Kirk’s Blog

I walk into a special cafe that people go into when they want to commit suicide, and in this culture, suicide is a normal and an accepted part of everyday life. People are sitting around at tables sipping their death drink, and I go up to the counter to order one. I looked at the menu above the cashier’s head and ordered the “Power Green” drink. I did not want to die, I just wanted to examine the drink.

I left the cafe with my drink in hand on my way home so that I could analyze the substance, and I took a couple sips without thinking. I thought to myself, “Well, maybe just a couple sips won’t do anything.” Then my throat started to close up and my vision went blurry, and I started freaking out. I started running home so that I could reverse the process before it was too late. Before I got there, I croaked and collapsed to the floor.

As far as I can tell, the dream is about my raw diet because of the “Power Green” drink. Dreams are often a rehashing of the day’s events with a stronger emphasis on the emotional content. Yesterday I was talking to my sister about the raw diet among other things. Death in a dream in often symbolic of change. The raw diet has brought a change in my life that I unwittingly brought upon myself, just as I unwittingly drank from the cup of death.

I started the live foods diet over a month ago, and I’m still learning how to to deal with food cravings on a daily basis. I assume that eventually the hunger will subside since I read that it’s normal for this to happen. One theory was that the body craves lots of food because it has been deprived of good nutrient-rich food for so long that it has to over-compensate in the beginning. Whatever the case, food cravings on a raw diet have a unique character that is different from food cravings on a cooked/processed food diet.

The best way I can describe it is like when you eat something light, like maybe a piece of fruit, whether you’re hungry or not. It whets your appetite so that you’re actually more hungry than before you ate it. This is how I feel all the time. It’s great that I don’t feel weighed down after I eat, but for some reason I’m still searching for that satisfying feeling you get when you eat a decent-sized portion of processed/cooked carbohydrates like rice. Eating these types of carbohydrates causes an insulin spike, which in turn stimulates the production of serotonin. The result: you feel peaceful and sleepy. One of my goals is to maintain a consistent energy flow, so while I still crave this relaxed state, it’s ultimately undesirable.

Even with this in mind, I’m still forced to deal with the practical reality of craving cooked/processed foods. So far, this is how I’ve been dealing with it:

• Exercise. I find that when I don’t exercise in the morning (usually jogging for 30 minutes), I tend to be moody and less energetic throughout the day. Mood swings then lead to a desire for comfort foods, and it becomes hard to keep the raw diet.
• Bananas have become my comfort food now. For some reason, they just have that effect without weighing me down. Lately, I’ve been eating up to 5 bananas a day including 2 in the morning with my raw hemp protein shake. My ultimate goal is still to transcend these cravings.
• Raw nuts and dried fruits are the other satisfying comfort foods that I seek when necessary. I stopped eating nuts for a while though because I noticed I would feel slowed down after eating them, which is why I would like to avoid comfort foods altogether. I think eventually I will not feel like I need them anymore. Some say that you should soak the nuts to activate their enzymes before you eat them. Perhaps that would reduce the weighed down feeling.
• Daily rhythms also help me to anticipate when I will be more likely to have cravings. In the morning, I’m feeling stronger and more energetic, and I usually don’t don’t get any cravings. In the evenings, I more frequently get cravings.
• I often just keep my belly full. There are plenty of fruits at work for me to munch on all day, and I make large portions of veggie slaw or something along those lines in the beginning of the week that I can just scoop into a bowl when I’m feeling hungry.

Ultimately, I’m just going to have to get used not feeling the full, satisfying feeling anymore. It’s really great when I think about it. I can eat without feeling like I’ve eaten and always feel optimal. Until that day, I’m going to allow myself to endulge in whatever comfort foods I feel are necessary and gradually ween myself off of the ones that slow me down the most. I’m not sure how long this phase is supposed to last, but I will surely find out.

Immediately after writing my last post, I lay down to take my nap, and when I got up, I had a pounding headache. I didn’t know what caused it or what my body was trying to tell me, but it became unbearable to stay awake, so I slept that night for another 12 hours. And the following night I slept for 12 hours. Leave it to my body to do what it must when my conscious mind has other plans. The headache persisted for 3 days at high intensity, and I finally figured out what was causing it. I have to laugh at myself for not seeing this coming.

When I first started the raw diet, I noticed some minor detox symptoms, and I immediately recognized them because of my previous detox experiences. I didn’t consciously embark on the raw diet for the purposes of detoxification, but I later found out that others with the same circumstances (beginning vegan, going raw) experienced the same intense detox symptoms (headache, nausea) anywhere from a week to a month after starting the diet. To the best that I am able to determine, my body’s ability to self-detoxify was limited while I was sleep-deprived, but as soon as I got some rest, it began a massive flush of toxins from my system, resulting in the severe, pounding headache, light-headedness, and nausea. The headaches seem to have gone away (I’ll see how I feel tonight since they tend to get stronger at night), except I’m still a bit light-headed, and my appetite seems to be coming back (for a while, I only wanted to eat a little fruit).

After a couple days of resting, I then came under more pressure to get my overdue assignments in. Seeing as I lost an entire week of transition and seeing that my body was already over-taxed, I decided to end this round of polyphasic. Hopefully, I will be able to finish all of my work by the time of the break (7 weeks from now) so that I can give it another whirl. So, for now, I’m back to my normal quasi-monophasic. In the meantime, I will allow my body to get used to being raw, and perhaps I’ll get a rug or something to soften the squeaky noises in the middle of the night.  And I have a bit of a Warcraft addiction now, so I’m giving my Warcraft CDs to my coworker, Kevin, while I finish my school work.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
- Thomas Edison

Thursday night at around 11:00 PM, I was sitting in my room listening to some light music and doing something on the computer when I heard this insane maniacal banging on our front door. The man must have been banging the door with something hard because it made a very loud and disturbing noise. When my roommate asked who it was, he wouldn’t say, but he instead demanded that we open the door. Right, we’re going to open the door to an insane person like that. So, he did what any normal person would do - he called the cops. The crazy man was shouting the name of my other roommate, who has lived here longer than any of us, and then she opened the door and started screaming back at him. As it turns out, this man lives beneath us and was complaining about noises that he heard at 4 and 5 in the morning: footsteps, TV, furniture being moved around over the past few days. My room just happens to be right above him, but I kept my distance from the whole ordeal. Our landlord said she couldn’t do anything, and the cops gave us all a talk and went on their way, and then I couldn’t fall asleep for my 11:30 PM nap.

I still have not quite recovered from the explosion nor has my polyphasic sleep schedule. One time in my life, I beat someone up, but that was an extraordinary circumstance. Other than that, I never lift a finger to harm anyone, and I always try to solve my interpersonal problems diplomatically. I very rarely encounter violence because I don’t attract it, and I in fact do everything I can to avoid it, so this presented a problem that I wasn’t too sure how to solve. How do you deal with someone who is incapable of being rational? I recently bought a nice new $42 knife because I’m chopping a lot on my raw diet, and I thought, “What if I have to use it to defend myself the next time he comes up?”

Let me provide a little background information on the situation. All of my other roommates and I, both together and on our own, have heard this man verbally abusing either his girlfriend (wife? divorced?) or his young daughter. It was such a scarey sounding event each time that we were thinking of reporting domestic violence. The only problem was that we didn’t know where it was coming from. I didn’t know it was the same person. Then, less than a week ago when I was playing Warcraft one night, I heard a banging coming from the floor, and then I realized that I wasn’t playing on headphones, and the sound must have been keeping him awake, so I put my headphones in (I almost always play with them anyway). Also, when I first moved into this apartment, I noticed that the floor was a bit squeeky, and I tried to find places to step that wouldn’t make any noise because I thought it might disturb someone (I didn’t know who) and because it was just annoying anyway. Eventually I realized it was a game in futility because the position of one foot step would affect the sound of the next, and there were few consistently quite places to put your foot. The only other complaint I wasn’t able to figure out was the furniture being moved around. Then I thought he must be hearing my chair roll around on the floor. I don’t think about it because it’s a part of me when I’m using the computer.

That night I was trying to think about how to compensate for my missed nap, and then I ended up sleeping for 2 hours to see if I could shake off the negative feelings. I had started to feel depressed earlier in the day for some reason (perhaps it was a premonition), and it was becoming unbearable just to stay awake. So after a while I slept for another couple hours, but that didn’t help very much either. The next day I kept my schedule, but that night I slept so many hours that I don’t even know where to start counting. Warcraft seemed boring. Whenever I woke up feeling groggy, I just wanted to go back to bed, and I did. In fact, the whole idea of polyphasic sleep started to turn me off, and lately I’ve been thinking, “Is all this torture to become polyphasic really worth it? Haven’t I been feeling good and getting a lot done as an early riser already?”

I started to question the matter more deeply and think about things rationally. For the past 7 months, polyphasic sleep has been a priority to me. I’ve been doing everything in my power to make it a reality including taking a reduced load at school, negotiating exemption from symposium, getting an extension on some overdue work, arranging things at work so that I can take time to do this, buying all the things to wake me up after naps, changing my diet - in short, rearranging my life around polyphasic sleep. How can I allow this crazy man with a temper problem to destroy all that? How can I shake off this violence-induced lethargy and get back on track?

Certainly I’m not going to stop walking around in my own home because we have a squeeky floor or stop rolling around in my chair or do anything else that’s unreasonable. If he was looking for a solution or some compromise, he went about it the wrong way. I think all this man (who clearly has anger problems from his childhood) wanted was to find someone to yell at. Thank you Saturn in the 4th house (I should make a blog post just about that). This depression is going to make things more difficult. It’s going to be harder to get up when I’m groggy, harder to find the motivation to persist when I’m on the verge of unconsciousness, and worst of all, it will be hard to do my school work while fighting sleep-deprivation and depression. But I can’t let this mood swing deter me from my goal.

As the sleepiness persists, I’ve begun to lose my grip on certain things. For example, I’ve already forgetten to turn off the water timer twice, and my mat got wet both times. In other cases, I turned off the alarm without getting up. Thankfully those didn’t lead to an oversleep. In this most recent episode, I was no longer in control of myself. In fact, I may have even ceased to be aware of myself at certain points. The Sandman must have not liked how I escaped him last time, so he forcefully took control of the vessel this time. My other self must have been gagged and put in a dark room somewhere because I can’t remember a lot of what happened.

I do remember getting home at about 3:00 PM, 30 minutes before my nap. Then I made sure that my mat was dry, and I unrolled it. I can’t remember when, why, how, or what time I actually lay down, but I do remember grabbing the nap equipment at one point. I remember gaining consciousness to discover that the mask was not covering my eyes, but everything else was in place. I even remember setting the loud double-bell alarm even though I don’t remember it ever going off. Around this point, I thought to myself, “I can’t set the water alarm because I need to test out Placebo’s sleep mp3.” So for some reason I did that and put the mask on, and I allowed the whole or part of the thing to play so I could listen to all of the alarms. Fruitless as this may have been, I don’t think I actually slept much while this was going on, and I ended up getting up at around 4:10 PM, not too long after when I should have been getting up anyway.

I can’t make too much sense of that, but it’s possible that I got an hour of sleep. I did wake up feeling ravenous, which may be a sign that I got some good sleep. I don’t know if you’d call this an oversleep or a lack-of-body experience, lol. Whatever the case, I think we can safely tally that as the second slip-up in 6 days, both of which happen to be approximately 1-hour naps. I can’t say that it’s right or wrong to have these little oversleeps now and then because I just don’t know. Many polynappers and I believe that they just delay the transition. In any case, I’m in a different place now than during the first transition. Rather than obsess over the fact that I screwed up, I’m just happy that I have some ability to concentrate and I didn’t majorly screw up.

I just barely escaped the Sandman’s dreamy vortex.  I was listening to Placebo’s sleep track, which has been working flawlessly for me so far.  This time however, I slept past most of the various alarm that come on after the white noise and was startled awake by my loud double-bell alarm.  So I got up, folded the mat, and sat in my chair.  The next thing I knew I was being awoken again by the sound of water, not from the rain outside, but from the water pump over my sleep mat.  I rushed over with the bucket still trying to figure out what had happened.  Apparently, I was so lost in the trance of the Sandman that I forgot to turn off the water timer after I got up to sleep in my chair.  Thank goodness for that!

I’m gonna have to go with “yes” - I felt like a zombie today. It snuck up on me like a phantom. Not only was I spaced out, but due to being so sleepy, I was incapable of of doing anything of significance. All this reversal of alertness is driving me crazy. Now it’s the day time that I’m sleepy and the nighttime that I’m so awake. For the first couple days, my alert times were extremely regular and predictable. Now it seems like any little thing is shifting them from place to place. Sometimes this very time slot that I’m typing this entry during is a groggy one, sometimes it’s an awake one. Somehow though I think these changes are a necessary part of the transformation process (as I like to call it).

I remember back in high school or middle school when they taught us drug education/awareness. We learned things like the first few buzzes one gets off of cocaine are awesome highs. Then, as one becomes addicted and develops a tolerance, it is necessary to consume higher doses to get the same effect until eventually the person is doing the drug all the time just to maintain equilibrium. That’s how I feel with Warcraft, ha! Before, it was get a nervous energy rush after playing. Now I need it just to stay awake, and it’s getting to the point where I need to play it every time after I wake up. It’s such an easy way to stay awake; I don’t know what I’d do without it. The blood-shot eyes are paying the price, but the eye drops are also helping that.

Another thing that’s been happening is that I’ve been having more memorable dreams during my naps. Like earier today I had this one dream that I was walking around without any shoes on with a bunch of Jews. Sometimes I’ll wake up for a brief moment during my naps with the weirdest sensations. Like one time I woke up and I thought I was floating… for real! Also, it seems that my appetite has gone down somewhat since I started getting groggy, which is good because raw food ain’t cheap!

…except maybe after my 4:00 AM nap. Possessed might be a better word. It’s so bizarre to observe what happens to me when I wake up from that nap each time. The last nap I woke up from was a 4:00 AM one. For some reason, I didn’t think my ultimate goal was to stay awake. Instead I was battling something or saving something; I can’t remember exactly. It was some weird mixture of Steve Pavlina with Warcraft 3 that involved doing something both heroic and demonic. It’s like those weird journeys your mind goes on when your alarm is going off, and instead of getting up, the alarm sound somehow morphs into your dreams, and the whole dream landscape becomes a giant battle to save the dream world before extinction. Except this time, I wasn’t lying in bed listening to an alarm. I was sitting in my chair staring off into space. And the 4:00 AM nap before that one was not much better. I have no idea how I could have staggered around in circles (and periodically sat down) for 45 minutes debating whether or not to go jogging in the cold weather.

In any case, during this whole transition experience, I have been much more full of energy and focus than the last one. For the first two days, I was basically either alert or sleepy, and it was on a very regular schedule. The next 2 days I finally started feeling spaced out, but because I was still able to do work that required a significant amount of concentration (to a point), I would not say that I was a complete zombie. I did experience slight irritability though (perhaps concentration despite spacey-ness comes at a cost?). I have a feeling that my ability to concentrate this time is a result of all the time I’ve spent practicing napping since my last attempt at full uberman, and as a result of napping regularly, my body must have already adjusted to some degree (my experiences would validate that). And while all that is going on, other things seem to be changing/fluctuating too. This is the most wide awake and alert I’ve felt during this time slot the entire time (after a consciousness-inducing game of Warcraft of course). Usually I’m alert from 12am to 3am, not 4am to 7am. Today it was reversed. I think it’s the pendulum swinging in the opposite direction as my alertness spreads more or less evenly over all of my waking periods. Something similar happened during my last transition, but I don’t think I ever had the opportunity to see it through because of all the oversleeps and other mess-ups that would have changed the process.