I just came down from my shower and Lena’s in the kitchen shoving stuffing up a turkey ass. Later, I’m going to make the cranberry sauce and pecan pie. I don’t have a problem eating turkey and I could roast one if it came down to it. Stuffing it’s lifeless corpse with breading is something else though. It looks like some sort of ritual killing, which I guess is really what it is. What else have we traditionally done throughout the ages?

But on a lighter note, the cranberry sauce will be made with shiraz and the pecan pie will be made with Malibu rum and Sambuca (it was supposed to be bourbon but the liquor stores are closed–bad planning on my part).

Now it’s time to clean the house before the guest arrive…

Last night, I went to the College Inn Pub to celebrate the coming weekend with some of Lena’s coworkers. I didn’t have anything to drink but some cranberry juice. We ate chips and salsa, then I had some chicken tenders at IHOP while Lena sobered up to drive us home. By the time we got home, it was bedtime and I could still taste the food we had recently consumed.
When I awoke this morning, I felt like I had indulged in a few drinks–even though I didn’t.
I’ve read that eating within 3 hours of bedtime is not very healthy. I suspect this is the case only with monophasic schedules though. When I was on the polyphasic system, I found that eating before a nap was practical and easy, without the side effects of feeling hung-over.
The reason for the hung over feeling has to do with deep sleep slowing down digestion to almost nothing. So, if a person sleeps for 6 hours straight (as I did last night), food just sits partially digested. Not a very pleasant thing to wake up to. However, when I was only sleeping for 20-40 minutes, it didn’t have much of an impact (if any) on the digestion process.
I’ve also noticed a distinct difficulty remembering my dreams on days when I wake up with the grogginess of a late night meal.

I was working for this large software company and I had to go into the office for some reason. Outside, in the parking lot, dozens of scanner drones flew around, identifying anyone within walking distance of the building. I was scanned at least half a dozen times. When I entered the lobby, Lena was there. She needed to do something for school and I was wondering how she could get in without an ID badge. They were very strict about access. No card, no entry. I checked my wallet, hoping I could scan us both in but I couldn’t find my ID card. I opened pockets that I didn’t even know I had but it was nowhere to be found.
“Looks like we’ll have to sneak in,” I told Lena.
One other security measure for that day was that everyone who entered had to be wearing a special T-shirt. The company had just launched a new product, so everyone had a black shirt with the company logo and the name of the new software. Two girls at the front desk handed us a couple of shirts and said we should put them on outside. We started to leave but they called after us, “if you’re going to change in your car, you should take one of the couches by the main entrance. You can carry in out and haul it up the stairs to the parking lot. Just bring it back when you’re finished.” I thought about this idea of hers and realized there was no need to do what she suggested.
“We’re not taking one of your couches.” They would have none of it and we had to lose ourselves in the crowd in order to escape.
We went to my car to change and when we were finished, Lena suggested we check on our backpacks that were in her car a few blocks away. That was a good idea since earlier there was some strange guy eyeballing our stuff when she parked it there. We hopped in my car and sped out of the lot, a scanner drone chasing us and blaring sirens to identify ourselves. We went faster. It only chased us a couple of blocks. Lena checked the car and came back with the news that our bags with our laptops had been stolen. Although, she didn’t say it right out. She said, “I heard theft increases 54% after the first time.” I knew by that statement that it was gone.
Dissapointed, we went to my old work place, a bar, to have a drink. Some friendly acquaintances asked me whey they couldn’t log into my file server. They were having all kinds of issues with it. I wrote down my IP address for one of them and he asked me to also write down the IP address of Yahoo mail because he wanted to do some hacking. “I don’t know the yahoo IP addresses off the top of my head. You can look them up though.” He didn’t seem satisfied.

Dang. I do need to wake up earlier. I’m just getting started but I have to eat breakfast and get out of here. I meant to wake up at 6am (that was when my laptop got stolen and I woke myself up to feel better that it was just a dream, knowing that my laptop was right downstairs).

I ate dinner really late last night, which consisted of a bunch of flax seed soy chips with hummus and a some Thai basil seed drink (first time I’ve tried it–it was ok but not great).

I woke up shortly before the alarm today, remembering my dreams. I was back in high school, visiting. Around lunch time, this horde of people with sumo suits and party gear were waiting for the students to come out to the quad (our communal lunch field). This had happened once when I was in high school. It was an elaborate ploy to get kids to come to a lecture on Jesus. Needless to say, I was once again horrified. The man who was in charge noticed that I was glaring at him and when he came over to deliver his sales pitch, I told him off. The biggest problem I had with this group in high school (other than the fact that they held a religious sermon at a public school, which goes against my beliefs of seperation of church and state) was that they never told anyone what was going to happen at the “party” everyone was invited to. It’s a small town. If there’s a party, people will go without asking what it’s about. It’s the weekness of the uninitiated. So, as all the students came out of the class rooms and saw what waited for them, I screamed out the truth, “it’s a hoax! they just want to preach to you. This is a church promotion…” and so on.

Later on in my dream, I was riding a very small (and thin) skateboard to get to school. I had missed too many classes and I didn’t do any of my homework this week so I was worried that I would miss even more. The reason I was riding the skateboard was because my motorcycle, which I don’t have in real life, had broken down. On my way, I came across a truck that was for sale. Curious, I opened it up and crawled inside to check out the interior. It was huge. While I was inside, the owner came around and asked what I was up to. I said I just wanted to check it out and he started telling me all about everything that was wrong with it. Somehow, it still seemed cool. Probably because it had a couch inside, which still left it with a livingroom sized interior.

There was a lot more but I’ve gotta get ready to go. Maybe I need to wake up earlier so I’m not so groggy.
I noticed, when I was on the plan, that I could eat at any time–even right before bed. Now, if I eat within 3 hours of bedtime, I wake up really groggy.

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.

Well, I’m not much of a drinker but last night I had a few. It was Alissa’s birthday party and I had a full night of sleep the night before. So, last night I slept from 3am to 11am. Wooohoo.

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.

Last night, I spend about 60 seconds concentrating on the idea that I would wake up as soon as the 3am alarm went off and that I would hop out of bed immediately.
It worked. I only set the one alarm and when it went off, I was immediately awake. Of course, immediately after I picked up my phone to halt the alarm, noting that I was incredibly alert and awake, I laid back down to marvel at the fact that I woke up so easily. That’s when I began to feel extremely tired. Before falling asleep again, I managed to recognize that this was a very bad idea, if I was to get up at all this morning. I then hopped out of bed and jumped into the shower.
I must say, I feel much more alert and awake with this 3 hours of sleep than I felt yesterday (after over sleeping 6.5 hours on my core session).
Now, I’ve got to do some more research.

Today’s Breakfast:
Sunflower Seed Butter (like peanut butter) and Pupkin Butter (like apple butter) sandwich. Yum, yum!

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.