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!