Well, as you can tell from the title, this post doesn\’t contain good news. Well, mostly not good news. On Sunday night I kept the polyphasic sleep schedule for most of the night, but when I woke up from my 4:00am nap, I went to the couch and watched the first half of “Return of the King”. I watched a few minutes of it and slept all the way until the intermission. I still had plenty of time to get ready for work, but I slept through the time when I usually write my log.

 

Work that day went well. I had plenty of energy and clarity and had a much more productive day than usual. I slept fine on the trains, but my lunchtime nap was put off for almost two hours because I couldn\’t get a slot in the private room at work where the couch was. I did start shutting down towards the end of those two hours and was grateful to finally get in there and take my nap. Good work day overall, though.

On Monday night, I slept through my alarm at 1:30am, so I ended up sleeping from 1:00am until 6:00am. I was groggy for most of the morning but still had energy and clarity at work and did a good job, like on Monday. It turned out okay even though I didn\’t follow the schedule.

The problems came when I got home and realized that even though I discussed polyphasic sleep with my wife before I started, she was not fully on board with it. I guess she thought that it was another one of my crazy schemes that never actually turns into something (like my idea of starting a non-profit software company in Fiji or the time I bought CDs to teach myself Spanish so we could move to Buenos Aries). She wasn\’t prepared for me to actually follow through. She thought I looked too tired, with puffy bags under my eyes. She worried about my health and my performance at work. I told her how well work was going but she was still concerned about me. It took a couple days for us to work out those issues and come to an agreement that we were both comfortable with. During that time I switched back to normal monophasic sleep to keep the peace. I could have started again on Thursday night, but I didn\’t want to go through the readjustment period during a workday, so I put it off until the weekend.

Well, the weekend brought with it the finest weather we\’ve had in Chicago in all of 2007. We went out with out little girl to the park on Friday and the zoo on Saturday. Six months of Chicago fall and winter basically turns people into albino vampire bats, so when we got back from the park, we were all pooped! I tried to stay up, take naps, and get back on the polyphasic schedule, but when that alarm went off, I shut it off faster than I\’d squash a mosquito at a Florida campfire. “Your beeping doesn\’t concern me – please leave.” We were all so tired in the morning that when the baby woke up (with her energy level completely unaffected by playing in the sun the day before), we took one hour shifts with her so that we could each get more sleep – this went on until 10:30am. Now that I\’m recovered from the being out in the sun, I\’m starting again tonight.

I\’m a little nervous about starting on a Sunday night and having to make the adjustment during the work week, but a few days of normal sleep made me miss all the time I had during polyphasic sleep and all the stuff I got done. I don\’t want to wait another for another weekend to start, so I\’ll just do the best I can. I\’ll write at tomorrow morning to report on how my first night went. There are just a few new rules I\’m going to follow this time around:

1. Instead of using my big alarm clock, I\’m using a countdown timer on my phone. This way I can take it with me, not worry about having to continually reset the clock, and also, it\’s quieter for my mother-in-law who sleeps in the next room. She was having trouble sleeping because the big alarm kept waking her up.
2. NO TV WATCHING! Well, I\’ll never just watch TV without doing something else at the same time. For one, I\’m not making the adjustment to polyphasic sleep because there are TV shows I want to catch up on, there\’s stuff I want to do. Second, it was the worst thing for trying to stay awake in the deepest, loneliest part of the night.
3. I\’m adding exercise this time. We got a membership to the YMCA, and they have lap swim at 5am on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the weight room is open the other days. The 4am nap gets me up at 4:30am, the perfect time to drive over and get some exercise.

Wish me luck!