Success & Freaky Time Dilation
Yay! Overslept slightly Wed. night, but have had no mistakes since. Am only very slightly tired this morning, so I imagine by tomorrow I’ll have things back to, for lack of a better word, “normal”.
Man, sleeping more than 4 hours a day feels lazy to me now. It’s pretty weird. Cool-weird, but in a way that makes an asshole out of me if I’m not careful. I have to watch myself and make sure I’m not being sneery at people for sleeping a normal night!
Someone asked a good question on the Uberman Yahoo! Forum about the time-dilation effects of polyphasic cycles. The short answer is that there is a little bit of one on Everyman — the days can seem longer than they should be — but on Uberman, it’s pretty profound. Here’s my answer (with a bit more detail added), wherein I make questionable puns and try to describe it:
My experience when I did Uberman for 6 months was definitely one of “What do you mean it’s only Wednesday?” or often, “What do you mean it’s *still* Wednesday?” It was actually profound enough that after about a month, my friend and I “named the nights” — so that our week had fourteen “days”, half of which happened in the dark. That helped us overcome our tendency to completely forget what day it was, because the days were so darn long. Sometimes I would swear that 3 days had gone by, only to find out that it was still late-late night of the first day. Watches, for some reason, were useless in helping with that (though 24-hour watches were definitely more useful than the 12-hour kind).
The feeling persisted the whole time I lived on that schedule. We even made jokes about “Uberman: You won’t live forever, but dammit, it’ll FEEL like it!”
The time-dilation was actually initially my biggest reason for giving lots of caveats to people who wanted to try Uberman. (I was in college and quite crazy, so for a while I honestly didn’t realize that *most* people wouldn’t want to or be able to hang with the sleep-dep thing at the beginning.) I was constantly busy and engaged in what I was doing, and because of the momentum (if that’s an applicable word), life felt like flying down a hill on skis. That feeling where you know you’re going way faster than you should be able to control, but somehow you’re controlling it. It was very fun and sometimes a little scary, but the longer we failed to have any negative symptoms or effects, the less scary it got. (You have to remember that when I did it, I wasn’t aware of anybody else who ever had who was still alive. So there was also the spectre of “Will I go completely insane tomorrow and jump off a building?” to liven things up.)
As I said, we did fine — but if one’s life were slower and/or one’s psychology more frail, I could totally see it snapping a mind or two. It was pretty freaky in the sense of its profundity, but I actually enjoyed it at the time. To put it another way, it wasn’t unpleasant, but it was definitely different and it wasn’t something you could ignore. The very few other long-term Ubersleepers I’ve talked to have confirmed the sensation, though it seems to affect everyone a bit differently in terms of how they interpret the experience (fun, scary, freeing, confining, etc.).
And yeah, I’m on Everyman now, and the effect is definitely much less pronounced. The days sometimes seem long, especially when I spend larger-than-normal chunks of them at work or running around (I’m one of those people that needs lots of “quiet time”) — but I don’t have trouble keeping track, and I don’t feel like I’m living one endless day like I sometimes did before.
…More later, with any luck. (I’ve actually discovered something quite shocking that I can’t wait to write about, but it’ll have to chill until after work. *sigh*)
-PD
17 devoted students of Roshi accepted this page in 0.261 seconds without moving, or saying a word.
doing the 8-9 hours at night thing always leaves me tired all of the time & i just feel like i’m lethargicly wasting my life! i’m seriously considering trying the everyman sleep approach - how many total hours at night do you recommend & then at what time do you nap?
thanks!
Hi! I’ll answer assuming that you’ve already checked out different schedules and decided that Everyman fits your life best. Here are the ways I’m pretty sure it works, though the only schedule I’ve kept for any length of time is #1. Adapting is tricky, because you have to be really strict at first — for at least a week — and then, if there are still times during the day that you’re tired, you adjust it.
#1 - 3 hours core nap and 3 20-minute naps a day.
#2 - 4 hours core nap and 2 naps
#2 - 1.5 hours core nap and 4 (sometimes 5) naps
…And there’s biphasic, which is 5-6 hours core nap and one nap, which is sometimes long, even up to 2 hours. (Unlike Everyman, biphasic is widely used and scientifically known to work and be healthy.)
I sleep from 1-4 a.m., and nap at 9 a.m., 2 p.m., and 9 p.m.. I can vary my nap times by as much as an hour, and it appears from what I’ve heard that the longer your core nap, the more flexibility you gain in when you can take your short naps.
One thing I don’t suggest is napping for longer than 20 minutes. If you need to set the alarm a few minutes ahead in order to adjust your pillow, etc, that’s fine — I set mine for 23, because I sleep in my car most of the time and it takes a minute to get comfortable. ;)
If you decide to move your core or nap times (which seems likely), don’t forget that they don’t have to be “on the hour” or even the half-hour. Don’t just assume that because you’re going to sleep when you’re tired, you’ve “fixed” something — oddly enough, sometimes going to sleep *before* you’re tired, or even a bit after, works better. Be prepared to pay a lot of attention to sleeping for a few months!
In short, it’s not easy, but it has a lot of positive effects, at least for myself and several others that I’ve talked to. I absolutely love it. You can find out more if you’d like by searching for “Everyman” in the site’s search box up top.
Luck! Luck luck luck!
-PD
Yes, time dilation is real and quite a shock at times. I can’t say it was scary for me, but more like annoying or even amusing depending on which side of the correct time I was mistaken.
There have been times that I told myself that I had two weekends in a row, or two Wednesdays in a row, and the like. Anyway, I’m glad that I finally found a term for it.
And I’m glad to have found your website, PD.
All the best to all you fellow polyphasic sleepers out there :)
/t
There’s lots of stuff like that with Ubermann. Apart from the time dilation in general, the experience of a twenty-minute nap feeling as if it were several hours long is something I’m never going to get used to. The only thing that’s weirder than that is whenever naps are pulled off so perfectly that you experience it as if they passed in the blink of an eye. You know- you lie down, fall asleep instantly and what feels like a second later the alarm goes off and you wake up perfectly refreshed, with no recollection of having slept whatsoever. As if you insta-traded a tiny piece of your life in exchange for energy.
And then of course you have the increased probability of having lucid dreams, which are always awesome. It would also be interesting to hear a neurological take on what goes on during adaptation for the brain to deliver those “Anger-dreams”, where you just shout and scream at people. Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to about it get them the first few days. It’s pretty funny. Polyphase is like hacking your life, you get all sorts of weird side-effects.
Please, please, tell me what you called your nights. I am soo interested!
On another note, your posts are great. Currently experimenting with the uberman method, but I’m having trouble falling asleep during naps.
Ack, I’d have to dig through a ton of stuff and see if I can find it. I named them all after diseases, though; it was really funny. “Schizophrenia” was one; “Impetigo” another…there was a rhyme and reason to it, but I can’t remember what it was now. ;)
Having trouble falling asleep for the first few days is normal; if it’s been longer than that, you aren’t sticking strictly enough to the schedule, probably. Good luck!!
I call my nights my sleep cycle. It seemed like my only option when it first fell out of my mouth years ago, but folks seemed to readily understand it. People around me already know that I work online and often according to foreign time-tables. So, by now my friends and colleagues ask me about my ’sleep cycle’ when they want to make plans for getting together, heh.
To answer your other question, a trick I learned when I was young, is to mentally or physically do what the dogs and wolves do– they go in a few quick circles before they lay down. I know that that answer is a bit vague, but when you figure out whatever your corollary is, it actually works beautifully.
An interesting thing I picked up from puredoxyk awhile back was the word “snuggle”. I don’t actually know what puredoxyk meant *exactly*, but at the time, it seemed to embody that circling-my-bed model from canines, and has become my mental trick.
I just remind myself to snuggle into my jacket or blankets or whatever it is, depending on where I’m napping. If I need to, I also remind myself to mentally cut loose and an actually trust my alarm whatever happens.
Usually, I just fall into deep sleep anyway, but the ’snuggle and trust my alarm’ idea really helps.
I hope this helps you too.
/t
Hmm… I think it might just be easier to call the nights Monnight, Tuesnight, Wednesnight, etc.