipment. I hijacked one of Alex's fold up tables and fashioned it into a makeshift desk... that Alex is actually currently occupying.

I think that I'm at minor sleep deprivation right now, I slept through the 2-4th naps but the 5th one had me just worrying about paying rent, so I'm not so tired that I just fall asleep. I'm probably too sleepy to safely drive at this point, so it's walking everywhere from now until I'm fully transitioned. Also, the floor in Alex's room is not the most comfortable arrangement to sleep on, but I don't think that will matter very much in the next few days.

So far, we've ran around worcester, gone to the local supermarket and purchased a small amount of food (we want to keep our food on hand low so we'll have to walk to eat), and soap, a razor and shampoo. We stopped by the WPI campus center, read about current activities to see if we could find somehting to do in the next weeks. It turns out: worcester is a boring place in the summer. Like Alex suggested earlier, we might travel by train to boston and stay with one of his friends, hopefully finding some interesting activities (Alex calls them "ubran adventures"). The only problem with this is probably the train ride, because trains are really boring and we won't have much flexibility for doing stuff to keep us awake.

When things get bad
I've devised a mechansim to drop soda cans on us while we sleep if we over shoot our naps and don't wake up or disable the alarms some how. It's a pretty simple construction, it's basically a hinged plank with the pin attached to an electric motor. The most complicated part is calibrating some kind of light switch timer to set the motor off 5 minutes after we're supposed to wake up. It'll take a bit of playing with to get it right.

Well, I'm planning on making up a chart of how happy I feel every day, to actually if my total happiness increases over the whole time I've started the experiment compared with something like how happy I'd be if I were boring monophasic. I'll have to figure out how to get a graph in here or something, I'll try to make it a page element like the awesome nap timer.

Day 3

This was the first night with Kelly here. This made it much easier, and much more fun. Right now we're using three alarms, one on my loft bed and two on the floor. We'll start adding more alarms as we get more tired. We did some stretches, which definitely helped to feel refreshed. We're also keeping little food in the apartment, so that we have to often walk to the store. Since we have so much time and are near urban environments, we're considering traveling to Boston for a few days to have things to do. The main problem with this is that it costs money, but I think we may be able to get enough value from it.

Day 2

There are two main problems to overcome while transitioning to polyphasic.

• staying awake
• waking up
  

Since I've been staying up a whole lot for the past few months, it's already getting very difficult to stay awake on my own. My first attempt at poly was done alone, and it was a disaster. This time I've already fallen asleep on a very comfortable couch. When Kelly gets here this problem will be reduced to negligibility. The key is to have plenty to do, and that's a lot easier with two people.

I haven't had a problem waking up yet. One reason for this is that I need to get down from a loft bed to turn off the second alarm. The second reason is that I took the advice of Steve Pavlina in this article. This will become a much bigger problem once hell week starts--that is, days 3 through 10--when we are intensely sleep deprived. We have a plethora of alarms to cover this, which will be detailed tomorrow.

Another effect of poly becoming apparent is that since I'm active 6 more hours every day, I need to eat more. This costs more money which is annoying, but the extra hours I can work on poly make up for it. Also, the walks to the store are helpful.

Plans for poly.

Hello, I'm Pyromuffin, aka Kelly and I'll be moving in tomorrow; my official polyphasic sleeping begins when I've finished driving there. We've got quite a bit of activities planned (though Alex thinks we need more things to do, and he's probably right) and I'll be detailing them later, but here's an outline of the criteria. Keep in mind that these are rough ideas and if you have any suggestions feel free to comment or facebook or whatever us.

1) It's a skill that we don't possess or would like to improve
2) It requires some kind of physical participation
3) Minimal comfort (as to prevent sleeping)

A few examples we've got are: Learning to play piano and drums, learning to swim, flexibility and calisthenic exercises. So yeah, feel free to offer suggestions, we need it!

Some other things
At WPI, we've planned our A term class schedules so that the following nap periods will fit:
11:20 - 11:40
3:20 - 3:40
7:20 - 7:40

What's cool is that the naps are every four hours, as you can see, so those times are both AM and PM. Maybe I'll write a little script to show a countdown till our next nap or something. I really don't know how flexible blogger is.

I've got quite a bit to write about here, but I wouldn't want to ruin all the fun in one post (and I should really get back to packing). In tomorrow's entry I'll write about our 'can machine' and my happiness plot, because what good is all this sleep deprivation silliness without a little math? Stay tuned.

edit: like 10 hours later- I taught myself javascript and implemented the nap timer. It accounts for time zone and everything, so if your local time is correct then it's a good indicator of our current state. Yay for being awesome.

Day 1

Walden: 2. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

-Henry David Thoreau

Sleep versus awake has often been an analogy for consciousness, knowledge, wisdom, and even life versus death. This blog is a documentation of my attempt to transition to polyphasic sleep, an alternative sleep schedule where I will take very short naps at intervals throughout the day. This will reduce my total sleep time to 2 hours per day. This seems like magic, but since mankind knows so little about sleep it's not surprising that there might be a better alternative. Not much scientific study has been done about polyphasic sleep either, but many bloggers have documented their trials and successes, including most prevalently Steve Pavlina. This will be my third attempt; transitioning is incredibly hard because you are intensely sleep deprived for the first two weeks, but afterwards you feel completely normal. During the first two trials I did not prepare enough to be capable of staying up enough to see it through. I will be transitioning with a friend, and once he gets here on 11 August I'll start documenting our procedures in more detail.