GOAL : 14 hours sleep per week
PROGRESS: 14.5 hours sleep this week
This week turned out to be much better than last week. Although, if you take into account the first few days in, you would have never noticed. If you saw my Twitter updates you would have noticed that I went through a rough patch where I felt like “screeching monkeys were in my head having a loudest screeching monkey contest”… basically ONE BIG HEADACHE. Due to this I overslept two of my first naps by 15 minutes adding 30 more minutes to my goal of 14 hours. My only times oversleeping. I kept going though, and life got better. Noting my earlier progress from week one, I can say I fixed most of the mistakes I had. For example:
- I no longer sleep on beds
This was weird at first, but I got used to it. Stupid mistake I made the first few times was sleeping on my arm. After waking up I always felt like blood had rushed to them. I can describe to you the fun I had in turning off alarms while feeling as if my arms were balloons, but I won’t.
And, yes. Alarms. As in plural. I got three :). See the previous week, my body adapted to the one alarm system, and it got far too easy for me to turn off one alarm and go back to sleep. So I set up an elaborate alarm system:
- One alarm on my computer that can only be turned off by entering a specific password.
- One regular alarm set one minute after the others, and placed at a far off distance of where I’m taking a nap, so that I would have to actually walk in order to turn it off.
- And my best system, the “throw-away” alarm. Let me explain. I got a wireless alarm clock (no extension cords), and every-time, right before I take a nap, I toss it/placed it somewhere without looking (best practice is throwing it behind your back). This leaves me with the task of finding it, in order to turn it off, and believe me when I say that finding an alarm clock, when you don’t know where it’s at is harder than it sounds (and it sounds hard).
All the alarm clocks are set on automatic schedules so that I don’t have to constantly input my times, or *wink* *wink* forget to set the times. A typical day spent home with me would look like this:
- You’d see me take my 30 minute (feels like 8 hours) nap.
- See me wake up to two alarm clocks and enter my password into the computer alarm clock first to shut it off (it’s the loudest).
- You’d laugh at me while I stumble through the place looking for my “throw-away” alarm and watch me turn it off when I found it.
- And if by chance, you see me trying to (unconsciously) get more sleep, you’d hear me curse the world when the third alarm (the one set one minute behind) went off.
- Then you’d watch in horror (or ecstasy) as I stretch, or do a mini-exercise to get my heart rate up.
I give credit to this elaborate system for my drastic improvement from last weeks 22.5 hours.
- My dreams are becoming more and more lucid
I’m starting to realize that I am in fact dreaming, and this leads to ‘interesting’ dream experiments. Like the ten nap continuous dream where I learned how to fly step-by-step in each dream and improved onward. This is one of the best outcomes of this whole thing. I’ve gotten to the point where I want to go back to sleep not because I’m tired, but because I want to go back to all the fun I was having.
- My social life needs to be better handled though
I’m still trying to find someway to not keep having to interrupt my social life in order to go take a 30 minute nap somewhere by myself. I’m not particularly irritated by it, but I think it can go much smoother than it currently is. However, I can say that the trade off, having the night all to myself, is fantastic. It’s like I live in two world. One is the bright daytime where life is in constant motion and people are moving at breakneck speeds. And the other is the dark nighttime where I’m (usually) by myself in the wee hours of the night. I get to actually concentrate on my work like never before now; these have been my most productive hours by far. The only thing I have to fix thus far, is the whole “sex” thing (having to use up an hour of your life to explain to someone that you can’t just stay there and cuddle because you’ll end up sleeping isn’t fun).
- At least I look healthier
Another great thing that happened was that the bags under my eyes actually disappeared (or shrink-ed in size), which is great because now I don’t get the “you look so tired” statements from people anymore. And it’s kinda awesome to see people go to sleep and wake up bewildered at the fact that you’re still awake!
That’s pretty much it for my second week’s update. If you want to get daily (smaller) updates on my progress follow me on Twitter and look for comments with the #polyphasic hashtag. And as always you can check just how puffy my eyes are not by tracking my pictorial progress on Flickr. ‘Till next week.
photo credit: Steve Tolcher