the little engine that couldnt stop fucking up

on the 12th somehow i slept through the alarm or turned it off, i have no idea. and i slept for a total of 8. this is especially depressing, i was really hoping to eradicate that awful number forever, i thought i had at least conquered the 8, but apparently it's still somewhat legit.

i abandoned the schedule for that night, as i had a day-long obligation from early in the morning on the next day. upon returning from said event, though, i resumed the schedule, and have been also setting my cell phone on extra loud as an emergency alarm. my core nap has become 4:00-7:15, with naps somewhere around/between 10-12, 4-7, and 10-12. since my core wakes me up at a fairly normal time, i don't feel so bad about possibly terrorizing the other dorm residents with blasting noises.

my failures are discouraging but the amount i've been getting done when i push through is gratifying enough to make me want to stick with it, at least for the remainder of the summer, and even after that i'll at least try to cut sleeping down to 6 hours or so, if everyman is still giving me problems. its nicer this way. extra life + naps = now integral to my wellbeing.

i don't think anybody is actually reading this... and even if you are there are 400 other more informative and successful sleep experiment chronicles going on instead, so... i think i'll abandon this little sublog, unless something incredible happens. in the meantime if you want to know how it's going, let me know and i'll give you your very own personal update.

sayonara.

dumb

well im not sure what happened, everything was going great but i guess i didnt hear my alarm or turned it off unconsciously. im reluctant to get a blaster cause i live in a dorm. this is hard.

most interesting nap so far...

just got up from a nap that ended up being 15 minutes but felt like 2 hours and also like i never actually fell asleep... i was having those inbetween consciousness and sleep weird thoughts the whole time, weird "memories" of conversations that never happened, and that sort of thing. and i have all kinds of energy now. this gives me hope and pleasure.

6, adjustments

so after i wrote that last entry i took a nap earlier than normal and prolonged it into an hour or hour.5 or so. i was really thrown off. i skipped the middle nap and went to work later which was no problem, took another nap at 11:30pm, felt pretty awake through the night, slept from about 4:15 to 7:30 which turned out really well, thanks lucia for the advice. slightly groggy after most recent nap, which i took about half hour earlier than i should to compensate for some things i have to do this morning. it went on a few minutes longer than my average nap, maybe thats why too. i actually woke up after about 12 minutes, i wonder if i should have just gotten up...?

cheating

what is this, day 5?

so i cheated this morning on purpose and allowed myself to sleep an extra 2 hours or so. and i went to sleep about half an hour earlier so i think it must have been near 6 hours all together.

my main reason for this was that i woke up after about an hour and a half of the core and had to go to the bathroom. as i was walking back to my room i was totally delirious, sort of falling asleep while walking, and when i thought i had reached my door and went to open it i realized i was just pressed up against a wall near my door. it was not my door. it was a wall. so this startled me a little bit. i left my alarm set to 6 as usual but when i woke up apparently i still felt awful and set my alarm an hour later to 7, which i again also apparently decided to ignore and wake up yet another hour later at 8. ok so i guess i don't remember how much of it was conscious. but i was consciously wary of my delirium state, in general and in consideration of having work tonight, so i thought maybe it would be best to reset a little bit and start fresh. i do feel great this morning though.

i have another work related dilemma approaching, a dilemma which is going to force me to be at a specific place from 7:30am until 7pm or thereabouts, plus commute time, and there probably won't be an opportunity to nap within that period. i'm wondering if it would be effective to allow myself 6 hours of sleep the night before to compensate for the naps i'll be missing/postponing.

two things i will be changing about my schedule: i'm going to move my core sleep to earlier or later, since i really seem to just want to be awake in the middle of the night. i've always enjoyed being awake at that time, actually, but during the past few experiment days no matter how groggy i've felt during the day i'm always bright and awake after midnight. so i'm thinking either 11-2 or 4:30-7:30, or somewhere in that neighborhood. i also wonder if the fact that i'd been taking 4 naps rather than 3 was somehow detrimental... my rationale for doing this was that i'd need naps at those times for uberman which i'm still hoping to be able to transition into, but maybe i should give up on that idea for now and just focus on perfecting everyman in the way he wants to be dealt with. though the extra nap was always nice, sometimes i felt like i didn't really need it when i went to lie down, though the general trend with all naps was right most of the way up to them i'd feel groggy but then the hour or so before them i'd feel finally awake.

i'll also be toying with little minute-adjustments, though the time it takes me to fall asleep is irregular so i don't know how much it will help.

alright. that's all for now.

blugh

so each day it gets harder to wake up after the 3hr nap. i hear the alarm and get out of bed and then its an epic struggle to keep my eyes open. i thought 3 hours was my ideal core period, as it seems that i was occasionally waking up after that amount of time anyway. but maybe i should extend the core period? or maybe its more important to just try to stay consistent at this point? i remember reading some polyphasic advice to the effect of "let your body sleep when it's naturally inclined to"... well, my hardest time is during the daytime (morning/early afternoon), whereas i tend to perk up a lot at night. i've always been more of a night person i guess. so maybe i should move the core to sometime in the morning and have the whole nighttime for wakefulness and get to watch the sunrise every morning. i badly want to cheat and try this switch-to-morning-core thing out now after having a differet name with tat you............ ???? those past few words were written while nodding off. it's strange that the sleepdep is evidently THAT bad, as after i manage to pass through the initial morning issue and some occasional early day nodding off, i've been feeling totally fine and occasionally quite good. hmm.

i woke up soooo sweaty. how is it possible to be this hot and humid at 6am.

i guess for now i'll stick to the schedule i'd laid out for myself, possibly adding an extra nap this morning and possibly extending sleep tonight to 4 hours. i'm slightly concerned as i have work tomorrow and i dont want to do anything embarrassing or incriminating...

now its off to the shower room.

day 2

due to extreme amazing thunderstorms the beach trip was cancelled. so i was able to follow my schedule like a pro. seems to be going pretty well so far. i am quite groggy, but nothing too severe. some nodding off right around the first hour after waking, or if i'm reading or studying, and then towards the last stretch before the next nap, although right before im supposed to take a nap the drowsiness has already passed. slightly out of sync. today the naps mostly felt like i never actually fell asleep, though during one i was sure that i'd overslept when in fact i woke up at around 19 minutes before the alarm.

my alarm clock is actually rain and thunder... i wonder if the recent thunderstorm extravaganza (theyve been happening several times a week lately) could end up somehow working against me... make me immune to the sound of thunder or something. or maybe it will just train me to wake up whenever i hear thunder, which i wouldnt actually mind too much...

the only weird thing that's happened so far was after my 11:30pm nap last night... i woke up and for about 5 minutes was having light hallucinations. when i moved my arm i'd see 3 or 4 um... images of my arm in its previous 3 or 4 locations. do you know what im talking about? there's a word or phrase for this that i can't seem to recall. like stop motion if you were to superimpose each phase of movement over the previous one? i know at least one of you isn't too happy to be hearing this, but don't worry because (a) i've experienced similar things with architecture-related sleep dep, and (b) if it keeps happening and i start going crazy(ier) ill stop.

but aside from the occasional bout of nodding i felt fine all day, and am pleased with how much i've been getting done in the past few days without even particularly having giant overeager to-do lists.

two other negative side effects: (1) i just spent about an hour trying to figure out the word i actually was going for in place of overeager.... i gave up. its hard to determine how much of this is due to sleep-drowse brain and how much is a general deterioration of english from just not using it as much. do you know what word im thinking of? when you set your sights maybe a little too high because you're motivated and maybe a little naive? there's a word for it. (2) my eye muscles have been pretty tense. this happens normally when i dont get much sleep, but its exacerbated by the fact that reading and studying takes up a majority of both my regular and my extra waking activities. though a part of me is always looking out for excuses to buy more japanese glasses, i dont really need my eyes to get much worse at this point. so... we'll see how it is in a week or so.

edit: overly ambitious. that was it.