Sleeping Outside the Box

It seems that my natural circadian rhythym is not suited to my 24 hour cycle. I’ve read that people are more rythmically syncopated with the Moon than the Sun, having closer to a 25 hour day than a 24 (as far as natural chemistry goes). I think I’m seeing some effects of my daily restrictions.

Again, I overslept. I’m starting to not even remember my phone’s alarm. It could be because I’ve started sleeping much deeper during the 3am-4am block.
On the bright side, on days that I oversleep, I’ve been waking up naturally around 5:30-6:30. When this is the case, it’s very easy to get out of bed.

I just found a few more encyclopedias in the Library. I decided to check out the general psychology books and found a plethora of sleep information.

Record
It seems that Randy Gardner [wikipedia entry] is the leading Guinness record holder since 1965 for staying awake the longest. He managed to stay awake for 264 hours (11 days) and at the end showed no signs of mental or physical deficit. I stumbled over this in Magill’s Encyclopedia of Social Science Psychology vol. 4. After the 11 days, he supposedly slept only 14 hours 40 minutes, then the next day 10 hours 30 minutes, 9 hours for the third day and then resumed the 7 hours a day schedule he had before the experiment.
Scientific American speaks of this and claims that Randy Gardner was “basically cognitively dysfunctional at the end of his ordeal.”

I’m not sure how accurately I can trust this one experiment. In 1965, communcations and witness were both much easier to trick. I’d like to see the records for the past couple of years. It’s possible that this was a hoax. If it is, the record may hold because it may not be merely unsurpassable but actually unattainable. I’m not sure what, if any, checks the Guinness Book has against older records. If anyone has any info, comment and post a link to a resource.

Diet
Something else that was interesting is animals that don’t sleep in long blocks tend to eat smaller portions more sporatically than large predatory animals, which usually eat few large meals.
I’ve been eating snacks rather than meals for quite a long time and I find it works best for a napping sleep schedule. I haven’t been consuming caffiene or sugary foods either, which I think eases up on unnecessary drowsiness.

Resources
Carskadon, Mary A. Encyclopedia of Sleep and Dreaming. New York: MacMillan Publishing
     Company, 1993.
Kazdin, Alan E. Encyclopedia of Psychology vol. 7. Washington, D.C.: American
     Psychological Association, 2000.
Piotrowski, Nancy A. Ph. D. Magill’s Encyclopedia of Social Science Psychology vol. 4.
     Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, Inc, 2003.

Just had another bout of deeply detailed dreams, fading in and out of consciousness at the office. I only laid down for 20 minutes but the dreams were so long it seemed like at least an hour.

I never thought 6.5 hours of sleep would feel so refreshing. My calves feel a lot better. I feel pretty awake too. Although, I missed (sleepily disabled) the 3am and 4am wake-up buzzes on my phone. The alarm is bad. All it’s doing is giving me a negative connotation for my phone’s vibration mode.

So, yes, I overslept. My schedule is so not conducive to polyphasic sleeping. Next quarter, I’m going to try it with a much more strict (and evenly spread) schedule.

Even if I can’t get to my goal this quarter, I’m writing a research paper on polyphasic sleeping. I will be posting the full text by the middle of December.

Well, at least my 14 day average is still under 6 hours of sleep per 24.

Oh, my sweet warmness… we just got a heating pad for our bed, put it under our sheets and now it’s so toasty. I don’t want to blame the warmth as why I slept 4 hours last night but it definately helped. That and my calves, which are like two painfully swollen rocks attached to my legs. The heat felt very nice in that regard.

I had such a scare yesterday. My laptop wouldn’t turn on. Luckily I was able to trace it down to one of my 1GB RAM modules. I’ve got to return it and get a new one. So, I’m floating on only 1GB of RAM now. Woe is me
Oh, well, I’ll notice the difference once I try to boot another OS in VMware.

You may have noticed that i put wikipedia.com links on anything that anyone might not be familiar with. Go ahead and follow the links if you are interested in reading more about these topics.

I just got up at 3am. It was really easy to mentally wake up as soon as my first alarm vibrated next to me. The hard part was opening my eyes again, after seeing the big 3:00 on my red digital clock and re-closing them immediately. I let my phone snooze for 9 minutes then forced myself out of bed. Will power alone got me to the shower. My eyes burned for a few minutes under the steam.
If I had absolute control over my schedule, I would be doing this differently.
The whole purpose, in the end, is to acclimate my body to spreading sleep out evenly over the whole day. However, I am currently trying to sleep for 3 hours, then take about 1.5 hours worth of naps throughout the rest of the 24 hour period. Hardly seems even.
Ideally, I would have tried to ease my way into a true polyphasic system, sleeping in 3 three hour blocks, then transitioning to 4 two hour blocks, and finally 6-8 twenty-fourty minute blocks.
Someday, I will experiment with that transition. Well, time to do some homework.

I just saw “Good Night, and Good Luck.”
It was a great film but it’s too bad it didn’t come out 3 years ago. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the terrorist party? I suppose some americans are still suffering from Bushism so maybe it’s still a good time to have this movie come out.

I totally don’t remember turning off my 4am alarm. I set both the 3am and 4am to be safe. When the 3am went off, it took a couple of buzzes to actually wake me up. I think I was in deeper sleep than I should have been. I’ve heard that alarm clocks disrupt the body’s natural rhythm. I’d like to get in the habit of not using it. I’ve read that lapses are normal up to once a week, while adjusting to this schedule. It just seems like such a setback. Well, it certainly boosts my average sleep per night.

I did some more research and I found yet another contradiction. Does anyone have a real firm grasp of how sleep works? Everyone says something different. I want my own EEG machine so I can just see for myself.

Here’s the deal:
Most research says that the stages of sleep are NREM 1, NREM 2, NREM 3, NREM 4, NREM 3, NREM 2, REM -> repeat.

However, I just found a very recent publication, which says that there is a very short slipping into REM right away, then sleep progresses all the way to deep sleep and back to NREM 1 before it returns to REM. This model makes much more sense when considering the ease of waking up during each phase–REM being the easiest and progressively getting more difficult down to NREM 4.

From “Complete Home Medical Guide” © Dorling Kindersley 2004

This would explain why everyone seems to agree that the most vivid dreams happen in REM. Since, I always fall asleep dreaming, it would make sense that there is at least a short phase of REM right away.

And now that I’m looking for it, here is another resource with the same claim — and another.

My dreams were intense last night. Right before I finally got up, I would have sworn I was in the middle of a David Cronenberg film (something like Naked Lunch crossed with Blade Runner. It was complete with government assassinations, which led to political takeovers, genetically perfected artificial life, which would control the minds of normal humans, highly intellegent artificially intellegent machines, which would leave 800 messages in my voicemail box, each one telling me that it just wanted to talk to me, and several other strange and undefinable moments.

I got up at 3am, remembering a different dream, turned off my 4am alarm, thinking that I would get up then. Two hours later, I was eating at a neo-mexican (which strangely meant ‘european american’) Interzone border restaraunt, trying to keep the chef from eating all the food off of my plate, which he was keen on doing. When I time/space shifted to an office where I was listening to my voicemail (the countless artificial messages) and a man told me the door AI, which I had called an ‘A’ generation, was actually an ‘E’ generation–and was not to be trifled with–I realized I was asleep and jolted my eyes open, only to find that it was already 5am. An expletive involuntarily jumped out of my mouth, which hopefully did not wake Lena.
In the shower, I decided that I need to just lie down for my scheduled nap times, even if I can’t sleep, just to get my body in the habit. I didn’t do so for the latter half of yesterday. I’m not sure if it was just my dreams that kept me enthralled enough to oversleep or if it’s the result of totalling 5 hours and 20 minutes of unevenly spaced sleep, yesterday.