Polyphasic Day 20 - Afternoon Watch
It’s been a few days since I updated. On the night of Day 16, I overslept by about 5 hours. I felt extremely groggy and disoriented after waking up from my 1.5 hour core, which was displaced by about 30 minutes because I got home late from watching a movie. So I stupidly crawled back up into my loft bed and slept for another 3 hours or so.
For most of the next day, I felt let down and discouraged. The blog, once my life-saving outlet for such feelings, had turned into a nuissance, and blogging about another major setback would just increase the frustration I was feeling at the time and draw out the painfully slow conversion process even more. By the end of the day, however, I felt a renewed optimism and commitment to move forward, and I developed a new action plan.
At this point, the imbalance that adjusting to a polyphasic lifestyle created in my life was being felt more strongly as I sank more deeply behind in my school work, and so a compromise was in order. I decided to adopt a 1.5 hour core for however long I felt it was necessary in order to hopefully arrive at some stability.
So far it seems to be working. I did have one 1-hour oversleep on the night of Day 18 and one 30-minute oversleep during my last nap, but aside from that, all of my naps have been on schedule and restful with the help of my iPod Nano, which I am using both as a sleep aid and an alarm. First, I play a soothing 7-minute track, which almost always puts me to sleep before it ends, then 25 minutes of silence. Then a series of alarms, set louder than the soothing music, go off including some quotes from Captain Picard eventually leading up to some annoyingly loud beeps. I put on the headphones, press play, and forget about it. I often wake up before the alarm.
Now it seems again like my circadian rhythms have reversed. Last night I had clear focus and vitality, much like a previous night shortly before my first dream that fooled me into thinking I had already converted and sent me into a state of confusion when I realized I had not. I was very tired yesterday, very awake last night, and semi-tired today. Seeing these changes, it seems like something is happening. At this point, I will be happy to achieve some stability in my levels of alertness whether or not I become fully Uberman so that I can catch up on my school work.