In reply to Thiago.

Cool! I hope it works out for you.

I’ve been polyphasic for a pretty good while now. I’ve varied it a lot as I’ve gone along–stretches of “uberman,” stretches of polyvagrancy as described above, and for a while I took a nap every six hours but let it be anywhere from 20-90 minutes depending on what I felt I needed…that idea worked really well the first few weeks but got tougher as I went along. Which is pretty much what happens no matter what I do. Varying my sleep, though, seems to work really well. Plus I don’t get bored with it. 🙂

I don’t seem capable of sleeping for very long no matter what I do any more, and I don’t worry too much about schedules anymore either. I time my shorter 20-minute naps with an app on my phone, but don’t bother with an alarm for the longer ones most of the time–it’s not needed. Because I don’t sleep for very long. 🙂

Sometimes I go back to pure uberman for a few days. Sometimes, when I feel the need to catch up on sleep, I take a 90-minute nap around 10pm and another long nap, up to couple of hours, starting around 4am. When I do that I like to take a couple of 20-minute naps sometime during the day, but it doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot exactly when I take them. As long as I do take ’em, it works out fine. Until I feel the need to switch to something else.

I think the whole “polyphasic” thing is easy and natural. Trying to make it work on an unvarying schedule, though, is really hard and feels unnatural. At least for me. So I don’t even try; I just figure out what makes sense for the moment and don’t plan too far ahead. It’s no sin to get sleepy, or to sleep longer than I planned either. Really, who cares about either of those? They’re just not a big deal.

I’m very glad I started doing this. I doubt I’ll ever go back to trying to pretend to be monophasic, which is how I think of the days before I learned to nap more efficiently. It never really worked out very well for me. Now, if I get sleepy? I can fix it. And if I’m not sleepy? There’s not a problem.

{8’>

I can’t wait to hear how you go! I am just now into the first 24-36h of no sleep to induce deprivation. Like yourself, I’ve never had regular 24h cycles anyway so it hasn’t been too tough. All the best with your journey and do keep up updated 🙂

[…] guards and such, though they did come by and check on me a couple of times. See, I was doing this polyphasic sleep thing and was never down for more than 90 minutes. Twenty minutes was far more common. In general, […]

In reply to José Pablo.

Thanks! I’m not a big fan of luck, and I’m not quite sure what you mean by “wild dreams”…this is just what I’m planning to do next. It sounds fun and goofy but not particularly wild to me.

But who knows? Maybe I’m crazy in ways of which I’m currently unaware. In fact I’d recommend betting that way, if you’re a betting man! {8’>

Meanwhile, thanks for the comment, and I’ll keep ya posted. I should probably do another blog post soon–but my family and I are vacationing in our cabin until late next week, so I’ve been focusing on other things.

Wow, Good luck, Dave! Hope you accomplish these wild dreams and I really look forward to hearing how your Vegas experiment goes.