Triphasic Sleep: Day 13

This is part thirteen of my Triphasic sleep experiment. Please visit this page for more info.

“SHIT!”

I jumped into full alertness as the feeling of dread consumed my being. The frustration at having failed after 12 days of adjustment led me to curse and swear when the obvious signs started surfacing to my conscious, confirming with the inevitable failure.

I had changed my core sleep hour from 4AM to 7:30AM, reducing it to 3.5 hours only and was very late in taking my afternoon nap due to overwhelming workload presented to me by numerous engineers. New years is a popular day to set your deadline. Add to the fact that I started sweating cold sweat at 2PM at work, an indication that my body is overtaxed (never scientifically proven, but experienced every time I pull an all nighter and write an exam the next day, or at a LAN party). Rest assured, when i finally got into my bed at 6:30PM, I was scientifically brain dead.
The sleep was too good, I remember my first thought was: “Boy, the last time I slept like this was the 2 day sleep I took after a camping trip… 2 DAYS!!!”. Which brings me straight back down to reality. I checked the clock and couldn’t believe my eyes. I had waken up at 7:58PM. 2 minutes before my alarm goes off and this is the best sleep I’ve had in years. Still not believing, I waited 2 more minutes and indeed, my alarm went off. Something must be wrong.

Then I remembered Steve Pavlina’s blog entry about the experience where he felt refreshed because he had dreams. I too had a dream this time and can still remember some of it while staring at the clock. This adds affirmation and erased some of my previous doubts about Steve’s claim to polyphasic sleep pattern. I can now fully trust this source and proceed to apply the knowledge to mine.

What did I do today that is different? I napped at 6:30PM instead of 5:30PM and I also had a chocolate around 5PM. It could be that our body has an internal clock that cycles despite us being awake and shifting the sleep time made my REM sleep match that and produced the best sleep ever. Or the Sugar in the chocolate created some kind of high that combined very well with sleep deprivation.

The 12 AM nap is still the same. Hard to get up, but once I am up, it’s fine.

So I proceeded with further adjustment as I enter phase 2 of the sleep experiment. Yesterday I reduced the core sleep hours to 3.5 and today I took away the extra 30 minutes nap in the afternoon.