*Transcendental *Logic

Hey yo.  Sorry about the intermittent postings; things are markedly crazy here.  My house is being worked on (largely by me), we’re adding another person to the household mix (for awesome and exciting reasons), and the clock is ticking on the countdown to Starting Me Own Business.  (Once that’s happened, I can legitimately put spots on my daily schedule for "Minding Me Own Business", yeah?)

And, oh, lots of stuff.  I got my first commissions for chainmail work, so the picky little hobby has the added flavor of (minimal but actual) cash; and I’m trying to study up on math — not physics, which I like, but arithmetic and algebra, which I don’t — so that I don’t fail the test I need to take to get into grad school.  Oo, and I got my diploma…and before I had it a day, spilled a whole monsoon of coffee on it.  I was upset at first, but then I thought about it, and coffee-stains are so appropriate for a philosophy degree, especially this one.  So I’ve decided that it has character now.  (Anyway, my awesome husband washed it, and now you can barely tell.)

And while I’m on about fearlessly leaping into doctoral education and small business administration like they’re so many happy lukewarm mud-puddles, I’ve been sort of fearless about my sleep-schedule lately too. 

(This part is going behind a cut, because it contains conclusions that strongly depend on having done a polyphasic schedule for over two years now, and if you’re just starting out with, or contemplating, polyphasic sleep, this isn’t necessarily good information for you to have right now.  It’s also massively theoretical, being that I’m the only person I know about (besides Dr. Fuller) to do this this long — so if you do read further, please keep in mind that this is my experience and *only* mine.)

(But yeah, I’m getting pretty fast and loose with this…)

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Ah, gotta love those moments when you suddenly realize that you have a second to write something you’ve been meaning to write, and moreover, you remember what the something was!

Magic, I tell you.

Anyway, here’s today’s, while I have it:  Sometimes, whether during adaptation or just due to Situational Crap, you may find that you have time to lay down, but are not able to fall asleep.  Maybe your brain’s going eight hundred miles an hour, or you have a headache or some other distracting physical condition, or for whatever reason sleep just won’t come.  In this situation, it’s miles better to lay and relax for your 20 minutes than to get up — staying horizontal keeps you on-schedule, and you’ll get a little rest, if not as much as you would have if you’d slept.  By doing this meditation, though, I’ve found that I can get nearly all the benefit of a full nap, even if I can’t fall asleep.

I’m not making any claims about this technique being able to "replace sleep" in the grand sense, okay?  Just that it seems to work very well for countering the effects of nap-insomnia.  Plus, I have it on authority that there are good mental and physical (especially immune-system-related) benefits to doing this regularly anyway (which is, in fact, why I first tried it when I couldn’t sleep one day).  So, if you’re going to lay around for twenty minutes anyway, might as well use the time well, right?  Right.

Here it is.  The instructions look long because I’m trying to be clear about exactly how this works, but the whole exercise need only take a couple minutes.  It may put you to sleep (it does me, about half the time), and it may not, in which case you should get up relaxed and refreshed when your timer goes off.

1.  Lay on your back, if possible, and relax your body completely.  Close your eyes.

2.  Focus on your hands or feet (pick one).  Try to feel them as alive, not just as objects.  They have energy running through them — the electricity that constantly flies around every part of your body, via your nervous system* — see if you can sense it.  (Chances are very good that you will be able to, because, well, it’s there — if you can’t sense it though, move on through the exercise and just keep trying; you’ll get it.)

3.  Pay as much attention to that feeling of internal energy as much as you can.  You’ll notice that it gets stronger the more you focus on it; get it going as strongly as you can.

4.  Now, move your attention up your arms (or ankles).  Feel the sensation of inner energy — like the thrum of a running computer (which, ironically I guess, is also powered by circulating energy around inside it) — moving with your focus.  It may be less clear as it moves; don’t worry about that.

5.  Slowly move your attention all the way up to the top of your head, feeling that "running on power" sensation all the way.  Then, as soon as you get the head going good, push your attention down your neck, into your chest, stomach, abdomen, hips, thighs, legs, and all the way down to your feet.  Pause at your feet a minute and get the feeling back good and strong.

6.  Now, several times, run your attention up to your head and down to your feet — take it slow, and try to keep your focus sharp and keep feeling that sensation.  (You will probably notice that the sensation of internal energy "sloshes" a bit, lagging somewhat behind the focus of your attention — this is normal.  It is also, in fact, the source of the Chinese maxim, "Chi follows Yi", which literally means "internal energy follows your attention/imagination".)  If you start to lose the feeling, you’re probably tensing up (which is a natural thing to do when dealing with an unfamiliar mental challenge, so don’t worry; just relax when you remember to and keep going).

7.  When you’ve done that a few times, stop and let things "settle".  Now try to feel the energy in your whole body, all at once.  See if you can sense it as an unbroken field, rather than just in sections or threads.  Relax and focus and see how thrummy and glow-y you can make yourself feel…and just hold it.  Laying there in that state (brain-wave state or physical state or whatever it is) feels rather like laying in a tanning booth, or in the sun; it’s warm and both energizing and relaxing.  If your mind starts to wander, don’t worry, just pull it back when you realize what it’s doing and go back to feeling that internal energy.  Keep it up until your alarm says to stop!

And of course, a neat side-effect, besides making the most out of your insomninaps and being as rested as you reasonably can…you’ll be learning how to feel Chi!  Practice that for a decade or two and you’ll be all kinds of badass.  ;)

Enjoy your Monday, everyone…
PD

*and possibly more subtle things, but that’s not my "field".  (GET IT?!  ;)

Hehe, so, my boy is officially biphasic now — he’s sleeping 3-5 hours at night and another 2 in the early afternoon, and after two weeks of this he seems to like it.  Today I watched him wake up in the morning perfectly alert, get [KID] off to school, go grocery shopping, start dinner, surf for a while, and then hit the sack, nice as you please.

Maybe the Universe is compensating for the wreck that my own sleeping/eating/everything has been lately.  I get the feeling that the awesomeness I’m married to functions as compensation for my own failings quite a lot!

Everything moves in circles…

WHEW!  Hi world; it’s been a crazy, crazy time over here lately.  An accurate summary would be, "Damn near everything that could possibly be in flux, is."  Eek.

None of it is stuff that you care or would benefit from hearing about…except this.  Amidst trying to hold together various aspects of my body, mind, professional and family lives, I actually went monophasic!

It wasn’t by choice, at first — my "vacation" was an emotional rollercoaster the likes of which you really ought to be much bigger than me to ride, and so for a whole week I mostly slept like this:  Stay up embroiled in either drama or insomnia until 4 a.m. or later, crash for 2-4 hours, catch a 20-minute rest period (I mostly couldn’t actually sleep) in the afternoon if possible.  Rinse shake repeat.  Even after I got home, for a few days I couldn’t sleep during naps, and could barely sleep at night. 

So, then what happens?  Bereft of immediate fuel, the insomnia eventually subsides, and I sleep for ten hours one night last week.  Not surprising, really.  I even managed to nap once or twice the following day…but then the next night, I slept for eight more hours, and then found that the following day I couldn’t nap (and didn’t really bother with trying, since I wasn’t tired and in fact, was rather sick of sleeping!). 

Third night, I was semi-voluntarily monophasic.  I didn’t want to stay awake and deal with my own f’d-up brain, and actually I was curious; I haven’t slept like that (you know, like a normal person) for over two years, and I wanted to try it out.  I thought, maybe it’s time to go monophase for a while again; who knows?  I’ve certainly proved my experiment, that one can be polyphasic for a long-ish period of time and not go nuclear.  And lord knows everything else is changing, so…

So I went to bed "early" (11p.m.) in preparation for waking up at my usual 4:30 a.m.  Except that I forgot that, you know, when you’re monophasic you have to sleep a lot, not five or six hours, especially if you’re me.  So I slept through my alarm and woke up at 6:30.

And oh, what a waking-up.  The second I opened my eyes I remembered….I hate monophase!  

I’d written it off the first two nights as a result of being exhausted and/or sleeping too long, but that third morning I remembered…this is what waking up always feels like when you’re monophasic!  The sticky eyes, the aching back, and the feeling that you’re prying yourself out of a coma or general anasthesia…oh, ugh, ugh, ugh.

Yeah, you can keep that crap, normal people.  I got right to work getting my old schedule back, and I’m happy to report (third day back on it) that it wasn’t even that difficult to do; I was sleepy for a day, and a bit slow the next day, but today I’m fine (so far, anyway), and thank the lord my back has stopped hurting and getting out of bed this morning didn’t feel like being reborn as Frankenstein’s monster. 

I really might never be monophasic again, at least not voluntarily.  It’s funny, doing this long-running experiment, I sort of forgot that I used to loathe getting up in the mornings, and how much that’s changed…I still don’t enjoy it, but I’d forgotten how much it used to suck before, and thus lost my basis for comparison.  My few days as a monophaser-again reminded me right quick:  Give me the grogginess of having only snozzed three hours over the aching lethargy of having slept eight, any day.  …Plus, as soon as I got back to work, I started really wanting my naps — they really do a lot for me by way of breaking up a tedious day, and "resetting" my brain so I can jump back into difficult work without burning out.  (For example, if it weren’t for my polyphasic evening nap, I can’t imagine how I could have come home from work and done 2-3 hours of homework every single day, and more on weekends.  So maybe I even owe my degree to this sleep schedule!)

Okay, back to dealing with everything else…I’ll write more when something relevant comes up, eh?  Until then, enjoy your various lives and sleep-schedules!

PD

Hm, well, just as I suspected, my sleep schedule is finally firming up and working well again…just in time for a week’s vacation. *sigh*

Oh well. The point of the vacation is to stress out a bit less than I have been, so I’m going to do my best to not much care what happens. I’ll try to take my naps when I can, and other than that, just relax a bit. Several people have told me that I need it, and they’re right. At some point, you get so worried about so many things that you start to lose all focus and perspective, and nothing you do is helpful anymore.

Funny question I realized I’d never asked: How do other polyphasers sleep? I do it on my back, with my hands on my thighs or lower stomach. Occasionally I’ll roll onto my side for my core, but for naps I *have* to sleep on my back, preferably with my hands “just so”. Somehow it seems to both help me sleep and help me wake up — either because of the position itself, or because I’ve come to associate it with naps; I don’t know which.