After reading a small article in my college newspaper about this Uberman sleep schedule thing, I find that it interests me. As much as I like sleep, I could use the extra waking hours.
So, my question is, are there medical studies which say this will drive me insane slowly? I’m looking around online, but mostly I’m not finding much in the way of actual studies or data.
With polyphasic sleep, it seems that you totally avoid the REM part of sleep. Hasn’t that been regarded as the part of sleep which helps your body and mind the most?
And lastly, while not quite GQ, has anyone on these boards ever done this successfully? If so, how did you start, and what sleep schedule are you using?
Perhaps I should elaborate on what I understand polyphasic sleep to be:
The idea is that the sleep cycle is a muscle that can be exercised or summat, at least that’s the way the article phrased it. The regimen usually involves 20 minute naps every 4 hours, rather than one long period of 8 hours of sleep. This is not the only regimen, I’ve read about variations, some employing a 4 hour “core sleep” time, with two 30 minute naps during the day.
Didn’t Kramer try this on “Seinfeld”
Well, at one point in time I was working as a security guard on the overnight shift, and had an ass of a roommate who would stay out and finally drag home at about 7 at night then be loud and rude and have friends over right in my normal sleep time…I learned that if I could get a solid 3 hours of sleep in at noon, and 1.5 hours of sleep in just before getting up to go to work I was ok. I also determined that if the last 30 minutes of the sleep period right before work was spent hitting the snooze was better sleep in that small amount of time than just setting the alarm for the latest possible time. To this day, if I can only get in 45 minutes of naptime, I set my alarm and hit snooze for half an hour.
[I do have a second wake the dead type alarmclock that rings at my must get up time.]
I’ve done this several times during big projects (gone ‘sleepless’ for a couple of weeks.) REM sleep is certainly not lacking: often you’ll slip into full blown dreaming as soon as you sit down and shut your eyes.
Two warnings:
Don’t sleep too little! If you don’t get enough catnaps, you’ll get mildly psychotic, but without necessarily feeling sleepy. If dream images start invading the waking world, go hide somewhere quickly, and sleep for half an hour.
And also, if you continue with “Thomas Edison Sleep Mode” for more than a couple of weeks straight, interesting things seem to happen (at least they did with me), things like mild schitzophrenia or perhaps genuine religious experiences. You’ll encounter various phenomena which are the same things sought during “vision quests” or Shamanic voyages. Not bad if you’re experienced or at least prepared, but not the sort of things a normal mundane American type would want to mess with.
In one book on Fourth Way religious practice, the author mentions that “cerebrotonic” or cerebral types of people involved in that type of religion will occasionally have schitzophrenic breaks brought on by lack of enough dreamless sleep. He didn’t give any evidence, but I’ve experienced such things: you might get plenty of REM sleep, but over days and days of catnapping something goes wrong, and it takes a few nights of normal, many-hours sleep to fix it. Is dreamless sleep a necessity in the long run? I haven’t seen this mentioned in popular articles on sleep research, but it wouldn’t suprise me.
Buckminster Fuller reportedly got along for many years by sleeping half an hour every six hours.
Leonardo Da Vinci also did this. 15 minutes every 4 hours IIRC.
Here’s one (slightly nutty) guy’s experience with it: http://home.earthlink.net/~mrob/pub/split-sleep.html
The rest of his site is pretty cool in a math-computer geek sort of way.
I actually went for 60 hours straight once without sleep as an indergrad. I do not reccomend it. After a certain length of time (I think about 40 hours) you aren’t even tired anymore. After sleeping for a day or two afterwards I went over the work I had done towards the end of the waking stint. Psychotic ramblings are the best way to describe it.
My record was 68 hours on the way back from Europe. I eventually started hallucinating. I never saw anything but I started hearing really weird things. I kept thinking people were calling my name, and everyone that talked sounded like they were doing so in a sing-song voice.
When I finally got home it took me close to 3 hours to relax and fall asleep.
The only way it might kill you, that I can think of, is if you fall asleep while driving as a result of the sleep deprivation. I knew an 18 year old kid who died that way - worked, played his online game, got a couple hours of sleep a night…and drove under an 18 wheeler.
Sleep deprivation always wins.
Now, as al any new parent will tell you, you can function on broken sleep if you have to, and for some parents, the broken sleep continues for months or even years, especially if there are several children close together.