Day 20-21

So just a quick update: Day 20 was fine. After I got out of class at 4 pm and took my 4:20 nap, I spent the rest of the evening until early morning working on my school's newspaper. I was late for my 8:20pm nap, getting to bed around a quarter to nine. I retired to a lounge for my nap only to be woken up 15 minutes later by a club that had a meeting in the room. Moving locations, I slept for another 10 minutes before returning to the newsroom. That was the first time I've ever had a nap interrupted. Though it wasn't a pleasant awakening, I assumed that I would be able to bounce back. Later in the evening, I took my midnight nap as scheduled and continued work on the paper until my section was complete at 4am at which point I retired to my room for my 3-hour core sleep.

Waking up on Day 21, I felt fine but between my noon nap and 4pm nap, I felt extremely groggy as if there was a small weight pressing down on my head. I was fine after my 4pm nap for a few hours, but for the last two hours, the fog rolled over through my head, which is a pity because I have one paper and over 200 pages of reading for tomorrow. I'm hoping that my state will improve after my 8pm nap.

I'm not quite sure why this is happening. I had all my naps yesterday and my core sleep cycle. Yes, the 8pm one was late but not so significantly that it should matter. Other blogs say that if you miss a nap, it can take days to recover, but since I didn't miss anything, I'm hoping to recover as soon as possible.

Recently, I've been waking up minutes before my alarm clock goes off. It seems that my body is really getting used to a polyphasic sleep cycle. Although, it's possible that I'm waking up out of fear of oversleeping because each nap, while only 20 minutes, feels like hours. The next time I'm in a situation where a friend is around to ensure that I wake up, I will attempt naps without my alarm clock.

I wrote an newspaper article about this experience, ending it with advice for people interested in trying it out. I'm hoping my small liberal arts college will become a haven and testing ground for polyphasic sleepers. Please excuse the quality of this evening's blog; I feel a noticeable drop in cognitive ability.

UPDATE

So a friend of mine was working the same computer lab as me so instead of going home to nap, I went to a secluded part of the building that I'm working in, telling her to come get me if I didn't return 20 minutes later. Well, lo and behold, I woke up exactly 20 minutes later on my own accord. I am not sure whether I can count it as a full success though. My sleep felt extremely light, and I'm not sure at what point I actually fell asleep. That being said, I'm decently refreshed especially considering that I slept on the floor. The key is that I need to be able to take naps without preoccupying my mind with the fear of "when will I fall asleep?" Hopefully, there will be more opportunities to experiment with alarmless naps.

UPDATE 2

So this has got to have been one of the hardest days of my polyphasic experiment thus far. It's unfortunate that I can still have a hard time three weeks in. I was, in general, exhausted all day except for the immediate hour or two following a nap. Today, two people have told me I look like hell (to speak euphemistically). On the upside, even though I've doing work all day, my eye sight has only been slightly affected. I use natural tear eye drops, and when I take breaks, instead of reading the NY Times or other websites, I literally close my eyes and listen to music. To increase my energy during this period as I move into the early hours of Day 22, I've drank two Energy vitamin waters. They are surprisingly efficient ... or not seeing as it took two.

I may have to skip my core sleep cycle this evening and just insert extra naps like I did the first thirteen days of the experiment because of my workload this evening. Though some might consider this a drastic change on the level of missing a nap, I disagree. Core sleep is like a birthday cake whereas those extra 4am and 8am naps are cupcakes; you're happy with either, but birthday cake is preferable (unless it's a Magnolia's cupcake).

For my midnight nap, I decided to go home and sleep in bed rather than on the floor just in case it would give me more energy. Combating the issue of lying on my bed, wondering when I'm going to fall asleep, I've found that going through my multiplication tables or doing something related to math distracts me and puts me to sleep faster. I'm just realizing now that I've been setting my alarm clock for less time down from 30 minutes to 25 and occasionally 20--the reason for this is that I hoped to fall asleep faster, but the reality is that it may still take me 10 minutes to fall asleep, in which case if my alarm is only set for 20/25 minutes sleep, I'm not getting the full 20 that I'm entitled.