I overslept this morning by an hour. I was planning on having a long core anyway (2:15-7:15). My body right now wants me to cut the crap and just sleep long amounts of time at night, but I need to develop this sort of discipline anyway, so I’m definately not giving up.

I took at 20 minute nap around noon which went exceedingly well. I’m concerned that I may not be able to do 20 minute naps every day at noon, but this one went really well - I actually woke myself up at 20 minutes even though I set my alarm to give me 30 minutes. I had a brief dream during this nap. I felt completely refreshed and had an excellent afternoon. I was going to take another nap when I got off work around 5, but I was invited to dinner and this had to be put off until 9:00. This nap did not go quite as well, because I was already wide awake, so trying to fall asleep was difficult. I also had to go to acapella practice at 9:30, so I was concerned about being late, and had a rather poor quality nap. At around midnight I was feeling wide awake again, but I’m beginning to feel tired once more. I’m going to push it until 2:00 AM and get 5.25 hours of core and get up at 7:15, because I have noted that it seems I generally end a REM cycle around that time.

Wish me luck!

I was talking with Matt H. today and he informed me that he is doing a sleeping experiment which has to do with polyphasic sleep cycles. He started yesterday and his goal is to get to a true polyphasic sleeping schedule which would bring his total amount of sleep down to two hours a day. He’d take a 20 minute nap every four hours and after about two weeks when his body has been trained to this, he will (supposedly) fall immediately into REM sleep.

I’m inspired.

I went home and used wikipedia to see what I could scrounge up on polyphasic sleep cycles, and it seems that they’re rather poorly documented, although it says that if one can get past the first two weeks, it seems to work out quite well. Unfortunately with my schedule I would be unable to do a nap every four hours, so instead I am attempting to perform a modified polyphasic sleeping schedule. I am going to try to get two REM cycles in during a “core sleep” at night, and another REM cycle or two from naps during the day. This will hopefully limit my effective sleeping time to less than five hours a day.