So, my sleep experiment may be at an end–for the time being. My schedule is a little too booked to fit time for naps in the middle of the day (and at night). Since I missed about 5 days worth of evening naps and overslept the next morning on each occassion, I think the schedule would definately be doable if the rest of my life permitted it.
I’m not taking classes next quarter, so I think I’ll try it again at the start of the new year. Until then, I’m going to keep logging my sleep times to have a regular schedule to compare it to.
I won’t stop the blog either. I’ll write my dreams and whatever research I come up with. By mid December, my full research paper will be online.

Something about last night that was interesting:

Pictures soaked in glass jars full of water, enlarged for viewing. Some sort of way to find people.
Flowers, dripping bloody stems when cut by men for their women, a ritual sacrifice of beauty. Some sort of way to regain youth.

I had an old dream last night. It was thrown in the middle of many other dreams, primarily about music and sex.
As I recall, it went something like this:

I woke up this morning
to centrifugal force.
I was dreaming of driving
mechanical horses.
The cops were all chasing
careening down alleys.
The people were screaming
drowning in rallies.

I woke up this morning
to the fear of falling
I found that the sound
of the wind was appalling.

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.

My employers purchased a couch for the sole purpose of taking naps on it. It’s a fabulous tool since school doesn’t have any decent place to rest.
I was just sleeping on that couch and I had some very interesting dreams.
First off, I’ve read in several studies that REM is where people dream. I don’t believe this is true. The best way, and sometimes the only way, for me to sleep is to dream my way asleep. I try to focus on blurring out my surroundings while formulating some visual scene about the fuzzyness around me. On my most recent nap, I kept sliding in and out of deep sleep. I must have shifted 6 or 7 times. It felt like an enormous sine wave, what seemed like fully awake at one end and REM at the other, neither lasting very long.

There were these two beings, human like, although I didn’t get a close look. I was too busy focusing on the two colossal gladiators they were worshiping as gods. These gladiators were almost robots, huge bulbous metalic helmets, reflecting shards of light placed around there heads. On closer inspection, the helmets were domes holding hundreds of thousands of people, as if these giant beings had each swooped up a football stadium full of bloodthirsty fans and kindly wrapped a glass ceiling to cover them. Then it became clear that all of these dome dwellers were worshiping the two tiny people on the ground.
The small ground people worshiped the giants because of their magnificent size difference. The giants were full of people just like them who looked out and saw two unworldly beings, which they delighted to concieve of as Gods.
Mentally, I wavered between the two groups, zooming in and out–a dizzying thing to do when you are bobbing up and down the sine wave of sleep. I couldn’t be sure if I should focus on the absurdity of the two people on the ground or the countless people in the domes. They both seemed so silly, although, in retrospect, the people on the ground seem rightly less silly. I would certainly marvel at two enormous beings of any kind if they towered so high over me, even if I knew they were full of people (though, the groundlings clearly did not have that knowledge).

Anyhow, I had many other detailed dreams and I remained lucid throughout all of them. I even remember a moment of paralysis, which I believe was my body entering REM. I’ve read that the Pedunculopontine nucleus is the supposed (but not proven) main trigger of REM, which also halts motor functions at that stage of sleep.

Well, I’d tell you more, but I’ve got to get to class.