Advantages of waking up before the sun:

• All the stars are out
• Nobody else is awake
• It’s quiet

Disadvantages:

• It’s friggin cold outside

I just unicycled down to the 24-hour grocery store to get some grape juice.
I read that the human body produces some chemical during REM that is found in grapes. Hopefully, the chemicals will go the right places while I’m in my adjustment phase.
On my way back, I did manage to fly off my unicycle, but I believe it was more a matter of it being dark and not seeing the sudden steep incline as I came up onto a sidewalk than a matter of sleep deprivation taking hold.

Here’s the deal:
This all started with Polyphasic Sleep, popping up on almost a daily basis for the past few weeks on digg.com. Needing a research paper topic for my English class, I decided to try out a new sleeping cycle. I’ve always wanted to figure out a more natural sleep rhythm than the monophasic blocks, which have never been my forte to begin with. Having a very busy schedule, I need more hours in the day. Normally, I wake up at 7am. I spend an hour taking a shower and eating, checking my email and packing up food for the day. Then I catch a 45 minute bus downtown to work from 9am-5pm (approximately–my schedule is a bit more complex than this but it will suffice). After work, I go immediately to school (20 minute bus ride) where I stay until 8pm-9pm. I then take another 40 minute bus ride back home. Normally, I would get about 6-7 hours of sleep at home and then I’d nap on the bus. If I can manage to cut my daily sleep down to 3-4 hours a day, I would have an extra 3-4 hours each day (or 21-28 hours per week). I’m going to use this time to document my experiment in this blog, do my homework and start writing a book–not on this subject :)

Summary:
Polyphasic Sleep is a system of limiting daily sleep time to 2-5 hours by taking a 20-45 minute nap every four hours. People who practice this technique claim to be more alert and healthier than ever before. Little scientific experimentation has been done on polyphasic sleeping. However, throughout history, many brilliant minds have practiced and enjoyed its benefits. Leonardo da Vinci and Buckminster Fuller used this exact method and, while continually astonishing the world with brilliance, both lived double the expected life spans of their times. Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison experimented with similar sleep patterns throughout their most inventive phases.
Some people are still skeptical of splitting daily sleep into several sections as it goes against the social norm and, with lack of scientific proof, they cannot be certain of its effects. Doctors warn that lack of sleep can be fatally harmful, which is one reason people are reluctant to experiment with it. Polyphasic sleeping can also be difficult to practice for people running regular daytime schedules or working full 8-9 hour shifts. The question then is this: What are the real benefits or detriments of polyphasic sleeping? I expect to find that although difficult to manage and maintain, polyphasic sleeping allows a person to be more cognitively alert during waking hours while having many more waking hours to spend.

So yesterday evening (or the day before yesterday), I made a schedule for myself. I figured I should ease into this program by taking a big nap (3 hours) from midnight to 3am, then stay awake until my bus ride to work where I could sleep for 40 minutes. After that, I could take a nap break at work and sleep again on the bus coming home at night.

Schedule
2005.10.24
23:15 -> (awake since 07:15 = 16 hours = 960 minutes)
This is when I decided to start my new cycle — too late to take an extra nap :)

Overall, I think it went well for the first day (yesterday). It wasn’t easy to sleep on the buses, which is odd because I usually konk right out on the bus. I figured it was an adrenaline issue.

Unfortunately, this morning, I woke up a bit late. It was 4am when I woke up, so I figured I should sleep another 30 minutes to get the rest of my full 90 minute cycle.

Right now, I’m eating while writing this entry. Now that I have formulated a fairly rigid schedule, I’m going to try to eat more regularly.
I’ve been surviving mostly on dried fruit and nuts, Cliff bars and juice–with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast.

Meal:
Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich (Adam’s Peanut Butter + Trader Joes – reduced sugar – blueberry preserves + Franz “Redwood Forest” Flax & Grains bread
100% pure grape juice
Vitamins:
Flaxseed oil [1000 mg]
Acidophilus [10 mg]
Ginko Biloba [500 mg]
Glucosamine Sulfate [500mg]
Calcium [300 mg]
Magnesium [130 mg]
Zinc [10 mg]