Welcome, and an explanation.

This blog is to catalogue the daily events of mine as I progress through the transition to Polyphasic sleep. If the effects of this schedule are too traumatic, I will be dropping the experiment, and closing the blog.

Now that that's out of the way, here's what I have learned:

Of the Polyphasic schedules I've heard of, I've seen two that seemed to work for some people for any length of time (more than three months). The first is the standard "Uberman" sleep schedule, which I would prefer to adopt, but I'll understand if I can't handle the stress. The Uberman schedule is simply a 15-30 minute nap (depending on your sources) every 4 hours. Even at the .5 hour, it's only 3 hours of sleep a day. Lots of extra time. The other schedule is a modified one: a 2-3 hour "core" sleep sometime in the early morning, and 2-4 naps throughout the rest of the day. This lands the tally at more like 4 - 6 hours of sleep.

On a "normal" day last semester, I would get 6 hours of sleep. So, 2.5-3.0 hours of total sleep would afford me quite a bit more time. Especially when you count the fact that I spent quite a bit of time in bed "trying to go to sleep," which is basically me thinking too hard.

Here's my plan for this experiment:

• Stage 1: Adjust
• Instead of the normal "Switch it now!" schedule people normally do, I'm planning on starting the naps first. This does two things:
• I don't have the massive amounts of sleep deprivation at first
• My body gets used to sleeping for 20 minutes during the day
• Naps: 20 Minutes
• Do this for one week
• Stage 2: Sleep Deprivation 1
• Cut out all but 3 hours of sleep. Effectively switching to the non-Uberman method. This would be the Uberman method, except with the core sleep in place of a nap.
• Do this for 1-2 week(s) or until a few days after fully adjusted.
  
• Stage 3: Sleep Deprivation 2
• Now switch all the way to the uberman schedule. Basically, I'd take the core sleep and just nap instead.
• Do for at least 3 weeks.
  
• If it fails, go back to Stage 2, and try to continue there.
• If it succeeds, continue indefinitely, or until the summer.

Now that I'm done abusing bullet points, I'm going to add a caveat. If this experiment does too much non-temporary damage to my grades, I'm abandoning it. I don't care how far along I am. If there is some sort of project or something that interferes with the adjustment period, I'll start over when I can. If classes are too hard to allow for the required limited mental capacities, I'll drop it for the semester/permanently.

I'm going to start Stage 1 tomorrow. I will attempt to blog every day.