Day 4 - 6-10 block madness

I hit my first hitch with the uberman schedule.

It's not the naps, the weirdness of being conscious for what feels like days in a row, or the semi-sleepy haze I'm still occasionally in. It's all due to one small incident last night that broke my napping schedule.

I felt great throughout the day yesterday. My naps from 10am-6pm were all excellent. I even went to the gym to test how I would hold up under some weight lifting. The day was gorgeous, the trees were yellowing, and I got to chill outside in the grass, being irradiated by the sun and not feeling sleepy.

Basically, yesterday was the first day I felt totally awake during this schedule. I've had blocks where I was feeling super alert, but never an entire day. So this felt like a big step, because I thought I'd be crossing over into making this easy and feeling awesome ALL the time.


But alas.

HOW COULD YOU.

I went out with some friends to an event on campus and, after some vigorous dancing, returned to a friend's suite to say hi and then take a 20 minute nap (my 10 o'clock) before heading to a birthday party. The problem was that I had danced so hard and gotten so pumped that I couldn't fall asleep. I was laying in what was by far the most comfortable napping place of that day (earlier accounts were the library and DUC fun room) with the least amount of noise and I just somehow knew that I was not going to be able to fall asleep.

Which perhaps merits a bit of explanation. Sleeping polyphasically feels very, very different from sleeping monophasically. In mono when I'd sleep I was out and miles away from whatever was going on in my brain. In poly it's almost like I'm in a state of half-consciousness, or even lucid dreaming. It may be the way I've concocted to get myself to sleep, which is by building as high-resolution of imagery as my mind's eye can, but I nearly always feel like I am monitoring myself while I am sleeping. This often results in me nearly waking up when I begin to fall asleep because I am so pumped that I'm actually falling asleep (slightly counterproductive).

"IN YOUR FACE, SMALL CHILD!"

And when I'm falling asleep my brain feels really, really good. And weird. It feels like my prefrontal cortex is opening up and emptying out, and it's usually in that space that I build the imagery that eventually puts me to sleep.

So as I laid there I waited for my brain to do that strange thing, to open and empty. But it wouldn't do it. I laid in the dark for 20 minutes until my alarm went off then returned to my friends down the hall. I told them it was a bad one and they all looked concerned. Apparently my sleeplessness over the past days has not gone a long way to quell fears of me either going mad, dying, or just being a zombie.

Since I had 4 hours before I could sleep again I decided the best course of action was to stay busy. A friend and I then went to that birthday party where my stomach and head began to ache, and my zombieness began to come out. To combat all of these shenanigans I basically took the extrovert dial and turned it up to 11. During this time Jeanie, the birthday girl, decapitated a dragon pinata with a broom stick. It was certainly sight enough to keep me going for a few hours.

pretty much this, but more scaley.

At about midnight we returned to the friends we had been visiting earlier. I was feeling a bit better, numbed by the socializing, and we all decided to hit up a vampire luau happening a building over. After about 30 minutes of shuffling I began to get hit by a sleep wall. We returned home at about 1:15, leaving me with a full 45 minutes before I could pump my brain back up.

That nap was deep. I didn't dream (which is no good). My head hit the pillow and then the alarm went off. I felt groggy as hell and was tempted to just roll over and call off the whole thing. But, again, in the interest of both testing my limits and being a ridiculous person, I got up and went to the next room to socialize. After about an hour of chill times everyone else started to go into hibernation. I headed home.

As soon as I walked in the door another sleep wall came roaring into me. The site of the day-bed in my living room was probably too much for my system to take. I proceeded to say "TO HELL WITH YOU, BUDDY" to my own brain and went about cleaning up the house, doing laundry, and keeping myself moving. Once I got out of the zombie phase, around 3am, I did some actual work coding and getting some job search stuff setup. All in all, it was probably one of my most productive periods of work, despite the fact that I was zombie-ing for nearly half of it.

At 5:50am I set both my phone alarm and, because I thought it may be a problem, an alarm on my desktop computer. I turned the volume on the speakers way the hell up, and when I climbed into bed I threw my phone halfway across the room. That way I wouldn't be able to continue sleeping or zombie-off the alarms. I'd have to get up to stop the noise, and hopefully in that time gain enough control to stop myself from sleeping again.

I hit the pillow and was given a beautiful image of a half-white, half-black bird flying around in a forest that had pure yellow leaves. After about 3 seconds of enjoying this, I passed out...

And woke up at 10:30am.

There was a rooster crowing in my living room. My phone alarm still had the "Dismiss or Snooze?" options popped up on the screen, though it was no longer making noise. I swore heavily and went to the office to tell this rooster alarm to shut its dirty mouth.

I had overslept. I  had slept for an entire block of my normal waking hours.

Needless to say I'm still pretty miffed about this. Especially since I didn't even wake up and sabotage myself. My brain pretty much said "TO HELL WITH YOU, BUDDY" and didn't bother to inform me of the beast that was screaming in my living room, trying to wake me up.

I thought that I was going to be able to get through this thing without any of the incidents I've read about. Most people oversleep or miss naps, or end up failing after a few days because they aren't keeping busy, or because the sleepiness gets to them. I've managed to conquer all of these until what feels like some brain-born sabotage took over.

I'm back on track now, with a nap coming at 2pm. I'll be in the library, making a makeshift bed out of some chairs and crossing my fingers for some dreams. I'm having a bunch of more philosophical thoughts on this whole sleeping business, but I'll have to save those for when I've gotten through this adaptation period.

Here's a wee reminder that ridiculous things are the best. To the nap-mobile!