Day 11 - Cracks in the Armor and a Totem Animal

The past few days have been a flurry of activity. It's not that I've been too busy to write, it's simply been the case that I've opted for doing other things and, in a few areas, ran into hitches that made it difficult for me to confront my daily writing task.

Sleep deprivation aside, dealing with that zombie horde was rather time constraining.

So allow me to explain. We're now at Day 11. I've been averaging about 3 hours of sleep per day over the past week, with some spikes in sleep duration when I managed to oversleep or pull a sleep-walk and go back to bed.

I had a rather large question about this attempt come roaring at me on Tuesday night. The days prior, and really most of this week, I've been feeling pretty good. I usually manage to get 2-3 dreams in my 6 nap cycle, and for the other ones am usually out so deeply that I feel like I've slept for hours when in reality it's only been minutes.

As per usual, the 6-10 block has been the rough one. I slept through it on Monday and Tuesday of last week - Monday due to my inability to set an alarm properly (yes, it happens), and Tuesday for what I would call the catalyst for me questioning my continuation of this experiment.

Day 7 - Bike Tires and Waffles

Yesterday was brutal.

I think I underestimated the effect of oversleeping a nap. Apparently it doesn't just set you back a bit, but pretty much back to square one. The poor part being that my square 1 came on the heels of a beautiful 8 hours of monophasic sleep. This time it came on the heels of 2 hours of sleep over a day.

So, perhaps needless to mention, I was really, reaaaally tired yesterday. My first class went fine, as I was TA'ing and thoroughly involved, but the second one nearly had me unconscious. I attempted to, in between these classes, take my nap outside at the suggestion of a friend. It felt awesome, I was in good company, and it should've been rejuvenating, but for some reason it just wasn't. I felt totally conscious during the entire sleep, despite the fact that I kept dreaming (hallucinating, maybe) that I was holding various objects in my hands and was twitching like I was chasing rabbits.

Day 6 - CRONE! CROOOOOO OOONE!

We had just walked into the conference hall. Sankalp said it was something about an ambassador from a foreign land. Everyone there looked dressed to the nines. Suits, top hats, and I think even spotted a monacle. The event itself was held inside an enormous conference center that was open air for about 5 stories. It was sectioned off into multiple enclosures, presumably so more events could be held at once.

I stared around blankly. Everything was too good looking. The people, the plants, even the rugs and (for some reason) the macintosh computers dating back to the 90's were good looking. The light had a weird, twilight quality to it as it streamed through the windows.

And then a desk came flying over one of the partitions. It rocketed past us, and I turned over to Eunice, who was blindly chatting with some good looking monacled man, and told her to get down. The desk came rocketing overhead and crashed into a group of slow pokes behind us.

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.

Day 3 - IT'S ALIIIIIVE

Curious.

Aside from my absurdly painful 6-10 morning block this morning (detailed in the previous post) I felt fine all day. This is especially cool considering that I moved my naps around to accommodate my class schedule. Granted, I ended up shifting my 2pm nap forward by only 45 minutes, but from what I've read it's meant to cause near instant exhaustion and paralysis. That I was able to do it after 3 days without serious consequences makes me rather happy.

I believe the reason I've been doing so well is two fold. First, I decided not to do this on a break, where I had full control over my schedule. This is contradictory toward what nearly everyone I've read on this has said to do. But the reason I believe it works is because I both have more than enough work and play activities to consume my time, and that I have daily obligations in which my brain is basically required to function.

For example, I am able to be totally fine in engaging classes. As was seen yesterday in my latin american class and my TA-ing, my want to sleep gets reduced to a dull thrum in the background when my brain is fully engaged. Today, my first class was a lecture class but was not altogether exciting. I had to spend my time memorizing the location of all the african countries just to stay awake.

Day 2 - Part 2 - 6:00pm - 6:00am

WELL. This is certainly interesting.

6:00PM NAP
I went into the DUC for my evening nap and was immediately assaulted by someone vigorously moving furniture around on the floor below me. I was unable to fall asleep because of this, and had to wait about 15 minutes (the usual sleep time) before I could actually fall asleep.

I was a bit groggy when I woke up but once I got moving I was fine. I swung by a friend's place before heading  home to do some work and meet with another buddy. At this point, I was feeling better than I had earlier in the day, but certainly not as though I had managed to escape my sleep deprivation.

At home I grabbed a quick bite, my friend arrived, and I peaced out to take a nap. Curious as to what the hell I was doing, she stuck around while I was unconscious. This was actually incredibly useful because one of the things I'm noticing is that my short naps feel very long, and that I cannot tell if I am actually hitting REM or just having funky imagery flash through my brain. I was evidently spasming every so often and very clearly having some things go down in my brain while I was "asleep" for those 15 minutes. Afterwards I woke up and felt totally fine, as if I weren't sleep deprived or anything.

This made me super pumped. If I can get one or two good REM naps then I might have a shot at actually converting over. Since I appear to be on the track for that, it loosens some of my terror about not being able to keep my sanity or simply dying.

Day 2 - Part 1 - 6:00A-6:00P

I woke up at 6:24am and felt great. And by great I mean like I had been run over by a bus full of obese school children.

"CRUSH HIM."

Day 1

It is now 7:00AM. I took my first nap beginning my attempt at the uberman sleep schedule 13 hours ago, and have since slept every 4 hours for "20 minutes." I put that in quotes because, in reality, my brain is not yet trained for sleeping immediately upon laying down, so I would hazard a guess that it's a hell of a lot less than that.

My first nap at 6:00pm was excellent. I woke up a little groggy, but within about 5 minutes of being up and around felt solid. I decided that, given my future sleep deprivation, I should do errands/get stocked up on groceries so as to avoid needing to drive. From 6-10 I read 100 pages for latin american studies, went to the gym, and hit up walmart for some groceries. After purchasing an alarm clock and a boatload of proteins and vegetables, I headed home.

I meant to be home at 10, so I could take my second nap in the comfort of my home, but I managed to forget to buy bread. Not wanting to be without such a staple in the coming days (despite the notion that it might make naps more fitful), I stopped at schnuks, whipped the pillow out of my backseat, and settled down to sleep. Roughly 10 minutes in someone's car alarm went off. Aside from this aggravation, I think I actually slept during this nap, as I had an incredibly vivid dream (daydream?) of playing poker with a bunch of gorillas.