Further evidence of my insanity

No, I don't believe I'm actually going clinically insane. But from the perspective of normal people, it must look like I'm just trying to find all the possible ways there are to be very, very strange. What's really going on is that I keep finding things that look like they'd be a lot of fun to do, and deciding that life is finite and I ought to do them while I can. The latest thing that this means is polyphasic sleep. This isn't something you're likely to have heard of, but it's an interesting concept, and one that's been put into practice. The idea is that, instead of sleeping for eight hours out of every 24, which is an entire third of your time, you follow one of a few different sleep schedules that people have worked out that manage to give you just as much energy and wakefulness, but require as little as two hours of sleep. It sounds insane and impossible, but there are lots of people who've successfully made the switch to one of those schedules. There are three main ones, but actually there are just two, because I can't find any evidence that the third one's been adopted successfully by a real person. Suspend your disbelief for a moment while I talk about them, and then I'll get to what you'll be thinking at that point. So, the first one, the one that was invented first, is called the Überman sleep schedule. It consists of taking six twenty-minute naps, spaced exactly evenly throughout the day (and night). One problem with this is that it only allows you to be awake for 3h40m at a time, before you have to take a nap. You can take naps in all sorts of weird places, but it can get inconvenient to have to nap so often (and you have to follow the schedule to a tee), so another sleep schedule evolved. This one is called the Everyman schedule. You sleep four hours as opposed to the Überman's two, but it's a lot more workable around normal daily schedules. It consists of a three-hour "core sleep", and then three twenty-minute naps spaced about evenly through the day. (The third schedule is the Dymaxion schedule, supposedly followed by Buckminster Fuller and not successfully by anyone I've read about since then; on Dymaxion you take four evenly-spaced thirty-minute naps, which allows for more flexibility because you've got 5h30m between naps. But like I say, it's apparently the chimera of polyphasic sleep, in that no one or almost no one has done it.)

So right now the obvious question is, If you're only sleeping a quarter or a half of what normal people sleep, why don't you get unbelievably sleep-deprived and turn into a quivering pile of goo? The general theory goes like this. In monophasic (eight-hour) sleep, you go through several stages of sleep, which go something like Stage 1, then 2, 3, 4, back to 2, then 1 again, and finally the important one: REM sleep. That's the kind of sleep where you dream, and it's also the kind your body needs in order to feel rested. In the polyphasic cycles, you get your body to skip past all those other stages and go right into the REM you need. There's an alternate version of the theory that says you still do go through all those other cycles, you just blaze through them at lightning speed—but the difference isn't too consequential. And you can in fact get REM sleep on one of these schedules; I've read lots and lots of sleep logs ("plogs"?) by people who've done this, and they definitely report dreaming.

The tricky part is adjusting to the new schedule. You can't just go straight from monophasic sleep to the Überman schedule without a bit of jarring. For at least the first week, and more often for several, you're not getting that REM yet, because your brain hasn't come to terms with the fact that sleep isn't going to last as long as it used to. You just kind of wake up in Stage 1 or 2. Sometimes you feel refreshed, but it's maybe just as likely that you'll feel like crap. This goes on. Also, you have to regiment yourself really well when you're in the adjustment period. If you take a nap an hour late, you'll get thrown off for several cycles and get set back. If you sleep through one of your alarms, your brain will try to reset itself to monophasic mode, and you'll be set back. But if you manage to keep it up—and all the sources I've read say it takes a lot of willpower—you make progress. Gradually you stop feeling so tired. In the later stages of adjustment you might feel some "brain fog", as a few people describe it, that knocks you down to maybe 80% of your normal intellectual functioning. And then somehow after about a month you've adjusted completely. You're on the Überman schedule, and you have six extra hours in a day. Or if you're on Everyman, you have four extra. And that's like gaining another quarter or third of a life, for however long you can keep up your nap schedule reasonably well. People who adjust to Überman report feeling like time has gotten a lot slower, like everyone else is moving in slow motion except them. And they also say they have, strangely enough, more energy than they did with monophasic sleep. It's not as pronounced with Everyman, but it's still there.

So, as you've guessed by now, I want to try this. It won't be for a while; right now I'm thinking I'll try starting this winter around Christmastime, when I'll have a month until school starts and nothing terribly important to do. I haven't decided which one I want to try yet. What I've got in mind is starting out trying Überman, and then if it turns out I just can't do it, I'll fall back on Everyman. And once I get to school, I'll have no problem doing all my homework and having fun too. As it stands I tend to have room for only one of those, and they both seem to me crucial parts of college, so I'd love to be able to do both.

Since I'm waiting so long to start, I guess I could've written this closer to the actual start date, but I've been reading a lot about it lately, so I figured I might as well. Not much else to report for this last week. We had one of our book releases for Press, the cookbook, and our other two are tonight—the first one's in half an hour. Also I wrote a lot and didn't sleep much. I think I'll be able to sleep a little more (still in a vaguely normal way) starting now. Also I'm going to be going on maybe three camping trips, so that'll be fun.

Okay, see you again soon.