While overall everything is going well, there’s still been some bumps in the road for our polyphasic sleep experiment. I’ve got to say that in general, it’s been fairly easy up to this point, but we haven’t yet managed to reduce our sleep deprivation enough to not have some extra nap time in the early morning.
The first time we slept out of schedule was 7am Saturday morning (after beginning on Friday morning, 1am). This unplanned sleep lasted 2.5 hours. The second occurrence was 9am Sunday morning, which lasted only 1.5 hours. This is a positive trend, and we hope to remain completely awake for what’s in store for us tonight. Unfortunately, I also overslept my 1pm nap today by another hour, so by the end of today I shall have had 5 hours sleep each for the past two days.
Note that we are not considering such short oversleeps to be a problem. The simple matter is that we have drastically reduced our total sleep time per day, and the deprivation arising from that has to be alleviated somehow. If we had crashed and not awoken for four or six hours, that could have been a bigger problem, but for the meantime our small digressions seem to be the body’s natural was of dealing with the transition period. Perhaps with a more strict diet and exercise regime it would be less of a problem (not to mention alcohol and cigarettes).
Finally, it’s been decided that the deadline for our decision to continue with polyphasic sleeping will be Monday morning. This allows for a day of recovery in case we think it’s just too hard to fit into a real life schedule. I’m quite optimistic, however, about continuing.