Days 8, 9, and 10

If you read anything in this blog, read the later half of today's entry. 

In our last post we said we were changing the sleep schedule in an effort to be more productive at the CFA. We started to only sleep every 4 hours while at work, and then every 3 at home. Big mistake! Rule number 1: Do not mess with your polyphasic sleep schedule until you are over the hump. Pushing to stay awake longer during the day definitely had dire consequences for Maggie and I around 3am, Wednesday morning. Although during the day we were still alert, that night we were exhausted. We ended up oversleeping by 2.5 hours. This wasn't aided by the fact that I had a rather stressful day due to some family drama which kept me awake during all my afternoon and early evening naps. Sleep deprivation definitely was to blame in this case. I woke up in the middle of this deviation and went into Maggie's room to try and persuade her to get up. Maggie didn't even hear her alarm which went off for 1 hour, nor does she remember our conversation.

After we woke up I snapped the following pictures.

We managed to finish the rest of the night with polyphasic success, but that event definitely sobered us. With renewed vigor we set out again to try and get back into our schedule. Our mistake here was to try and stick with the adapted work schedule. We think that, especially during the first 2 weeks, a polyphasic novice should not deviate at all from a rigid and symmetric schedule so that the body really becomes prepared for each nap. As well, contrary to what one might think, since our oversleeping event, we have been way more tired. Especially in the first few nap cycles after. Again the problem is that oversleeping allows your body to try and slip back into normal length cycles. Setting multiple alarms is key for this. 

We spent a large portion of our next night looking for Dr. Claudio Stampi's contact information. No, we are not stalkers. Dr. Stampi is the original researcher who examined the feasibility and effects of a long-term polyphasic life style. He wrote the book, "Why We Nap: Evolution, Chronobiology, and Functions of Polyphasic and Ultra-Short Sleep" which includes a lot of interesting research on Polyphasic sleeping. We watched a Scientific American video on PBS that detailed Dr. Stampi's study of 50 days in the life of someone adopting the polyphasic sleep cycle. At somepoint, they tried to wake the test subject from his nap, but even shaking his shoulders was unsuccessful. When he did awake, however, his mental functions were slightly improved from before his polyphasic sleep days. (The video can be found here: http://vvi.onstreammedia.com/cgi-bin/visearch?squery=+ClipID:5++VideoAsset:pbssaf105&query=sleep&user=pbs-saf)

In general, Dr. Stampi found memory retention and analytic abilities actually seem to increase for polyphasic sleepers when compared to monophasic and biphasic sleepers. Another thing we had completely wrong early in the blog was that the proportion of different sleep stages remains the same in a polyphasic sleep schedule. In other words, it's not all about REM sleep. Some naps will be deep sleep, others REM. The body chooses a lesser proportion of light sleep, but otherwise the body still gets the same distribution of sleep stages, though potentially out of order. Dr. Stampi believes that evolutionarily we are predisposed, like most animals, to a polyphasic schedule and that our ancestors slept polyphasically. He advocates this sleep schedule for doctors, paramedics, solo world-sailors, and anyone who must perform for over 20 hours a day. 

The amazing part is he lives in Newton, MA and his Chronobiology Research Institute was, at least 10 years ago, located in Cambridge. We looked everywhere, but the institute seems to have shut down. We do have a home phone number, as he is a consultant for sailors who need to adapt a polyphasic schedule. We sent an email, but it's been 3 days and no response. If we get the nerve, we may call him.

As an unexpected bonus, sleep deprivation makes people say some very interesting things. My favorite examples came from Maggie in the middle of Wednesday night. We had just got up from a nap and she was beyond loopy. All she wanted to do was sleep, but I wasn't about to let her. This put us at odds for awhile as I flicked water at her and she tried to hit me, several times. Thankfully her motor skills were equally impaired. She said many weird things during this time, and if I had to do it over, I'd get a voice recorder to capture every golden statement. As it was, I was limited by my writings speed since I started recording them in a notebook about 10 min into our conversation.

In an attempt to keep her awake, I asked Maggie what she wanted to do until the next nap. She responded, "I want to do that thing. You know, that thing." When I asked for clarification, she frustratedly replied, "You know what it is. I want to do that thing, that I already said." Similar statements such as this continued for the next several minutes. 

Eventually Maggie started falling asleep in the middle of an uncompleted sentence. I pointed out that she was falling asleep and reminded her that we were polyphasic sleeping, and thus couldn't go back to bed until our next scheduled nap time in 3 hours. She said, "I don't think it matters if I fall asleep. I've slept at your place before." Considering I am in her apartment, I was quite confused. I asked for clarification, though at this point I wasn't expecting coherence. In fact, I would have been disappointed if she had snapped out of it. There was no need to worry, however, as she replied, "

It doesn't matter if I sleep now. I've already done the important part of being awake." I was not quite sure what "the important part of being awake" entailed other than staying awake. But as she was definitely proposing something else, I tried to get her to explain what she meant. 

Maggie was getting frustrated with my slow wit. She exasperatedly explained, "There is a reason I have to be awake. A special task. Like the with the Sword of Truth, Richard had a special task. To kill Darken Rahl. They (referring to the characters Richard and Kahlan from Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series) have to be asleep sometime and awake sometime. When they're been awake long enough to know where they are going, there is no purpose to being awake anymore. We also have a special task. There is some grand task that has already been completed, so it is ok to sleep." QED. Why would I ever question this logic?

Thankfully I snapped a picture of Maggie on my couch during her ramblings. 

In a more alert state, Maggie explained that what she meant by all this incoherent rambling was that for her, the hard part was waking up. So once she had woken up (which clearly in this case she never really did come to full consciousness) she could go back to sleep as her "special task" was done.

In addition while at the bus stop that morning Maggie commented, "The people at the bus stop are different. It's like we are in a parallel universe." Not to be outdone, I had my conversation of grogginess, though (un)fortunately Maggie didn't write it down for posterity. I am sure it was similar in style to her's, though without the creepy references to killing Darken Rahl. I do remember saying, while at the physiotherapist, "How do I connect the theraband to the dog?" Where dog <=> door. Mixing words actually happens quite frequently with me now, as well as my mid-term memory is much worse.