Kirk’s Blog

I’m not really doing any sort of strict polyphasic (ie - uberman) right now.  My goal has been to survive on 4.5 hours of sleep or so with a couple a naps, usually one 4 hours after waking and then one around 4:00 pm.  So far, I have found that the best time slot for my nightly slumber seems to be from around 12:00 AM to 5:00 AM, which comes to a bit more than 4.5 hours, which I believe is perfect, although I will know after I’ve been doing it longer.  My schedule has not been perfect… sometimes I sleep at odd times and so forth, but that’s been the goal.

Well, I just had one of my morning naps, and I had a really long dream.  You know… one of those dreams that seems like hours but it’s really only been a few minutes. I did not have any dreams like that while I was aiming for strict uberman for the 3 or 4 weeks that I attempted it.  From all of the information I’ve been able to gather, one of the important signs that one is adjusted is that the naps begin to feel much longer than they actually are: 2 hours for 20 minutes.  Mine just felt something like that.  Unfortunately when I woke up, the dream evaporated from my consciousness rather quickly.

A couple other things happened recently too.  Last night I had a particularly stormy night full of dreams that I can’t remember too well.  One included something about running from the cops, another was an inspection of a dead body from a car crash, and many others, all with a rather longish feeling.  So that may have contributed to my longish dream nap.  Another thing is that I finally reduced the time allotted for the naps, something I’ve been meaning to do anyhow.  I reduced the amount of silence between the sleepy-time track and the alarms from 25 minutes to 20 minutes, although I still woke up before the alarms began to sound during the last nap.  Curiously, I didn’t fall asleep until after the music had ended, when I almost always fall asleep before the music ends.  So that means my nap was even shorter, yet it seemed so much longer.  Perhaps it just takes a while for the naps to start feeling long, whether one is on strict uberman or not.  It’s an interesting thought.  I will see how my naps progress from here.

This first part of the dream is a bit foggy, but basically I am with my mom in the kitchen and I can’t remember what either of us are doing. She’s getting very moody and then she confesses that she’s having her period.

I am with my dad and my sister in an asian cuisine restaurant, and I look at the menu to find something relatively cheap, which is very difficult. I finally order a yam for $0.79, featured on the front page, and it came in a little glass with water. My dad and my sister, though, order entree after entree, and I think what the hell is going here?! I’m not feeling very hungry and I’m starting to feel that I just want to get out of here. So when the waitor comes back, I ask him how long all of this is supposed to take. Then he tells me it’s a special program, and we’d be there for hours and hours all morning! So I start yelling and making a scene, and I tell him that’s way too long, and I want to get out of here! My dad and my sister look at me like I’m crazy. So I just pick my things up and leave.

When I get outside, I realize that that it’s much harder to get anywhere than I thought. I didn’t drive to the restaurant, so my dad has the car, and for some reason my vision is impaired and I’m feeling around a lot of the time. It’s not exactly dark, but it’s not light either. It’s more like cloudy and foggy, grayish-blue sort of weather. Before I left I took this big wooden, black chest with designs on it from the restaurant.  It was in a plastic bag that I shook to reduce the particles, which appeared to be giant pieces of seasoning and spices, to the bottom.  Now I am walking down the street with it. One of the restaurant employees comes after me and tries to convince me to give the chest back to them. I continue to walk with it steadfastly, then he gains momentum to catch up with me. Eventually I realize that I’m not getting very far without and car and with my vision impaired, so I give it back to him and go back to the restaurant to try and get my vision back.

At this point the restaurant is empty and closing, and I’m on my own in a desperate struggle to find my jacket in the dark, isolated labyrinth of the back of the restaurant. I think that the jacket will help me to restore my vision, and it’s logical since I left it at the restaurant when I left, and that’s when my vision started to decline. Various shadow figures appear around corners, and I think they are more employees, and I try to avoid them. I don’t know how I got into this mess. One minute I was just slightly uncomfortable (althought it seemed like more than that at the time) in a restaurant, and now I’m completely incapacitated, and my jacket is lost.

I leave the restaurant again, and this time I take a smaller chest with me that no one notices. However, it’s not much more successful since I still have not found my jacket, and I’m still feeling my way through uncharted territory.

I just returned from a week-long symposium in Seattle, and I was forced to return to monophasic sleep during that period.  For the first couple of days, I was doing fine with 4.5 hours a night even after I had ended the juice fast.  However, as soon as the lectures started, I found it very hard to stay awake in those stuffy conference rooms.  Sometimes I would leave for a 10 minute nap to keep me awake for the rest of the lecture, but I finally just gave it up and slept 11 hours one night.  Even the 6 hour nights didn’t seem to be enough to keep me awake during lectures, so I just returned to complete monophasic.

I’ve been thinking that perhaps if I had gone ahead and tried the 4.5 hour core, I may have been successful.  This guy seems to have been fine with a 3 hour core, although he was still somewhat sleepy at night by the time he quit.  However, it was too much to risk with school work hanging on the line.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do at this point as it is very important for me to maintain alertness so that I can finish all the school work I need to do.  I may do the early riser thing and wake up at 5 am with an afternoon nap if necessary.

In the meantime, before I try this thing again after school finishes, I will be waiting for Stampi’s book to come in the mail.  That should provide some additional insight into how this stuff is supposed to work.  This whole experience has also helped me to more closely examine how I use my time and how to make more efficient use of it.  I really really want to get to bottom of my procrastination because no matter how great of time management skills I may develop, I won’t get anything done if I’m still procrastinating.  Steve Pavlina’s blog has been an inspiration to me beyond polyphasic sleep, and his recent article including tips on time management for college students came right on time.

There was much more to this dream, but all I can remember are these last two scenes.

My mom and I went to Sears to return some stuff, and when we got there I asked one of the employees why the place was so poorly run. He said that all the others are state-run but this one is forced to manage itself. I said that everything we buy here has to be returned because it’s all defective. After we finished returning the stuff in that section, we were about to leave, and my mom was trying to say goodbye to the manager, who was on the phone. I wispered in her ear to ask him about the earrings. So she showed him the pair she had on and started to explain how some diamonds had fallen out. She was also in great pain and unable to take the earrings out for some reason. She described the pain as quite severe - a level 3 with a “50 pins and needles” feeling. So they put her on weird triangular shaped stretcher and rushed her up to to the jewelry section to operate on her ear. All of the guys carrying the stretcher were black, and I know my mom is scared of/uncomfortable with black people.

I was on a mission with a rifle, and I was going through a house trying to find someone for some information. There reached a point when I was tired of killing of people so I woke this guy up in bed and told him there was nothing to worry about. Even though I had a rifle, I was not going to shoot him. But he was scared and said he didn’t have the information I was looking for. He pulled a flip gun out from under the sheets and pointed it at me. I realized I was going to either have to shoot him or step on his hand so he couldn’t shoot me. I didn’t want to kill him, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to have to do. The dream ended.