Polyphasic Sleep Experiment - Days 6, 7, and 8

Days 1 and 2(&3) were pretty difficult to swallow. In general, I had thought that those were the roughest of the days, simply because it was gloriously debilitating complete sleep deprivation. With those, I just felt awful. I had thought that I had gotten past the hump and it was all downhill from here. But for these past three days, it was even more of a struggle than the first two, but in a decidedly different way.

See, for the first few days it was an obvious issue. I was not only a zombie, as Pavlina described, but I was more like some sort of vile bog zombie, with nasty nausea effects attached as well. I could mostly treat it with caffeine, though (perhaps a mistake…).

This week, I wasn’t tired, per se. See, I was in a chipper mood each day, and felt motivated and excited. The evenings and night times were again very productive and pleasant with very little side effects. However, from right around 5 or 6 am until about 2:30 pm each day, I was… well, for lack of a better term, narcoleptic.

This sounds a lot scarier than it really was. But, effectively, any time that my interest in what I was doing waned, I would get very sleepy. My eyes would want to close against my will, and I would flip into a mini dream. Usually like a quick snippet of conversation at some odd locale, far away from work. Some were like being teleported far away, while others were like entering into a Salvador Dali painting or something. You know. Weird dream stuff.

My point is that these dreams weren’t special in any way, they were just short. It was a little annoying that they would force themselves on me as my interest levels dropped down (and of course, this week I’m doing some not quite as interesting work).

Now, the mini-dreams (“microsleep”) started showing up on day 6, Monday. I had decided to try removing caffeine from the equation, so that REM was potentially more effective (since caffeine has been shown to inhibit REM). It’s just odd that now the inhibitor is mostly gone from my system, it’s like a flood gate of dreaming dumping into me.

But what I find odder, though, is that after 2:30 pm it’s not a problem anymore. And then, throughout all the other waking phases it’s not a problem either. It’s just that for those 8-9 hours, my body is forcibly dumping REM on me.

Now if I was actively interested in what I working on, it never came up. While at home, again, not a problem. I happily worked on personal projects all through the night. When I re-introduced caffeine to get through a trouble spot, I found that the microsleep episodes stopped (which makes sense).


So, now my plan is to keep out the caffeine, but get my body to recognize that REM sleep will only come during those times that I lay down.

So, I’m still chugging. Holiday weekend coming up (I’m in the United States – it’s Thanksgiving, so we get Thursday and Friday off), so I should have more control over extra naps if needed.

Of course, I will also have limited internet connection as we visit relatives out in “the boonies”.

-sean