My girlfriend, Rachel, and I recently came across Steve Pavilna's blog posts on polyphasic sleep.
Polyphasic sleep involves taking multiple short sleep periods throughout the day instead of getting all your sleep in one long chunk. A popular form of polyphasic sleep, the Uberman sleep schedule, suggests that you sleep 20-30 minutes six times per day, with equally spaced naps every 4 hours around the clock. This means you’re only sleeping 2-3 hours per day.
Not only did this sound incredibly cool, but it's also exactly the kind of insanity that we love!
Normal ("monophasic") sleep consists of five stages that we cycle through many times throughout the course of an evening. The general flow looks like this:
- Drowsy Sleep - The body slows down and prepares to sleep. Brain waves slow down and we begin to lose consciousness
- Stage 2 - The body loses consciousness completely and we lose awareness of our external environment. According to wikipedia about 45%-55% of sleep is spent in this phase.
- Stage 3 - Delta wave (deep sleep) begins. It's in this stage that we see some of sleep's stranger quirks such as bed-wetting, sleepwalking, and night terrors. Joy! (5-8% of total sleep time)
- Stage 4 - As far as I can tell, this is the same as Stage 3, but deeper
- REM sleep - A perennial favorite stage, REM sleep most commonly associated with dreaming and visuals.
Advocates of polyphasic sleep argue that sleeping all night in the proportions that we currently sleep is largely a function of the society in which we live. It is (and has been for quite some time) very inconvenient to live polyphasically. Polyphasics argue that, in nature, we'd sleep more often and for shorter periods of time. In fact, about 85% of all mammals sleep polyphasically.
So, back to our regularly scheduled experiment. Rachel and I are going to take the next couple of weeks to transition ourselves from dull and boring monophasic sleep (boo!!!) to new bright and shiny polyphasic sleep (yay!!!).
I'll be posting my experiences here. Rachel's posted her experiences here, on Instructables.
