Kirk’s Blog

• SSS: 5

Well I’m not scared of the water anymore, but it certainly does motivate me to get out of bed! Haha, I really am getting more and more like a cat. Not only have I been taking “cat naps” but now I’m repelled by water, lol. And, by the way, the ringer on my cell phone is a cat’s meow.

Anyway, the entire process has become quite detached and mechanical. The first day after the nap of death I was bursting with energy the whole day, then the next day I was again spaced out. The first time I went through all this (the first days of the adjustment), I felt an emotional reaction to each change of mood/alertness. Now it all seems so predictable. My mind has the end result in focus, and it just has to wait patiently for the body to catch up. There is not really any more fear of oversleeping or screwing up in any other way, so now it’s just a matter of time.

I also feel like I am starting all over after that oversleep. For the first half of yesterday, each nap did not have much of an impact on my overall mood, which could best be described as spaced out (i.e. - a 4 on the SSS). By the time I woke up from nap 31 at 5:00 PM, I was feeling much more rested. The spaceyness had practically vanished, and I was feeling pretty normal. One thing I did differently was that I laid down in bed on my back for 15 minutes before I was supposed to actually start the nap. In that 15 minutes I got sleepy and ready to take a nap, and then I finally allowed myself to fall asleep, rolling over to my side, as the nap start time passed.

Naps 33-34 (night time) were not quite so successfull, and I felt more severely out of it than after naps 28-30 (day time). All of them were successful in the sense that I actually fell asleep, but none of them left me feeling very good. For nap 32, I didn’t fall asleep at all, and the energy from nap 31 carried me through to nap 33. All night I was on the verge of falling asleep with SSS values of 6 and occasional bouts of 7. So, I mainly played Warcraft 3 the entire night, where sleep has no place. When I would stop playing, I still felt energized, and I was actually going to do some school work at one point, but I quickly became sleepy again. So I went back to Warcraft 3. I almost fell asleep in the chair a couple times while waiting for Battle.net to match me up with an opponent. When the match did happen and I opened my eyes to look at the screen, I was dizzy, and things were out of focus. However, by the time I established the first 3 buildings or so of my base, I was alert and engaged. During the last game, I got into an exchange of “yo mama” insults with my opponent to help me wake up as it seemed to be taking longer than normal.