The First Post

Today I start on my polyphasic excursion. I only just came across mention of polyphasia yesterday at stevepavlina.com, polyphasic.blogspot.com, and everything2.com and did quite a bit of reading right away. Noticing that quite a number of people have written about it and tried it with success, and that some have tried it and failed, and being perfectly in tune with wanting more hours in a day since I was a child, I will try it.

Having always been a night-owl, and never having a sleep pattern that fits with others, I feel drawn to try it. I foresee a problem in that I have always felt that I need 8 hours of sleep per day, but on the other hand I can stay up until 5am without a problem when I am mentally engaged, so it has seemed to me for quite some time that a 28 or 29 hour day is what my system is tuned for.

The best results seem to be had by others with the Uberman so I would desperately like to try it. Uberman requires absolute strict adherence to sleep times for a couple of weeks until one's body has adapted, and my disposition is suited for it - I can stick to anything once I put my mind to it. However, from the writings of the failings of others, Uberman is intolerably inflexible, especially at the beginning - it seems the timing must be to the minute or one's body will revolt with a coma-like sleep that will last 4 to 5 hours or perhaps even longer. Naps that are late or missed wreak havoc with the mind and body of the adherent, so it is not conducive to a most ordinary job schedules. As I have a job as programmer my first reaction to the idea was that it would not fit into my work schedule and so was impossible for me. However there is a second polyphasic schedule known as the Everyman which consists of a core sleep period each night of 3 hours combined with 3 naps throughout the day, or a 1.5 hour nap with 4 to 5 naps throughout the day. The benefit to the Everyman schedule arises in that the nap times are more flexible and can vary up to an hour in either direction from their scheduled times, the downside being that there is more time slept each day. Since the adjustment for the Everyman is much less difficult and the failure rate lower, I will start with that one. It is less extreme and so appeals to me less, but I will think of it as a training-ground for the Uberman, which I will plan to graduate to in the future.

One problem I can foresee is that I have never been prone to napping; when I get up I want to keep going until I must sleep. I will need to adjust my thinking.

I am an instructor and programmer. As a programmer, I do not anticipate that taking a nap on the job will be an issue; whenever I work on-site I will simply tell them I am narcoleptic (or some such hooey) and require a nap at my desk at lunchtime and on breaks. People in IT are used to programmers being weird folk anyway; I have not been shaken by anyone's impression of me as being weird before; in all likelihood, this will fuel my inner oddball.

In fact, I can feel it energizing me already.