Day 8

6:20am Slept for 2 hours. Awoke to alarm - very sleepy. Possible causes: a) missed nap previous night, or b) too much sleep ( 40 minutes + 2 hours ), or c) not enough sleep, or d) started core sleep at the wrong time, or e) worked out hard the night before + A. I'm guessing A + D + E = C.

Observation: I'm sleepiest when I wake up. Last two days I've overslept a couple of naps, and been very sleepy this morning.

Let's try a hypothesis, starting with the obvious:
a) my brain must be releasing some chemical that makes me sleepy (uhm, melatonin - duh?)
b) The more it releases at once, the sleepier I get, the deeper I sleep. If I wake up after it has done that but before my body has used it up, I am groggy for a while until the melatonin? disperses. It feels a need for deeper sleep because I have shortened my sleep periods, so it releases more hormone to drive me deep quick.
c) So in my brain's attempt to adapt to shortened sleep periods it appears to exhibit signs of a lack of sleep i.e. sleeping through alarms and excessive sleepiness upon waking.
If this is true, then this inadvertently sabotages the effort to shorten the sleep period by exhibiting symptoms of lack of sleep when I awake and making me so drowsy that I fall back asleep as soon as I shut off the alarm. Thus, excessive sleepiness upon waking is a measure of the effectiveness of the adaptation but in the reverse way - the drowsier, the more the body is adapting. I imagine another measure of the effectiveness of the adaptation is the amount of bodily and mental energy exhibited throughout the waking period. The more alert and the more energy available at peak periods, the more effective the recovery during sleep. If this theory is true, then the following characteristics should present on a par with pre-polyphasal experience:
a) Mental acuity. This would encompass all mental abilities, i.e. alertness, clarity, powers of observation, memory, and more (testable, observable)
b) Physical strength and endurance (measurable)
c) Emotional. (Subjective; observable)
d) Immune system function. (Measurable; observable)
e) Spiritual. (Subjective)
f) others?

Regarding the above, so far:
a) I ran the pool table early in the experiment, even though I don't play pool well, and haven't played in years. (Externally verifiable; witnessed) Periods of increased clarity and alertness above the baseline pre-polyphasal clarity, periods of hyper-alertness.
b) Workouts are at the expected levels. Feeling a little less endurance, but this is explainable as I am radically altering my sleep patterns fairly quickly, there is bound to be some physical wear. Perhaps this could be avoided by extending the period of adaptation.
c) Feeling calmer, less stressed, more patience.
d) No illness as of yet. This is remarkable for me because I have, in the past always gotten sick (usually a cold, sometimes turning to laryngitis) whenever I went with less than 6 hours of sleep more than a few days in a row. In fact, recovery from the lung congestion I experience each time I visit South Carolina has been rapid.
e) unchanged.

Conclusion: My body is currently adjusting from old sleep patterns to the new ones. Old ones were less than optimal because I have experienced periods of increased alertness and ability. Perhaps the new ones will not be optimal either and it is unknown if they will ultimately be better, but during the transition phase I have encountered improved sleep abilities and patterns, so there is something that has improved by what I have done.

Comment on the efforts of others to reach polyphasic sleeping by suddenly changing their sleep patterns overnight to a radically different sleep schedule: this seems to me to be more prone to failure due to the inflexibility of the technique. Reasoning: the body recovers during sleep. Less recovery time at lower levels of recovery leads to a decrease in all measures, eventually making the body desperate for more recovery. If the body is not able to adapt to the new patterns quickly enough, then the attempt at changing the sleep patterns will fail and the body will fall asleep on it's own in order to recover. Thus, the number of successes will be determined by the average ability of the general population to adapt quickly. Perhaps this is why there is a high failure rate.

11:45am : Napped for 20 minutes. Prior to that my head got clearer and clearer. Wasn't tired, but when I laid down, I left my eyes open and after a minute they naturally closed and I instantly drifted off. Now am nicely alert.

Some interesting information on sleeping in general can be found here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026781.600-time-to-wake-up-to-the-facts-about-sleep.html

4:00pm: 20-minute nap. Awoke with a feeling of pressure behind my eyes. This feeling started a couple of days ago and comes when I don't have enough sleep.

4:40pm: 20-minute nap. I decided to do two naps with 20 minutes in between to see if I could get rid of the behind-the-eyesocket pressure. It helped. It's not disabling, simply present and indicates I am not well-rested enough. I hope it will be alleviated as I get better at napping.

8:00pm: 30-minute nap. I tried 30 minutes this time because I noticed my nasal passages are closed. I thought a little more rest might be useful. I am certainly less foggy (today my brain has been a little foggy all day) and now I am clearer.

Note: I read on a couple of other blogs (stevepavlina.com for one) that when polyphasers - or perhaps polyphasician would be more accurate - get sick, they revert to monophasic sleep to recover and then return to polyphasary. At this time I could understand the core and nap times longer, but it seems extreme to return all the way to monophasicity, especially since people who are truly sick tend to lay down a lot during the day and often sleep during the day.

10:11pm: Note: I am studying for periods of hours at a time without experiencing the mental exhaustion, frustration and re-reading necessary I have always encountered when studying a new course. It seems odd that I should feel a little sleepy and yet still have better long-term concentration. Possible explanation: I am more focused? It makes me think I should have started this experiment with baseline mental metrics using PC applications or web applications and then performed the tests over the period of adjustment.

Note: Listening to music while studying; found a new artist: Stephan Bodzin. At the time I first started to listen to his tracks they seemed to captivate my attention, almost hypnotically. The tracks were rich, deep and pulsating. Maybe the artist's sound is really that captivating, or maybe I was having an enhanced auditory experience - or maybe a combination of both. It didn't seem that I was having an enhanced experience at the time, but now reflecting back (it is 4:45 am the follwing day and I am editing this day's post) it seemed too good to be true, too real to be simply music in my ears. It was an engrossing experience; so much so that I had to stop studying and simply close my eyes and absorb the sound for a while. Now I have done that in the past - prior to polyphasia, but I can't remember getting that much enjoyment out of a track since I was a teenager. How interesting that so many of my experiences on this journey not only remind me of how I experienced my senses during that time of my life, but it seems that my senses have been revitalized and are reaching a refreshed state, as if the hands of time had been turned back on them all. The important thing for me to emphasize at this time is the nature of the enhancement seems to be in the cerebral processing of the signals, not in the receivers. To give you an analogy, it's as if my brain before polyphasia was taking analog signals and converting them to digital, discrete packets and processing each one, resulting in a someone choppy feeling and discontinuous exprience of the world, and now it is as if it is no longer converting, but processing the analog signal directly as a smooth unbroken and continious input. It is as if my brain had before been clogged like a drain, restricting the flow of information, and now is rinsed out and free-flowing.

12:10am: 20-minute nap. Awoke clear-headed.

1:30am: Core sleep: 1 hr 50 minutes.