Polyphasic Sleep, Day 5 | The Probabilist . com

Polyphasic Sleep, Day 5 January 5, 2007

Posted by The Probabilist in : [News], Sleep , trackback

It’s getting interesting. Regarding my oversleep, I’m theorizing that it occurred due to a culmination of both heavy food digestion and some sleep deprivation. I normally haven’t eaten much on the block before the noon polynap. This time however I made that change because I had something external planned for the block after the noon nap that wouldn’t include a meal when I woke up. So much for that plan. Secondly, I’ve noticed this particular time frame as the most difficult one to stay awake in. So I won’t make this mistake again.

However, it was very close of happening again. This time on today’s 4 pm nap I got out of bed, shut off both alarms and went back to bed again. Fortunately I had someone wake me up immediately after this. I was told that I had again done this while normally speaking and discussing a matter, which I had no memory of happening. This time however, I noticed afterwards a letter appointed to me on my keyboard. This is the first one I’ve gotten since I moved to my new apartment and suddenly I remembered that I did discuss this letter when I “was awake”. So what does that tell me? My subconscious mind tried to take control over my actions and conscious mind, and make me forget what I had done to serve its own purpose of getting more sleep. I wasn’t behaving unconsciously, I did those things consciously, but the subconscious mind took control and decided to give me a treatment of amnesia. Weird stuff.

Why would it do this? I have no clue, because during the prior 24 hours before this incident, I was all the time on a level 1 alertness. Additionally, I only got some sleep on 4 of the 6 scheduled naps. So here I am, facing no forms of dizziness, disorientation, fatigue or loss of cognitive thinking already after 4 days of this adaptation, but I’m still getting some kind of revolts from my subconscious mind. I’ll just cope with this fact for now and remind myself that some people require up to three weeks of adaptation until they graduate from Polyphasic U.

Final verdict: 1 on a scale from 1 to 5. There’s nothing difficult in living by my polyschedule. Something’s just not right from a standpoint that doesn’t concern sleep deprivation symptoms. I’ve decided to use my mp3 player in every single nap now as a possible solution to this. It’s not the most comfortable position to sleep in because one of the ear buds gets pressed between my ear and pillow. (I have trouble falling asleep lying on my back.) If push comes to shove and this doesn’t help, I’ll think of alternative and more radical solutions. There’s no way I’m dropping out from this since it’s been so easy for me to do, while the benefits that come from it are simply superb and don’t know of any other substitutes.