Getting there, but not quite yet

Good morning. Today is the 18th of august, and it's 7.20AM now, about 13 days exactly into my little experiment. I guess not updating the blog for three days made quite some people think that I gave up on it, but I can prove that hypothesis wrong. In the period between Saturday evening and Monday morning, I almost died of feeling tired but not allowing myself to fall asleep. Oversleeping for 4 hours on day 8 effectively rewinded my progress a few days, the days after that, REM sleep was gone again, I wasn't getting any of my well-deserved dreams anymore, and even though waking up from naps was easy, the sleep I was getting was very light, and did not give me a lot of mileage.

The weekend was a big test for me. Saturday was the day that my performance was scheduled with my amateur rockband. I had hoped that when I started the sleeping-experiment, that I would be mostly adjusted by this day, but that hypothesis wasn't either the case. On top of this, I still had to write a few pages for my bachelor's thesis, the last puzzle piece to get my bachelor's degree. The deadline for it was monday, so tired or not tired, the weekend was going to be pretty active either way. The rockperformance was a challenge, but I had been looking forward to it for quite a while, so it didn't really give me a lot of additional stress. The bachelor paper that had to get finished on the other hand, certainly did O_o. I was already feeling kind of tired before the performance on saturday. We had a last repetition at 2pm, so I wasn't sure if I would be able to get my 4pm nap. I ended up sleeping for a few minutes, lying in the sun outside while we were chilling. I was lucky that the performance was already at 5 o clock. That's around the most active time of the day for me on this rhythm, so I didn't feel sleepy. I was actually feeling somewhat overly active during the performance, and even though I was highly sleepdeprived, I was able to give the best that I have. Looking back at it now, I have no idea where I got all the energy from. I have a good afterfeeling about it anywayz. After the performance I got really tired, had to take my 8pm nap a little bit inconveniently again inside a driving car. Sunday was a bigger challenge. Even though I felt dead tired all day long, I still had to finish that paper. I finished it at monday morning. Together with handing in my paper at my university, a big weight fell from my shoulders.

I started dreaming again in my naps too yesterday, and the sleep I'm getting from it feels very energizing. If my naps stay like this, I can imagine that I can really start regaining all that spent energy from them. The only thing that I gotta watch out for, are all the hidden ninja's hiding in the shadow of sleep. Somehow, together with dreams, comes also a type of sleep sometimes that's very hard to wake up from, and this morning I slept a straight hour while my alarm was buzzing. It were my parents that woke up from it that saved me. The next coming week will be very key. Firstly I hope that oversleeping for an hour hasn't set me back again. If not, I have the feeling that if I can somehow make it though this week, I will probably have the tough moments behind my back, and making this sleeping rhythm really work systematically will only be a matter of days. Apart from making plans that tackle my oversleeping-issue, I'm not really planning a lot of stuff. I just want a few relaxing days, where I don't have anything or anyone that needs my attention, so I can focus all my willpower on bringing this to a good end.