donderdag 19 november 2009

Polyphasic Sleeping Experiment : How it failed

Excuse me for not making an end post to the polyphasic-sleeping adventure. I ended up oversleeping a few times in a few days time. I still don't quite understand the cause. Or my alarm failed on me, not going off, or I had slept past them completely, waking up at a random time, a few hours after I went for the 20 minute nap. That happened at the end of august. I kept trying to keep up until the start of september, putting more alarms and being more strict on myself, but the amount of sleep-deprivation without real adjustment to the new system, made it impossible. I had to go to a multi-day poker-tournament in Prague at the start of september, and that was the complete end of it. Since there was quite some money involved, I wanted to be well rested, so I went back to a monophasic sleeping rhytm again since then.

A few months after the facts, I can say that even though my experiment didn't succeed, I am happy that I was able to have an experience like this. For some reason, this experiment made me much more aware in my daily life, and this effect continued even after returning back to a normal sleeping rhytm. Also, my sleeping system seems to have permanently changed after doing this. Even after returning back to monophasic sleeping for longer than 2 months, my dream-sleep, that usually only occurs after 90 minutes sleep, occurs much earlier in my sleep. When I take a nap of shorter than an hour now, I have very vivid dreams every time. Also, my lucid dreaming rate has gone up spectacularly, without doing special effort for it.
In a usual night of sleep, I can remember double as many dreams as before this experiment, without writing anything down or any other effort. I wonder if I am just more often in dreaming phases, or if I'm just more aware of them.
Another very positive after-effect, is that I don't need the 8 hours of sleep anymore that I used to need. Since september, I have enough with six hours, and I feel more energy than ever. Recently I'm even going more towards five/four hours, but there are other reasons for that, that I will get into in future posts.
Weirdly enough, the spectacular improved quality of my skin that I experienced during this experiment, went back to how it used to be, when I went back to monophasic. I can't really find an explanation for that.

Definitely read next post if you found the part about polyphasic sleeping interesting. This blog is getting a new active, although different life very soon. (as in, from tomorrow)