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.