Triphasic Sleep: Day 14

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

I thought the rest of my life with polyphasic sleeping experiment is going to be a smooth sailing from now on since I started having wonderful naps yesterday until I tried to wake up from the recent nap at 1:30AM. It has always been the most difficult nap period to wake up from because 99% of my adult life involves being in a deep sleep during these hours. Perhaps I am too well attuned to that.

I was awakened by the alarm at the designated time and put the wake up routine into autopilot mode. However, my brain failed to kick into effect even after 10 minutes of up and moving about. I had a constant feeling of dizziness. My sense of balance is a few milliseconds behind the reality. I felt like a drunk man trying to walk. So I decided to take a 30 minute nap, it’s still early in the experiment so I don’t want to overtax myself. I am beginning to wonder how Steve Pavlina managed to switch to right into an even more rigorous schedule than this without progressively tweaking it like I do. But then again, he’s also someone who burned through university in one year.

The perfect nap didn’t happen today, so one of my two hypothesis must be true. I am going to start experimenting with that tomorrow. I also pondered the significance of breathing that I subconsciously focused on during my first 3 days of trial. Perhaps it is the body’s natural reaction to deprivation of oxygen and forcing a longer exhale will facilitate the feeling of falling unconscious. The problem with this is that I’d aways wake myself up with a sudden vivid image. Has anyone experienced this before? Why do we exhale our last breath when we die? I couldn’t find the answer on google. Maybe it has something to do with internal/external lung pressure. I know for a fact that breathing correctly affects the performance in a dance competition. Could it be that we are wired to change our state of mind with how we take our breath? That we’ve unconsciously anchored breathing to certain state of mind and the state of mind can thus be manipulated by controlling breathing?