I\’m not a superstitious person, but I thought it was a little odd to start something as unusual as polyphasic sleep on Friday the 13^th. I considered renting a bunch of horror movies to watch while I was trying to stay up through the night, but I decided to get DVDs of the TV show “24”. Jack Bauer had previously been banned from our house because we would get sucked in by the cliffhangers at the end of each episode and stay up one hour, two hours, sometimes three or four hours later than we intended. That\’s late considering that I have a job and my wife takes care of our daughter. Anyway, those cliffhangers came in very handy tonight. More on that later.

 

I took my last full night sleep Thursday night and planned on sleeping on the train and taking a nap at work to get a headstart on my nap schedule. That didn\’t work AT ALL! Maybe it was because I had slept all night, or maybe I just need more practice sleeping in those situations. I couldn\’t sleep on either train, which had me worried about the whole experiment. I took my first nap at 9pm. I slept on the couch with the lights on while my wife went out to run an errand. I had a very hard time waking up but I\’m hoping it was because I didn\’t use an alarm. My wife and I watched four episodes of 24 and snacked. She was trying to be supportive of me and do polyphasic sleep herself. Sweet thing that she is, she managed to stay up until my next nap at 1am but she was getting pretty tired and slapstick near the end. She fully intended to get up with me at 1:30am, but when the alarm went off, she apologized and went back to sleep. The moral support was nice and much appreciated!

The afternoon and evening were very hard and sluggish, and the 9:30pm-1:00am was only possible with the help of Jack Bauer, but this 1:30am-5:00am shift has been surprisingly easy. I\’ll be taking another nap in 25 minutes but I\’m not even yawning, and I\’m a heck of a lot more alert than I was after lunch today! I did some things of my computer while watching four more episodes of 24, and the time flew. I think for the purpose of this log, I\’ll use 5:00am as my cutoff between days, since it\’s not far from when I would usually get up on a normal schedule.

I found that my first day was pretty similar to Steve Pavlina\’s. The first day after the full night\’s sleep was difficult to nap. Excitement probably had a lot to do with it, plus the train isn\’t the ideal place to sleep. I tried to keep myself occupied doing “busy work” types of things, that were productive but not mentally or physically consuming. I\’m not planning ahead; I don\’t even know what I\’m going to do when I wake up in 45 minutes. I have a list of things I\’d like to do, and I\’ll just pick the ones I feel like doing when the time comes.

PS: I just read Steve\’s day 2 log entry, and UGH, I am not looking forward to tomorrow. Let\’s hope it works better for me than it did for him!