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You've probably noticed a lack of content as of late. I had a wonderful visit to DC and I went back to monophasic sleep, to be normal on vacation.

We've also been given some reading material as food for thought about whether to reconvene with the project.

For now it is on indefinite suspension. I'm sure we'll update again before long - and once we've made a decision.

It's been fun so far. Let's see if we continue. We'll be in touch again soon.

I'm not going to hotlink. I'm going to link-link. Click on the link.

If you are sleepless...

Yesterday I left Ames around 7:45 AM, napped at a rest area along the interstate, and made it to Iowa City just after 10AM. If anybody reading this actually knows me, they could probably guess that I had a 10AM appointment that had to be rescheduled for later in the day. That's OK, though, and pretty much beside the point.

So anyway, my 'before 11AM' appointment went well, and gave me time to nap outside the home of my 1PM appointment. The nap went swimmingly. It seems that naps inside my car are the easiest to control, and I snap out of them and become alert within 1 minute or so. When I'm in bed, however, there is about a 10 minute period where I either struggle to get up, hit snooze and catch some more sleep, or lay there angry that I'm not sleeping anymore.

So anyway, I had already rescheduled the 'before 10AM' appt to 4:30 and was able to catch a quick nap on the way. Once again, I felt great and was able to get the customer taken care of no problem. I headed back to the 1PM house - since one of the computers was acting dog slow and I let it churn away when I left to do the other appointments. I ended up leaving there around 9:15, missing my 8PM nap. I had one more stop - which turned out to be great conversation with a couple that was referred to me by my old boss at the IMU. Thanks Clark!

So by the time I left and was on the road again it was 10:30 or so. I was 2 1/2 hrs late for my nap. Stopped at a rest stop and woke up when Anne called me after her show. I'll admit I overslept a pinch, but I'm OK with that...

So I made it home around 2AM to take my midnight nap. Somehow I made it through the night without more than an extra snooze or two, and I'm still kicking today. Tuesday's Iowa City trip was good. It will help us pay some bills. Going back again on Friday...

Today? Yeah, it was a good day. I got some worky work done, and fit in a jog after my 4PM nap. Then some crunches, and now I'll go to work on my arms for a bit...

Thanks for reading. Here's a treat: Jake punching himself in the face!

I finally caught up to a squirrel the other day. I tried to play with it but it died. Then I was sad :-(

-Haley

We've been doing pretty well. Aside from Sunday morning - when I couldn't(or didn't) stay awake during Jake's 8AM nap - we haven't really overslept. I have needed 10 or 15 more minutes here and there, but there haven't been any ridiculous oversleeping. Even on Sunday, I slept from 8:45 - 10:30 and it felt like a full night :-)

We've been trying to eat healthier, and I've been exercising every time I think of it. I've been doing a lot of push-ups, bicep curls, and crunches. I've also been jogging a couple of times recently. Today I jogged with the dog down to the bank and back. It is about 1.5 miles round trip, and I only walked 3 or 4 blocks of the total trip. Yes - that is an accomplishment for me. I'm going to attribute it to my ability to avoid cigarettes over the last 9 days.

We got back from playing disc golf tonight, and the doorbell rang. We had literally been home for 3 minutes. I ended up having to kill some time with the customers while I was waiting for Mike to get everything ready. I was pleasantly surprised by their interest in Project Sleepy(they have seen my Facebook posts) and the encouragement I received in trying this experiment. Every once in a while, I have an encounter that makes me happy to do what I do. I don't think I'd be very happy living a "normal" life. I need a pinch more excitement than the standard 9-5...

On that note, my laptop is out of commission for the next few days. It has been donated to the shop so video posts may be a few days away.

So what about me, and how have I been feeling? I'm glad you asked. Honestly, it's been very hit or miss. I went to Iowa City last Friday and stopped in Cedar Rapids on the way home. Got in a nice round of disc golf, but the trip threw my nap schedule way off kilter. I laid down for a nap at 8PM and slept through a couple of phone calls. Then I woke up to a "good night" phone call from my girlfriend around 1:30AM. At this point, I hopped into the car and drove back to Ames. I was grumpy - pissed off, tired, almost ready to quit - all day Saturday. Something inside me kept the dedication alive and I've been able to push through. My mood fluctuates significantly and seems to be tied to my level of sleepiness. I kinda feel bad for those that have had to put up with me.

For now, though, I'm in good spirits and am looking forward to napping successfully through the night and a productive trip to Iowa City tomorrow. I'm gonna set a rule now - no napping at my parents' house. Only in the car, since I won't have Clocky available to me. We've been mostly hitting the uberman schedule. When not ubermanning it up, everyman has been pretty solid. I can't say that we fail at polyphasic sleep, we just don't always make uberman happen.

I feel rambly...

So it's official. I've hit the last three naps and each time had vivid dreams and woken up on my own before the alarm goes off...

... And I've been setting the alarm for 22 minutes. I still feel tired, a bit foggy headed, and a little bit goofy but emotionally I feel great! Which is a big damn plus. Each nap has been a "long" nap - I felt like I've slept way more than a mere nineteen or twenty minutes (which in reality is more like fifteen minutes or less if you count the time it takes to fall asleep). Long naps are great! Even if it's just subjective. If all my naps are like this from here out, I can really get behind some uberman sleeping.

Mike, unfortunately, is having the exact opposite time of it. He confided in me that his noon nap felt like five seconds, and his four o'clock nap, when I asked him how his nap had been, was related with, "I don't know..." and a shrug. It's a little disheartening to tell you imaginary readers the truth. I hope that he'll come around sooner, mostly because tired, slightly grumpy people are no fun at all.

But also 'cause it sucks to be tired and slightly grumpy all the time; I should know: I spent the first three attempts pretty much feeling like that. It certainly doesn't help that "all the time" includes an extra six hours a day.

So, the hat trick is in the bag. I hope it continues but somehow this felt like a significant milestone and needed writing about. If it does in fact continue, I sense that my energy level will continue to rise along with my mood, and as a result so will my productivity. I'm very excited about how the next twenty four hours will play out.

It's late, or early, depending on how you look at it.

I thought maybe I would write something since it's been a while without an update on my part, but I'm finding my brain is rather clouded right now. I'd say I feel about like the second day or third day into the sleep schedule adjustment - probably due to some oversleeping. Let's see if I can't think about what we've discovered so far.

I guess first and foremost is that oversleeping is the worst thing you can do and the thing you want to do most. I do not think there is a single more powerful force that I've experienced in my entire life than the urge to hit snooze when waking up from a nap. Through trial and error we discovered that it's more than just the twenty minute nap length that helps adaptation.

In order to try and alleviate exhaustion, both Mike and myself ended up trying to take a cluster of naps, each twenty minutes in length, within a few hours. More like a cluster fuck of naps. While it felt good to get the extra sleep, it eventually ended with both of us oversleeping by several hours, since it's hard to focus long enough to set an alarm for twenty minutes in the future when you're super groggy, much less do it several times successfully.

I'm starting to think that the extreme exhaustion that comes with holding strictly to only six (maybe seven) twenty minute naps is not just an unwanted side effect of adapting to the sleep schedule but in fact the very device that makes adaptation possible. It definitely makes the switch a very potent test of will power and resiliency in the face of failures and mistakes, usually in the form of oversleeping or say, getting blam-hammered at tailgating.

To that end, it would seem that each time I oversleep I'm only extending the period of exhaustion and delaying the adaptation to the uberman schedule. It's strange that I've been aware of this idea for some time, but writing it out definitely reinforces the soundness of the concept and as I type I feel a strong need to redouble my efforts to hold a strict schedule in order to more quick break through the exhaustive adaptation.

Both of us have also discovered that naps can be readily characterized along two polar opposites in terms of effectiveness, restfulness and rejuvenation.

On one end is a nap that feels like it didn't happen at all. It seems in nature as if I lie down in bed and instantly am awoken again. Sometimes it just seems like I'm awoken without having laid down or slept at all. Invariably when this happens I wake up confused and disoriented, of foul temper and extremely tired.

The opposite end is much rarer: a nap that when awaking feels like I've overslept by quite some time, but often is in fact shorter than the twenty to twenty five minutes we've been giving ourselves before the alarm. I awake alert and energetic, and it seems like I've slept a matter of hours rather than minutes. In my recollection these naps are always accompanied by vivid dreaming, and if I do remember correctly, waking not from slumber but as a natural transition from an active dream state.

There is then two archetypal naps: one which felt like it didn't happen and which leaves you exhausted, often worse than you felt when you laid down, and one which felt as though it lasted for a long time and gives a tremendous rebound in energy and mood. Naturally, there are naps which fall somewhere in between.

It's my nap time now, since Merps just got up. We've been sleeping in shifts to try and minimize the oversleeping, since the times where we've overslept by hours and hours has always been when we both went down for naps.

I'll finish with a little speculation: it seems to me that polyphasic sleep works as an edge condition. It may be required that you are pushed to the limit of exhaustion where staying awake seems no longer possible and there find yourself on a plateau. This edge plateau requires rigidity in sleeping since to push any further into fatigue would result in completely involuntary collapse as per regular extended sleep deprivation, and to relax away from the strictness of the sleep schedule results in constant torpor, such as when one goes for a long period when getting little sleep on a monophasic schedule. The key seems to be that with the disciplined sleep patterns you can walk the edge between weariness, fatigue and a necessitated large period of recovery sleep while avoiding all the ill effects that would normally beleaguer someone only receiving two or three hours of sleep per day.

To be geeky, it's like many strange edge conditions that exist in physics: Bose-Einstein condensates, super fluids, super conductivity or other weird things which I could think of a second ago while writing the previous paragraph but now escape me.

To wit: It's nap time! Huzzah!

So we had a rough weekend. I'll admit that. We also had a rough Wednesday morning.

I had a realization early during the overnight that I wouldn't be able to safely drive to Iowa City on Wednesday. I was really, really tired after 24 hours on the schedule after so much sleeping (about 12 hours combined Sunday and Monday) during our out of town "failure."

I decided to take a series of power naps starting at 4AM. I napped until 4:30, woke up, and then until 5:00. I also napped at 5:30 and 6:00. Then something happened - maybe Sleepy Karl came home - and I didn't wake up until 10:10. I was really discouraged. I didn't tell Jake, but I was actually ready to throw in the towel and pull the plug on Project Sleepy. We had made 4 attempts, and each one seemed to be weaker and weaker - at least on my part.

He ended up sleeping until 3PM or so yesterday, but attempted to nap at 8PM. Since he had made the effort to nap and get back on the schedule, I decided not to mention anything to him. After all, I had taken a nap at 6PM after working all day in Iowa City. I napped at 10PM, 2AM, 6AM, and am about to take one at 10AM. I'm getting close to 24 hours since my last sleep, and I feel better at this point than I have during any of my Uberman attempts.

I'll be sure to keep everyone updated with my progress. Hopefully Jake can find some time to give an update himself. We have an unofficial agreement to post at least once per day. As long as I'm hitting my naps, I can do it. Prepare to hear more - and hopefully see some new video soon.

Tailgating was a ton of fun! We hit our noon naps before getting to Iowa City, and traded off sleeping times at 4PM - during the festivities before the game. 8PM was also bearable - I slept on the floor at the bar/restaurant and Jake napped in the car. 12PM was at a bar, where I just put my head down on the table. All was good. We were feeling happy and getting naps in.

4AM is where we fell off the wagon. We were escorted back to a friend's house where everyone proceeded to fall asleep quickly. Jake and I decided to cave in and sleep - not because we were drunk and needed to, but because there was nothing to do there except for sit on the couch. We slept about 5 hours - which was the most in one given period for what, a week or so? Sunday was just as bad. I napped at 4PM and 8PM, and then slept. I'm not sure about Jake, but I got off the phone with Anne around midnight and slept until 8AM.

I felt pretty refreshed after Saturday's 5 hour sleep, but pretty groggy after Sunday's 8 hrs. I actually had trouble making the drive back to Ames on Monday morning. I had to wake Jake up just so we could stay on the road.

We started back on the schedule last night at midnight. We're trading off nap periods this time - holding each other doubly accountable. It should help us to push through the rough spots and avoid oversleeping.

I do have some exciting video from the weekend, it's just a matter of getting around to editing it and posting it up here for everyone to see...