Everyman, Days 8-9

Day 8 was another 4.5+2 day. Nothing terribly interesting about that, except that I'm trying to figure out if core sleep should count towards the day before it or after it. I'm now more inclined to think that the naps determine the core sleep, rather than the other way around.

Today was 3+3, and so far, I've been much less tired than I'd expected. It's a lot easier the second time around. 4.5+2 had been treating me well; as work is rapidly picking up, I'm going to go with mostly 3+3 now, except when I really have to miss a nap.

Everyman, Day 7

Went to bed at 4:00, woke up at 10:00. I'd skipped a nap yesterday (an impromptu music-making session with friends that was not to be missed, and lasted five hours or so -- my (singing) voice is gone today). I know, I know, bad idea -- paid for it with an extra cycle of core sleep.

Everyman, Day 6

Fell asleep around 3:30 am, woke up around 8:00. I've been averaging about 4.5 hours core this week. I'll try to get it down to a consistent three hour core by next week. Homework and activities will start picking up then, so I'll want more free time.

I've discovered that I'm usually running <50% for the first hour or so after core sleep. I figure it's part of adaptation; that's when I'm in most danger of falling back asleep. I need to physically get out of bed when the alarm goes off (no checking my e-mail in bed like I did this summer!). Huzzah for willpower -- let's see how well it holds up in a week.

Everyman, Day 5

Went to bed between 6:30 and 7:00 am (was talking with a friend into the wee hours of the morning) and woke up shortly before ten. Meant to take nap around noon, but it turned into 1.5 hours of core. Everything else was quite normal. I'm not nearly as tired as I'd have expected to be at this point; I think I won't even hit the low point until sometime after this weekend.

Everyman, Day 4

I've learned my lesson: never take naps after my roommate goes to bed, which is about 11:00 pm. (The reason this roommate relationship works is the curtain dividing the room. More about that later.) There is an extremely high probability that the nap will turn into core sleep. I woke up at 9:00 this morning thinking "why the devil is there that much sunlight coming through the window?" I'd tried to take a nap around 3:00. Not good.

Instead, I will now do it like this: a nap in the afternoon (between classes), a nap in the evening (around dinnertime), and a nap right before my roommate goes to bed. I shall be needing my bike back for the first nap; I don't much feel like sleeping like a bum in the quad (though I've done it before). Campus is big.

About the bike: I'm currently being shuffled between a few levels of bureaucracy. No definitive answer yet. They seem to like calling me during my classes, from a private (hidden) number, and leaving supremely uninformative voicemails without a number I can call.

Everyman, Day 3

My core sleep accidentally ran to 4.5 hours this time. I'd meant to take a nap at 12:15 am, but ended up sleeping until 3:05 or so. Waking up, I thought, why don't I count this as core sleep to salvage the situation? I need ten more minutes. (Yes, I know it doesn't quite work like that.) So I went back to sleep, and woke up at 4:45. Hence 4.5 hours. At least it seems that I now naturally wake up after a REM cycle or two, +/- ten minutes (it usually doesn't happen until further along in the adaptation process, I think). It should be quite handy if it keeps up.

Everyman, Day 2

I slept for three hours last night (4:00-7:00 am). I decided to count the time I zonked out in my biology lecture as a nap (put together, it was probably a bit over twenty minutes of sleep); it was a really boring introduction to Mendelian genetics. I think they assume we come into the Biology Core knowing absolutely nothing about biology, because it took nearly a whole period to explain alleles and Punnett squares. It's supposed to get better (I hope!). That was between 11:00 am and 12:00 pm.

I had my second nap just now, waking up at about 8:00 pm. I'll probably take a third nap around midnight. Looking at the intervals, I should have slept before dinner, methinks. I'd wanted to, but I was having problems with the lock on my door, and all the RAs were at dinner, so I couldn't get let in, either. Ah, well.

So far, my function is still pretty good; I'd say I'm running 90% full. It would be better, were it not for the fact that I had no bike today. The storage people lost my bike! They're "working on it", whatever that means, but it doesn't look promising. I'll go bug them again tomorrow; I've been calling them every few hours to see if it's been located.

Polyphasic, Take 2: Day 1

The hiatus has ended! I am back on campus and readapting to Everyman. I'll record the experience here, since this is the first time I'll have gone straight to Everyman (last time, I switched to Everyman having already done Uberman).

I don't yet know what my sleeping schedule will look like, because it depends on my class schedule, which I have not quite finalized. I plan on doing mostly 3+3 (3 hr core + 3 naps), and sticking to a more regular nap schedule this time. I was rather too careless about that last term.

Last night, I slept for 4.5 hours (I'm easing into it), naturally. I was really tired and passed out on top of the covers around 3:30 am, and then woke up naturally at about 8:00. I took a nap around 5:00 pm, and another around 1:30. The intervals are off, but I plan on doing 3+3 tomorrow, so they'll change anyways. So far, I'm not tired at all. Let's see how I feel in a few days...

Whatever happened to QWERTY?

So, after three days in the office (summer internship), where we (naturally) use Windows and QWERTY, I decided to see how quickly I now type on a QWERTY keyboard. Using an office keyboard (a desktop keyboard, which is substantially better, methinks, than that of a laptop), I got 42 wpm, 2 mistakes. That's the same exact time as my most recent Dvorak trial, with fewer mistakes, even.
Incidentally, I find that the keyboard itself makes quite a difference. I should have realized this earlier, but then again, I have not used any keyboard save my own since the beginning of the Dvorak experiment, at least until now. The fact that my laptop keyboard has both layouts printed on its keys (the standard QWERTY with which it came and the Dvorak stickers I made, if you recall) has probably been slowing me down. It definitely doesn't help when I try to type QWERTY; I just took another typing test in QWERTY, on my computer, and got 15 wpm, 2 mistakes! I reckon, not only am I more used to looking at the Dvorak stickers (as opposed to the printed keys), but also, the physical printed letters on the office keyboard's keys and those of my computer are different. Here are some pictures to illustrate the point.



The keys of the Dell keyboard have their letters printed in the upper left corner (where I have the silver Sharpie on the Macbook), whereas those of the Macbook have their letters printed in the center of the key. When typing, the QWERTY layout of the Macbook is therefore completely obscured by the fingertip when a particular key is pressed, whereas the Dell's QWERTY and the Macbook's Dvorak are still visible. Not to mention that having the one in that particular location accustoms me to looking there.
Once my touchtyping in Dvorak improves, I intend to switch my office computer to Dvorak. I would do it now, seeing as I much prefer Dvorak, but I have no desire to pry apart the keyboard, or else make a set of stickers for it.

An aside, because it has become habitual: the first excerpt was taken from A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde, who is really good. I thoroughly enjoyed The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, and I intend to read this one too, at some point. Unfortunately, it will be later rather than sooner, as I have a very long list of books to read, and this one's closer to the bottom, I'm afraid.
The second passage was from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Ah, classic scifi. I have read this one more than once (which makes my 15 wpm all the more pathetic). Great book. It also occurs to me: what an unfortunate name! What parents would ever name their son Aldous, when there are better names to be had? It sounds more like an adjective than a name, and reads far too close to "odious" than is healthy in a name.

Cleanup Post/Dvorak, Day Whatever (I really can't be bothered to count.)

You may have noticed a whole slew of older posts cropping up. It's just a bit of cleaning up that's long overdue; I had a bunch of half-finished posts languishing on the blog dashboard.

In Dvorak news: 42 wpm, 3 mistakes. This may not be an accurate measurement of my current typing speed, as the text was particularly difficult. It was taken from Bram Stoker's Dracula, which opens with Jonathan Harker's journal, kept in shorthand and therefore naturally staccato and full of numbers (dates and times), locations, and punctuation.

On the other hand, good choice! (Fie on you, Stephanie Meyer!)

Oh, and I can't believe no one got the reference in the title of my most recent post. The Great Hiatus refers to the three-year interval between Sherlock Holmes's "death" in "The Adventure of the Final Problem" and his reappearance in "The Adventure of the Empty House".

Polyphasic Sleep: The Great Hiatus

Summer break began yesterday. I will be home most of the summer -- that, and travelling with the family (currently in Los Angeles). Ergo, I am readapting to the monophasic life. I've had some experience doing so, certainly, over spring break, but not for any significant duration. This should be quite an adjustment.
Of course, not enough time has elapsed, so I don't know exactly how it will go. Thus far, I seem to retain my ability to fall asleep very quickly in pretty much any situation. I find myself getting mildly sleepy in the afternoon, but that goes away. I'm having a bit of trouble sleeping through the night; I wake up at odd hours (at multiples of 90 minutes, no surprise there), but I can go back to sleep. It's still a bit surreal, though, to get out of bed and find that it's light out.

P.S. Five nerd points if you get the title reference.

Polyphasic Sleep: The Finals Crunch

It's that time of year again: finals to take, projects to finish, half a room to pack. I am less than halfway through finals week; one down, two to go. With two such finals weeks under my belt, I have a fair idea of what to expect this time around. I will sleep no more than twenty minutes at a stretch the day before each final, studying (cramming, really) through the night and/or day until literally ten minutes before the exam begins, skipping whatever meal falls closest before the test, prevailing upon my roommate to bring me back a banana or the equivalent. I have terrible study habits, I know.
And then, after my last final on Wednesday, I will have to throw myself into packing; I leave on Friday. The storage service people come to take my stuff away (everything I'm not schlepping to my aunt's garage or flying home) Thursday afternoon. Hence, I will be packing through the night. I've accumulated more stuff than I had expected to, I'll reckon.
What does this mean for my sleep schedule? I'll be skipping a lot of core sleep, and will probably crash afterwards. By crash, I mean something like six hours, or seven and a half, or so.

How polyphasic sleep is preserving my life and sanity

This week has been absolutely insane in terms of workload. I won't bother to enumerate all the various items on my to-do list; they would interest no one but myself, and barely that, at times. The relevant consequence, of course, is that I have taken to cutting core sleep.
I have never before been so thankful I went polyphasic; without it, I would not have survived the week, methinks. (And I'm definitely not adapted to Uberman anymore, I've found.) I've seen four sunrises for work-related reasons this week (I usually take core sleep right around sunrise.) and breakfast has replaced dinner as the one meal I eat consistently (from the "wrong" end of the night, so to speak); it used to be Late Nite (a little after midnight), and before that, dinner.
And then, after an absolutely crazy work week, I decided to play the Game. No, you did not just lose the Game. At my school, the Game is a scavenger hunt type of thing, where teams of three to five students drive around campus and the city in the middle of the night solving puzzles (clues to the next location). It runs from Friday evening to Saturday afternoon -- about a continuous eighteen to twenty hours (though I did snatch a twenty minute nap along the way). I'd played the Game organized by my dorm complex two weekends ago, and I'd been asked to join a team playing a different dorm's Game. It was probably a monumentally bad idea, but I'd caught the Game bug -- I was hooked. I crashed afterwards, of course.
I'm going paintballing in a few hours.

Dvorak, Day 59

40 wpm, 4 mistakes.

Today's passage was from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four. It brought back a small piece of my childhood. I grew up on Sherlock Holmes, so that canon in particular makes me happy. I actually recently acquired a Complete Sherlock Holmes for Kindle, for all of sixty cents (It's wonderful how the e-book versions of classics cost so little -- the miracles of public domain!). I could have gotten it for free off of Project Gutenberg (which is a miracle in itself), but the smooth formatting and table of contents are worth sixty cents in my book (no pun intended).

Dvorak, Day 47

37 wpm, 5 mistakes. I am making an effort to touch-type, hence the increased number of errors.

Today's text was taken from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Huzzah for early SciFi!

Dvorak, Day 38

33 wpm, 0 mistakes. Today's excerpt came from Shakespeare's Henry V. It was the "once more into the breach" part -- a great bit, methinks. This typing test has good taste, I must say.

Dvorak, Day 29

30 wpm, 2 mistakes. Today's passage was excerpted from Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

I'm posting increasingly infrequently simply because there isn't much to report with this sort of experiment, except for the relevant data point. My apologies for... well, being boring, I suppose.

Polyphasic Sleep: A Reflection

It has been a full quarter since I embarked upon the polyphasic sleep experiment. Overall, I would say that it was a good idea. I liked it enough to resume Everyman this quarter. (I went monophasic over Spring Break, to avoid suspicion, and it was quite a surreal experience!) Some thoughts:

• Uberman is not for me. It's not that it's physically too difficult (I had enough consecutive successful days to demonstrate otherwise); rather, my schedule simply doesn't accommodate such a rigid sleep cycle. Between my extracurriculars (such as debating in a different time zone a few weekends per quarter) and my classes, it was getting impossible to fix my schedule such that I had the same twenty minute periods free every day.
• For the sake of a good roommate relationship, I need to time my core sleep such that I wake up at a relatively normal hour every day. While I can go to bed as late as I want to, I can't set alarms for 7:00 am, because my roommate would not appreciate being woken at that hour.
• In retrospect, I probably should have kept to a slightly more rigid schedule of naps. By the time I switched to Everyman, I had gotten a bit lazy in that regard. I took naps whenever convenient, so long as I got in the right number of naps.
• I seem to like lunchtime, right before dinnertime, and between 11:00pm and 2:00am naps.

At this point, I don't think polyphasic sleep is an experiment anymore; it has become more of a lifestyle choice. I shall soon be readapted, and I don't plan on resuming regular posting on the subject -- I'll post if anything out of the ordinary happens.

Dvorak, Day 14

My apologies for the hiatus. It is Spring Break, and I am home for a few days, since I am conveniently debating in the area this weekend. I have spent most of my time with my parents and sister -- it is good to be home.

My typing speed is now 25wpm (3 mistakes). Today's passage was an excerpt from Winston Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches" speech (delivered before Parliament during the Battle of France). Churchill was a wonderful speechwriter, a personal favorite, and this is one of his best, methinks. It calls to mind the valor of such men and women as Leonidas of Sparta, Boudica of the Iceni, and Roland of France, battling valiantly against insurmountable odds -- the stuff of legend.

Dvorak, Day 4

19 wpm, no mistakes. Huzzah for linear improvement! (Actually, it's not really linear, seeing as it's day 4 rather than day 3. We can call it linear with regards to taking typing tests, as opposed to day-by-day.) At this rate, I'll be back at my old (QWERTY) typing speed in a little over a week's worth of typing tests. Of course, that's tremendously optimistic; the curve will flatten, I'm sure.

Dvorak, Day 2

As you may or may not be able to see, I have taped a very small diagram of the Dvorak layout right next to the camera of my Macbook (the camera itself isn't visible), which should help quite a bit with touch-typing. One of the small benefits of the old black Macbook -- the screen of the new aluminum one (Caradoc uses one) extends all the way to the edge, and one probably wouldn't want to mar the glass by taping anything to it.

Today's speed is 14 wpm, no mistakes. An interesting aside: the typing test text was excerpted from Jack London's The Call of the Wild. Yesterday's was from Romeo and Juliet ("But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?"). I hope my familiarity with certain texts in the public domain doesn't artificially inflate my measured speed.

I do hope this learning curve keeps up. I had to write a two-page assignment today, but I will not have much time to practice in the coming days, as I have finals.

Dvorak, Day 1

First of all, a very happy Pi Day to all my intrepid readers!

This is my new keyboard configuration. The picture quality isn't great, so perhaps you can't see it very well (click on it); I wrote all the letters and symbols in the corners of little clear stickers and affixed them in the Dvorak layout. (By stickers, I really mean the adhesive portions of those sticky bookmark tabs -- they're sort of like Post-its, but plastic -- that I cut into squares.) The A and M stickers haven't fallen off or anything; those letters are in the same place in QWERTY and Dvorak.

Now, Caradoc just popped all the keys off his keyboard and rearranged them. I am hesitant to do so for several reasons:

1. Tampering with the hardware can void the warranty. (My computer is a year and a half old, so any warranty is probably out, but if I ever have to take it to the shop again, I don't want any trouble on that score.)
   
2. Having both layouts visible is more user-friendly for anyone borrowing my machine.
3. Eventually, I hope to be able to touch-type in Dvorak on a QWERTY (essentially a blank) keyboard. Not only will I be able to avoid the first consideration, I would be able to tell if anyone tried to use my computer. Anyone who wasn't well-versed in Dvorak wouldn't be able to do anything at any speed, including changing the keyboard settings back to QWERTY.

My Dvorak typing speed today is 10 wpm, no mistakes (that's looking down at the keyboard, though). You can only imagine how long this post took!

Experiment 2: Dvorak

My second experiment! I thought this day would never come! And the timing is quite nice, too. The polyphasic sleep experiment has become sufficiently routine such that it can no longer really be called an experiment. Incidentally, it was Caradoc (the friend who, as you may recall, chickened out of Uberman) prodded me into this one -- not that it took much prodding; I was looking to try something new anyhow. (On the sleep front, he is considering Everyman for next quarter. Finally!) Anyhow...

What is Dvorak?
The more appropriate question is, "Who was Dvorak?" August Dvorak (distantly related to the composer of the same name) created the eponymous Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, which is optimized for typing speed and ergonomics. The QWERTY keyboard, the current industry standard (and I write "current" in almost-futile hope that one day, Dvorak will gain widespread usage), was originally deliberately designed to slow typists down. Recall that the alphanumeric keyboard was originally designed for the typewriter, as the computer had not yet been invented. Typewriters, except for the electric models developed later, operated by means of mechanical hammers, sort of like the ones in pianos, with characters engraved on the striking surface of the typebar. These small moving parts jammed and tangled if too many of them were moving at once; hence, the keyboard was arranged to maximize the amount of time it took for a typist to move from one key to the next. Given that the advent of computers rendered such a system obsolete, Dvorak came up with an optimized keyboard. Unfortunately, because the QWERTY keyboard was already entrenched in the consciousness of the typing population, Dvorak never caught on.

Enough of the impromptu history lesson; I've probably bored you half to sleep. The experiment itself is pretty self-explanatory: I will try to retrain myself from QWERTY to Dvorak. I hope to pick up touch-typing along the way. (I never did learn how to type properly in the first place.) I'll track my progress using an online typing test; I think I like this one. I'm at about 57 wpm (words per minute) on QWERTY now. On Dvorak, it's liable to be 2 wpm.

Note: I typed this post entirely in Dvorak! (It took forever, but it happened.)

Days 43-45

Again, nothing particularly interesting has happened lately. It's the last week of classes before finals, so things are über-hectic (but not interesting, at least from a sleep perspective). This is really just a check-in post.

Short term memory tests
Numbers: 12
Letters: 12.15

Days 40-42

I had a great time with the tournament, but best of all, I got in all my naps but one! That's right, no recovery period at all! Ha!

I judged all five preliminary rounds, and both novice and varsity finals. Judging is quite fun (and apparently a bit of a power trip for some first timers). As one of the varsity debaters on my team observed, rounds are actually a lot closer from the judge's perspective. Debaters usually think they either crushed the opposition or got slaughtered themselves.

Also, Sunday was Daylight Savings. If I were on Uberman, there would have been a slight recovery period, but on Everyman, I'm absolutely fine. I'm so very glad I switched.

Days 36-39

Nothing of note has occurred these few days. Adjusting back from a monophasic night really isn't that bad -- I'm already over it. Ergo, I can probably take monophasic nights once in a while if I have need, so long as I don't have consecutive ones.

This weekend, we're hosting the college debate tournament. Don't panic -- it's not nearly as bad as the high school tournament was, thank goodness. I'll be judging, rather than doing anything administrative. Moreover, it's a fairly small tournament, since the schools in our league are all a ways away; there'll only be about forty teams (American parliamentary teams are two debaters apiece). I should have time between rounds to nap, since it always takes time to tab.

It occurs to me that, despite not naming names, I have written enough about myself to make my identity readily deducible. Does this mean I have to trust in the laziness of the various denizens of the internet?

Parents' Weekend: Days 33-35

I apologize for what seems like a bit of a hiatus. I have not died or anything. It turns out I had two (this is the third) saved posts languishing in my account; I'd simply neglected to post them. Happens. I'm a tad absentminded like that. Go read those first, I'd suggest.

It was a lot of fun. You really don't realize how much you miss your parents until you've been away long enough. Also, my father's been on campus before, more than once, so there was no need for the obligatory tour (conducted by me or anybody else). I took him to the various eateries on campus that I like, including this wonderful frozen yogurt place in the student union (the cashier recognized me, I'm such a regular). We went to some of the talks given by various Important People (or rather, he went to all but one of them with out me -- I was in class on Friday). We went to dinner with family in the city, and just drove around in the city for a while. Small things like this are the moments you remember.

I slept eight hours, from 3:00 am to 11:00 am on Sunday morning. I actually woke up at 7:30ish, and went back to sleep when I saw what time it was. It's a little strange to be awake for an entire day without napping. The whole, unbroken day felt really long. I like breaking it up into intervals.

Now, for getting back on track. At least it won't be as bad as after that tournament!

Days 30-32

I've been super-busy these few days. I won't bore you all with details of exactly how much work I've had -- suffice to say that it was a lot. I'm so very glad I'm polyphasic; I don't know how all the monophasic people around me get it all done!

In other news, I just found out that I'm staying in the city (my university is about a half-hour's drive from the nearest big city) with my father this Saturday/Sunday overnight. I'm actually looking forward to spending time with him, but this overnight thing will be a problem, methinks. I'll go monophasic for a day, and hope it doesn't completely mess me up.

Days 27-29

Again, nothing of note to report. Parents' Weekend is coming up, which will entail pretending to be monophasic, seeing as my father will be here. I will probably go biphasic for a day or two, just because that's the best compromise between appearing monophasic and not screwing up the polyphasic schedule yet again.

Short term memory test results
Numbers: 13
Letters: 11.6

Days 24-26

Nothing of interest to report on the sleep front. Steadily inching back towards a normal polyphasic schedule. I find that I will usually wake up on my own after about three hours of core sleep. This is a good sign.

Apologies for the very short update. This is the cyber-equivalent of waving and saying "I'm not dead yet!"

Day 23

I had the strangest dream today. It was continuous, too, spanning core sleep and the one pseudo-nap (it was one full REM cycle; my roommate had instructions to wake me up, but was distracted by a Rubik's cube, or so the story goes) I took.

It involved some sort of secret society. I don't remember the exact name, but I think it was called the Order of the White Somethings (I really can't think of the noun). It might have been something to do with ships. Or churches. Anyhow... there was definitely a suicide bombing in there somewhere. A member had to sneak into the private office of some Important Person to retrieve a mysterious red stone (it might have been a palantir-type thing), and was clearly not going to make it out, so he detonated an iPod bomb. It was my old nano, actually (white, 1st generation). I don't think it was my idea.
There was a living room, dimly lit, lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The secret police stormed it, and rifled through some secret compartments behind the books. I think that's where the red stone was kept. I don't think anyone died that time. This happened before the suicidal break-in.
There was also some sort of excavation going on. People were apparently unearthing the "original white ship" or something -- whatever it was, the Order was in the thick of it. I don't remember much of it, only that there was an exploding Geiger counter (not a suicide bomb, I don't think).
Then there was an Order meeting in the forest. Not a camp-out, sit-by-the-fire type of thing either, but a real boardroom type meeting, with a long table, rolling desk chairs, and yellow legal pads smack in the middle of the woods. There were unicorns, too.

Right. Secret societies, suicide bombings, unicorns. Funny how my mind works.

Days 20-22

Less progress than anticipated. Two steps forward, one step back, as they say.

I have a houseguest, just for tonight. She is the friend of a friend of a friend. That is, she is the family friend of a good friend of my (male) friend who lives four feet across the hall. She is a junior in high school visiting colleges. I think it's quite early to be taking overnight visits, but I have friends who did the same in their day.
My roommate is at a party, so I am entertaining tonight. I do not anticipate getting to bed when I should. I have spent a few hours talking, and none on the homework in front of me.

From yesterday...
Short term memory tests
Numbers: 11.8
Letters: 13

Days 17-19

Attempting to get back on track is harder than I'd anticipated (let's just say that things snowballed and rolled rapidly downhill, accelerating as they went). Most of the novelty has worn off, so it just requires massive amounts of willpower, it being hauling myself out of bed. It's getting better, though. I'm less tired now than I was a day or two ago. I'd say I'm running an average of about 80% full. I should be back on schedule in a week, tops. I've definitely learned my lesson regarding skipping naps -- don't do it!

To all my readers (the few and the brave), a very happy St. Valentine's Day. It is raining out, and has been for the past week. It well suits my outlook on this holiday.

Debate Tournament, the Aftermath: Days 15-16

How my life is now a disaster, part two:

After the tournament ended, I still had chemistry homework to do. Normally, functioning at about 80%, I could have gotten it done in twenty minutes, tops. That night, it took me until 3:30 am. I was barely awake; I kept nodding off, and when I wasn't, I just couldn't keep my eyes focused on the page. Even after a twenty minute nap, I was running at no more than 5% -- more like 1-2%. When I first staggered back to the dorm, my friends and dormmates who were in the lounge thought I was drunk or something (note: I don't drink)! I don't really remember much of it, but I do believe one of them said something along the lines of, "What did those people feed you?" Apparently, I act ten kinds of intoxicated when I'm that tired.

I sort of collapsed in bed at around 4:00 am. I didn't wake up until 3:30ish pm, when my tournament director calls to ask if I'd seen a particular item in the Tab room. At that point, I'd missed all my classes, including the chemistry class during which I was supposed to hand in that homework assignment! Also, despite the fact that two of those classes were lectures, where I wouldn't really be missed, one was a seminar, where the professor definitely noticed I was absent! I wrote him an e-mail, apologizing profusely and explaining myself. His response? Get some sleep; you need it. Good man, my professor.

The problem is, I'm no longer adapted to long periods of sleep time. The twelve hours didn't help me all that much; it felt like the equivalent of two or three REM cycles. So I was still very tired throughout the day, but the problem was, I had to catch up on work. I figured that perhaps the exorbitant amount of core sleep would take care of napping for the day (I was sort of hoping that the tiredness was just stress and would go away)... bad idea. I tried to do 3 + 3 today, and not only was I extremely tired the entire day, I was having significant difficulty getting up from my naps. Right now, I'm actually procrastinating on a paper due a few hours later. I anticipate taking a nap tonight, instead of getting any core sleep. It... won't be pretty.

Oh, and before I forget...
Short term memory tests
Numbers: 14
Letters: 13

I didn't do the words test because all three of together take quite a bit of time, which I haven't had much of these days. Also, interestingly enough, this is one of the few times when I've scored higher on the numbers than the letters.

Debate Tournament: Days 12-14

This tournament has made a mess of my life. Perhaps I am being a tad melodramatic, but I feel it is warranted. Let me tell you a bit about how my weekend went.

I ended up working continuously from 7:00 am until past midnight both Saturday and Sunday. I missed all of my naps, considering I did not ever have more than fifteen minutes of downtime at a time (and I couldn't have had more than an hour total each day, including meals and bathroom breaks). I've been running on about three hours of sleep the past three days, and I'm really burnt out. In other words, I'm a flaming wreck (or perhaps a wreck that was at some point on fire, but now has fizzled out, and is spewing forth occasional gouts of toxic smoke).

See, what happened was, they had me staffing the judge room. I wasn't originally assigned there; I was supposed to be on building patrol. It just so happened that the area I was patrolling happened to include the judge room, which for some reason, had nobody on staff. I was sort of roped into staying there, and was basically manning the desk alone on Friday. Tab sent somebody to help during high-traffic times, and one of the judges in the room who saw how overworked I was volunteered to help, but I was basically in charge, as a freshman, having just learned the ropes on the job.

Saturday was a bit better. Varsity LD and varsity CX started their first rounds on Saturday morning, adding two events to the four (JV LD, JV CX, Public Forum, and Parli) I was already handling. But seeing how utterly shorthanded I was, an alumnus of the university who had significant experience in judge room management was assigned to help me. Also, a few Tab people helped set up the 8:00 am outgoing varsity ballots. Still, the day was grueling, if only because of the long, continuous hours. I later learned from the alumnus that a few years ago, when he was still a college student, not only were there separate varsity and JV judge rooms (and PF had not yet been created), but there were also three people assigned to each room. Three! You can imagine my dismay when I found out.

That night, I got about three hours of sleep.

Sunday was pretty similar, at least through preliminary rounds. Might I add that we kept things running very much on schedule, more so than just about any tournament I've ever seen (debate tournaments are notorious for running hours behind schedule)? That, I'm quite proud of. Two people staffing for six events, and we still managed to get ballots out and rounds started at nearly the slated times.

Then elimination rounds happened, and people started leaving in droves. It was very hard to find enough judges to fill all the three-judge panels for all the different events! We ended up having to pull a lot of Stanford debaters from their assigned jobs to judge rounds, sometimes in events they had very little experience in. We had a lot of college parli debaters judging PF (which is fine, actually, because PF is designed for a lay judge) and JV LD (not as good, because LD is more specialized -- though the heavy duty jargon and spreading doesn't usually happen until one hits varsity, so it's not as bad as one might imagine). I wanted to judge, and I've experience in pretty much everything except CX, but I was necessary in judge room (basically chained to the desk the whole weekend). Ah well. Everything that was supposed to end on Sunday ended by 12:30, I believe, so I spent some time cleaning up and closing down the judge room, and then ferrying things between Tab and various vehicles (in the rain, no less). I had forgotten to bring a jacket, and was stupidly wearing sandals, so by the time I stumbled into the dorm lounge, I was cold, wet, and bone tired. It was a little after 1:00, methinks. And then I had homework to do.

Days 11-12

Thursday was a pretty typical day. Today, however, was a bit crazy. I had a 4.5 hour core sleep, because I knew I'd be extremely busy with the tournament. I napped sometime around noon or 1:00 pm. Then I was awake for about eleven hours, which is the longest period of continuous awake-time I've had since I began the polyphasic sleep experiment. I was running at maybe 90% for most of the day, but once all the judges (I was manning the judge room) dispersed, I could literally feel my energy levels drop as we cleaned up. I got back to the dorm around midnight, and I was pretty much exhausted, running perhaps 20% at best. A few of my friends were in the lounge, and I wanted to hang out with them, since we hadn't really done much together this quarter, but I knew I needed a nap. My body was practically screaming "sleep!" at me. I did wake up in twenty minutes, only to find that they'd all disappeared upstairs. I found them eventually, and wasn't quite tired anymore (70-80%, I'd say). It's not going to last though.

Tonight, I'm getting a three hour core, because I'm going to sleep at 3:45ish, and I have to be at the tournament rendevous point at 7:15. I'm nominally working until 11:00 pm, though it will actually be closer to midnight, again, until I get out. That's 17 hours. I may get one break, at most. I may post tomorrow night, just because I'll probably be completely zombified, and it might be amusing to read. Then again, I may not have time, and getting some core sleep might be a good idea.

Days 9-10

Nothing much to report, again. Still getting tired at odd times, but that's been getting better. Proof of sanity below.

Short term memory tests
Numbers: 11.72
Letters: 12
Words: 28

Days 7-8

I've decided to start doing multiple days per entry, mostly due to dearth of interesting things to report. Eh. One downside I've noticed about Everyman is that it's just so easy to think "90 more minutes..." and take another REM cycle. At that hour, I don't think anyone is thinking about efficiency of day; it's more of a singular "sleeeeeeeep...". I've had a 3 + 3 day and a 4.5 + 2 day; I really need to somehow get my lazy self out of bed after one REM cycle. Preferably some way that won't soak the pillow in ice water.

This weekend should be interesting. I have to work at the high school debate tournament my university is hosting, and that's basically a 7:00 am to 11:00 pm job. I suppose I could take 20 minute "bathroom breaks" or something, but seeing as we're stretched thin in manpower, that's probably a bad idea. At this point, I really can't afford more than one monophasic day, lest I unadapt. We'll see how that works out.

Day 6

Today was a 4.5 + 2 day. I had apparently turned off all my 6:00 alarms on my phone (I have five, at one-minute intervals), but woke up naturally at 9:00. I seem to be adapting to getting fewer than five consecutive REM cycles. Then again, I was on Uberman for so long that I really should not be surprised. I'm just not really used to sleeping more than five hours at a time now.

I feel like these posts are shrinking because no news is good news. When I break down and type up a few pages of gibbering drivel, you'll know that something has gone terribly terribly wrong.

Day 5

I seem to have slept in two 90 minute blocks. It was supposed to be a 1.5 + 4 day, but when I went to bed for my 10:00 am nap, I didn't wake up until 11:30. I suppose today was an experiment in split-core Everyman. It worked beautifully. I took/will take all my naps on schedule, and there were no sudden waves of grogginess. If I should have a class early in the morning next quarter (with about two hours until the next class), this is exactly what I'll do.

Day 4

Day 4 was a 3 + 3 day; I had an exam, so I only had time for three naps.

My dorm played a game of broomball in the evening (the opposing team, incidentally, was Caradoc and Aethelwine's dorm, although only Caradoc actually played). Broomball is essentially ice hockey in sneakers with "broomsticks" and a foam ball (two, in this case). It was incredibly fun; I've never played anything like it in my life! Of course, since I didn't really know what I was doing, and was slipping like crazy on the ice, I ended up spending half the game stickfighting on my knees. I have a few mashed fingers and some enormous purple bruises on my knees, but it was worth it. I can't wait for the (tentative) rematch!

And the only real relevance of the above is that I swung my nap by about an hour and a half (half an hour more than recommended maximum) -- I slept in the car on the way there. Did not affect my (nonexistent) broomball skills.

It occurs to me that I haven't checked my sanity in a while. Here are today's results.

Short term memory tests
Numbers: 11.31
Letters: 13
Words: 33

Day 3

Today was another 1.5 + 4 day. I was sorely tempted to make it 3 + 3, when I had to make the decision at 6:00 am, but considering I really do have to adapt, I forced myself out of bed. (Willpower, I haz it. (sometimes)) This core sleep business can be very aggravating at times; it's twice as difficult to wake up from during adaptation, and presents the temptation of "just one more REM cycle, it's only 6:00". It's way too easy to be tempted at 6:00 am.

I had quite a frightening dream at 11:30 pm. I was on a battlefield, in the thick of the fray, with a long, blood-soaked pike I clearly snatched off the ground; I could barely lift the thing. The field was slick with dew and blood, the mist so thick that no one could see more than a few feet in front of their noses. I could hear the piercing, shrill screams of horses as they were cut down (Was it horse blood on that pike?), the clash and scrape of blades and armor, the groans of dying men, and the shouts of the living. I could only really see the few men immediately next to me, all pikemen from the broken line, gathered in a tight half-circle, a desperate last stand against a mass of cavalry we could not see -- but we could hear them thundering towards us. I brace the pike against the ground as best I can, unwieldy though it is. The head and shoulders of the first horse breaks through the mist. The rider raises a bloody sword, slashing a wide arc into the huddled infantry. I duck -- and slip, and fall into the wet grass -- and a body falls across me. The horse's ironshod hooves descend -- the alarm rings, and I wake up.

Day 2

I decided that I should restart the day count for Everyman; hence, it is day 2.

I had a normal 1.5 + 4 schedule today. I was running maybe 10% in the morning (7:00ish) -- it seems harder to get up from core sleep than it does from a nap. Although I suspect it has a lot to do with the time of day. I used to absolutely hate mornings; now, I do enjoy them -- I just wish my body would change its mind!

I also swung one of my naps about 20 minutes, with no discernible ill effects. So far so good.

Day 1

Just finished my first day on Everyman. I had my core sleep at 4:30, intending to wake up at 6:00, but overslept and woke up around 9:00. Bummer. But the great thing about Everyman is that I can compensate for oversleeping by cutting the number of naps I take the rest of the day; on Uberman, there was no correcting for slip-ups. Because I had stuff to do (and wasn't tired), I just took the last two naps of the 1.5 + 4, rather than shifting to a 4.5 + 2 schedule for the day. Went admirably. Bounced right up from both naps.

Now I have to core sleep. Good night (morning?), all.

Day 19: A Decision

My sleep schedule as of now is a right mess. It's somewhere between Uberman and 3 + 4 pseudo-Everyman, and in defiance of logic, that's nothing close to 1.5 + 4 Everyman. This needs to be fixed. Ergo, I have come to a decision two days in advance. Looking back at my "Thoughts on Everyman" posts, the pros heavily outweigh the cons. I'm switching to 1.5 + 4 Everyman.

Schedule as follows (+/- 30 minutes' flexibility):
4:30 - 6:00 am -- Core Sleep
6:00 - 10:00 am -- Morning Block
10:00 - 10:20 am -- Nap
10:20 am - 2:30 pm -- Noon Block
2:30 - 2:50 pm -- Nap
2:50 - 7:00 pm -- Afternoon Block
7:00 - 7:20 pm -- Nap
7:20 - 11:30 pm -- Evening Block
11:30 - 11:50 pm -- Nap
11:50 pm - 4:30 am -- Night Block

Day 18.2: More Thoughts on Everyman

One fascinating thing I've discovered about Everyman is that once adapted, you can vary your core-to-nap ratio day-by-day to fit your schedule. You could literally decide on the number of naps you want to take/would be convenient on a particular day, and adjust your core sleep to fit. You could even go monophasic (eight hours) one night with little consequence, as long as you went back to Everyman for the next week or so. I like the sound of this! This means that I can pretend to be biphasic, or even monophasic, over Parents' Weekend. (Note: my parents have somehow figured out that I've been "sleeping less", though they don't know the whole deal, thank goodness. I just got a talking-to over the phone last night.)

One significant downside to Everyman that just occurred to me is jetlag. I fly quite a bit, and I'm not sure how jetlag would affect my core sleep. See, under Uberman, I would never get jetlagged; I'd just have to match the timing of my naps to Pacific Standard Time, wherever I happen to be. For instance, if I spent a few days on the East Coast, my naps in EST would be one hour earlier than they were in PST, but would actually be happening at the same absolute time. Presumably, my core sleep under Everyman would be short enough that even though it would be matched to a PST absolute time, it wouldn't conflict with whatever I'm doing locally.

I suppose I should work out the 3 + 3 and 4.5 + 2 schedules as well; they'd be good to have on hand. The 2:30 nap, of course, is fixed, unless I skip it all together. On the other hand, the core sleep period shouldn't change dramatically; I should be adding to the original 90 minutes, rather than moving the entire thing. The naps, though, are extremely flexible +/- 1 hour on 3 + 3, and +/- 2 hours on 4.5 + 2.

3 + 3 = 2:30 pm, 7:30 pm, and 12:30 am naps; 4:30-7:30 am core
4.5 + 2 = 2:30 pm, 10:30 pm naps; 4:00-8:30 am core

Wow, just looking at that... 4:00-8:30 feels almost sinful.

Day 18.1: Thoughts on Everyman

I messed up again this morning! 45 minutes, from about 9:30 until the "almost naptime" alarm at 10:20. This core sleep just isn't going away, is it? (A pox upon ski trips!) It just kills me to know that had it not been for ski trip, I would probably be on Uberman right now. I was doing well that first week!

Something I mentioned to Caradoc last night: It would have been so much easier had I had someone else to do it with. The idea behind polyphasic support groups is that you prod each other and keep each other awake, providing external stimuli to stave off sleep. It's terribly hard to fight the sleep monsters when I'm stuck being very quiet alone in the dark, with my roommate asleep a few feet away, and the entire dorm also asleep throughout the hall. (The lounge doesn't helps much; the couches are soft enough to be tempting.) Being very quiet in the dark is easier with someone else.

Anyhow, let me work out an Everyman schedule, because from the way things are looking now, I'm going to need it...

The 2:30 pm nap cannot change, because of my class schedule. Ergo, I would have to shift my other naps, to make slightly longer blocks between naps. I would have one at 10:00 am, one at 7:00 pm, and one at 11:30 pm. Some of these might become a tad inconvenient, because I had originally planned my schedule to fit Uberman, not Everyman. Ah, well, I can swing it about half an hour either way. Core sleep would be 4:00-5:30 am, or 4:30-6:00 am, depending on when I got tired. I'll end up tweaking it; Everyman, being non-equiphasic, is more about feeling out your circadian rhythms than about sticking to a rigid, periodic schedule.

Oh, and before I forget...

Short term memory tests
Numbers: 11.67
Letters: 13
Words: 29

I'm doing fine on these, but I sure hope there aren't any more sudden amnesic moments.

Day 18: An Assessment

Temporary bout of amnesia aside (I knew I jinxed it yesterday!), I think need a better plan. Or rather, a plan, of any sort, to replace my current nonexistent one. I've been stuck in a rut ever since snow trip, and this needs to change.

Major Development: I am considering the Everyman schedule.

What is the Everyman schedule?
The main difference between Uberman and Everyman is core sleep. That is, under Uberman, I should never sleep more than 20 minutes at a time. On an Everyman schedule, there is a core sleep (sometimes two) of at least 1.5 hours, in addition to naps throughout the day. It is based on the fact that one normal REM cycle is 90 minutes long. A monophasic sleeper getting 8 hours (really 7.5 hours) a night is getting 5 REM cycles. The idea is that a nap can replace a core sleep REM cycle, by compressing the non-REM stages of sleep. Everyman is the classification of any schedule between Uberman and biphasic that involves a multiple of 1.5 hours of core sleep, and the corresponding number of naps (4.5 hrs + 2, 3hrs + 3, or 1.5 hrs + 4).

Uberman vs. Everyman, a comparison
Uberman: more waking hours, more rigid schedule, more severe sleep deprivation to adapt, more difficult adaptation, shorter adaptation phase
Everyman: (the differences between this and Uberman grow more pronounced with longer core sleep/fewer naps) fewer waking hours, more flexible schedule, lighter sleep deprivation to adapt, easier adaptation, longer adaptation phase
One blogger who has done both (I forget which, but I think it was Puredoxyk), summed it up nicely: On Uberman, you adjust your life to fit your sleep schedule; on Everyman, you adjust your sleep schedule to fit your life.

Uberman or Everyman?
Other than satisfaction of curiosity, what I hope to get out of a polyphasic schedule is more awake time. We already know that once fully adapted, the quality of my waking hours should be equal to, if not greater than they were in high school or last quarter (I was chronically sleep-deprived in high school). But I want a few more hours, too, mostly in my weekdays (I don't mind hibernating on weekends). I know that I can survive and be functional on about five hours of sleep on weeknights. I'd say, therefore, that totaling any more than four hours a day isn't worth it, because there wouldn't be an increase in waking hours. Thus, the Everyman schedules I'm considering at the moment are 1.5 hrs core + 4 naps (total sleep = 2 hrs, 50 mins) and 3 hrs core + 3 naps (total sleep = 4 hrs).
It appears that I have been unintentionally adapting to a 3 hr core + 4 naps schedule. Not quite Everyman (one nap too many), but just about. The easiest course of action at this point is just to cut one nap and finish adapting to this. But I don't want to settle for easier (never have, and never will). Recall that one of the main attractions of Uberman is its maximal efficiency. The only real appeal of the 3hr + 3 schedule is its flexibility; once adapted, I would be able to swing naps +/-1 hr, whereas on the 1.5hr + 4, I would only have +/-30 min leeway. Still, compared to Uberman, +/- 30 minutes is divine; the rigidity of the schedule is starting to wear on me. I think I'll wait until the end of week 3 (day 21) and see if the situation improves before I decide if I want to switch.

Day 17.1

A quick post -- two things:
1. I had dinner today! Seriously, two (cafeteria) meals in one day hasn't happened since... at least ten days ago. It feels like such an accomplishment.
2. It's getting more difficult to motivate myself to get out of bed after naps. Possibly indicates a decrease in enthusiasm for the experiment (the novelty was definitely part of what got me out of bed the first few days). Also likely has to do with the "unadapting" that I've done.

Day 17

That was very odd. I just woke up to my 6:20 "almost naptime" alarm. The thing is, I have absolutely no idea how I ended up asleep in bed in the first place; I distinctly remember getting up at 2:50. My phone wasn't even next to the pillow, which is where I put it directly before each nap -- it was on the desk several feet away. And I had my bathrobe on; I would hardly sleep in a bathrobe! My best guess is that I must have woken up at 2:50 to the second alarm, thinking it was the first, and thinking, "one-minute snooze", fell asleep again. But then a) the robe? and b) how'd the phone get over there?

However it happened, very frustrating. I was halfway to breaking the ski trip core sleep, I thought!

Day 16

I love doing laundry during the dawn/morning blocks; I have the laundry room all to myself. It's also terribly difficult to actually fall asleep while loading and unloading washing machines. The physical mass of cold, wet cloth in one's hands is quite effective stimulus. I'm certain if I had to hold a live fish for three hours straight, I would have no trouble staying awake for the duration. And then afterwards, folding clothes is the sort of mindless physical task that's just perfect for near-zombie levels of consciousness. I'll be doing dishes tomorrow morning.

I'm starting to break the core sleep; mornings are just terribly difficult around now.

Short term memory test
Numbers: 14
Letters: 12.5
Words: 29

Day 15

I didn't oversleep today! Of course, I was quite tired the entire day, and was a complete zombie for most of the morning block (I'm talking maybe 2% full, with frequent bouts of microsleep). Still, this means that things are looking up. Here's to hoping the sleep schedule doesn't take another nosedive.

I also had lunch today, for the first time in weeks! Admittedly, considering that I had planned to skip dinner today, that's not quite the accomplishment it seems. Oh well.

This is the third week, isn't it? Day 15. By now, the adaptation phase is supposed to be largely over -- bummer. I was doing well, too! I'll stick it out for another week; I shouldn't have been set back more than that, methinks.

Short term memory tests
Numbers: 11.4
Letters: 13
Words: 30

I forgot about this yesterday, didn't I? Well, seeing as there doesn't seem to be much of a change, I don't think it made much of a difference. I'm not an amnesiac yet, so it's all fine and dandy.

Day 14

I missed the inauguration! Of course, I got the speech transcript, and found it on Youtube later, but it's terribly disappointing nonetheless. I really need to break this oversleeping-during-morning-block habit before I get stuck in a rut. I think what's happening is that I've unintentionally adapted myself to core sleep + 4 naps over the past few days. So now I really need to break out of it, considering it's already become a habit. The upside is that I'm less tired most of the time, but that's not really an upside; it will all go away once I start readjusting to Uberman.

Day 13

I overslept this morning. I think I actually woke up about halfway, turned off the alarms, and went back to sleep. There's the willpower slipping, I suppose. The thing is, I don't think this would have happened had I not overslept the previous two days. I've accustomed myself to oversleeping -- bad news. Now I have to break the habit. I hope that doesn't take too many days. I should be adapted already!

The rest of the day was fine. I just need to keep myself awake late in the dawn block and most of the morning block.

Snow Trip: Days 11-12

Day 11.1
There is nothing terribly exciting to report (no news is good news, here) for the rest of the day. I think I've learned a bit about sleeping with lots of noisy drunk people all around me. The polyphasic soundtracks I blogged about before came in handy; they're not noise-cancelling, but it's much easier to fall asleep when there's just enough fuzz such that you can't make out what people are saying.

Day 12
More oversleeping happens. I fall asleep while writing a paper on the couch (I know, the couch was a terrible idea), at 8:30 am or so, and don't wake up until my "almost naptime" alarm rings at 10:20. Yes, that's another two hours of extra sleep! I skip the next nap, figuring that the oversleep counts as a swing (I swing naps within a ten-minute cushion on either side). Even so, my schedule has been seriously thrown off -- and I was getting close to the end, too!

I've discovered a rather frustrating, pervasive sense of misplaced sympathy in the dorm. That is, most of my dormmates are very concerned about this experiment, and think it's a tremendously bad idea. Hence, when they see me passed out on a couch, even when I'm not supposed to be asleep at that hour, they think that I need the sleep, and so take care not to wake me up. They don't understand how harmful it is for me to oversleep; the more strictly I cleave to my schedule, the quicker this adaptation phase will go. The sleep schedule went smoothly the rest of the trip, but I'm probably physiologically back in day 5 or something.

Snow Trip: Days 10-11

So... the blogging into a text file during ski trip never quite happened; I was having too much fun, to be honest. I did end up going skiing, despite the concerns of one of my RAs. He actually sent me an e-mail the morning before we left, saying something along the lines of "the high altitude and your sleep schedule won't mix well; it'd probably be too dangerous for you to ski". But I did, and I'm fine, and it was so much fun!

Unfortunately, my sleep schedule was blown to bits. Here's what happened, and then we'll see how many pieces I have to pick up.

Day 10.2
We left sometime between 3:00 and 4:00 pm. We pull into a rest stop for dinner at 6:15; we're given about 45 minutes on the ground. I buy my food in a hurry, and then conk out at 6:30 against the wall in a booth in a fast food place. It's the first time on this schedule that I've napped outside of the dorm (which usually means my bed or a lounge sofa). It takes me a little longer than my usual two or so minutes to fall asleep, but otherwise, that nap was fine.

We arrive in front of the house in Tahoe at 10:20 pm, but don't actually start unloading until fifteen minutes later, I'm told, because the RA who'd gone to get the keys hadn't gotten there yet. I take my nap right on schedule at 10:30, and am the last one off the bus at a little before 10:50 (with the friend upon whose shoulder I was sleeping). That was uneventful; so far so good.

Day 11
Trouble, in the form of oversleeping, strikes. I sleep on a couch at 2:30 am. I wake up around 5:00. Two hours of oversleep! Two hours! I panic when I can't find my phone, but a controlled panic, because everyone else is asleep. I do work, I think, with the intention of calling my phone from someone else's phone when people start waking up to go ski. My phone sounds muffledly (is that a word?) at 6:20; turns out, it had slipped between the cushions of the couch. That was probably why I overslept, though at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if I started sleeping through alarms.

I sleep at 6:30 anyhow, because accustoming oneself to a pattern is important. I am woken up a minute or two early by the convening of skiers in the kitchen a few feet away. I turn off the alarms and change into ski gear.

The next nap is tricky, because by 10:30, we would already have completed rentals and hit the slopes with all our gear. Fortunately the timing worked out exactly; the gondola ride up to the top of the mountain is 17 minutes long, which served admirably for my noon block nap. I'm surprised at how quickly I can fall asleep in ski boots in midair.

I took it easy this time; though flying down the slopes at breakneck speeds is great fun, actually breaking my neck is not. I didn't want to get hit by a wave of tiredness on the mountain and have to fight it coming down. Instead of taking blues and blacks as I would normally have done, I taught two of my friends how to ski, and we stuck to greens and blues. (That was an adventure in itself. One of them took 2/3 of a slope on his belly.)

The 2:30 nap happened in the ski lodge, since it was around lunchtime anyhow. I can fall asleep in noisy crowded rooms on hard tables in minutes! Then again, I can also fall asleep standing up on the subway, so it is perhaps not such an accomplishment.

Day 11 to be continued...

Short term memory tests (Day 13)
Numbers: 12.13
Letters: 15
Words: 29

It doesn't seem as though the two day hiatus has had any real effect on my scores. The letters one is surprisingly high, but that doesn't seem terribly significant.

Day 10.1

Before I forget, I must warn you that there will be no internet access in the ski cabin, ergo, I won't be posting for the weekend. Just so you know I haven't died or anything. I'll "blog" into a text file, and back-date them when I get back to the dorm.

It seems that I have a part of one block a day where I turn into this lethargic zombie-creature. Today it was the middle of the morning block. A lot of times, it's the end of the dawn block or the beginning of the morning block. Is this just my body bucking the last vestiges of its practically non-existent circadian rhythm, I wonder?

I had a semi-lucid dream this time! Of course, I've learned to be suspicious of any dream that involves flying. It's strange -- I'm willing to accept most dream-logic when dreaming, but flying has been a recurring dream, so much so that I can almost subconsciously recognize it as a dream. It involves sort of swimming through the air (though nothing quite as vigorous as, say, a freestyle stroke). I dreamt that a friend of mine from home lived in a creepy, dinghy apartment building, the top floor of which was a museum. She happened to be the curator, by the sole coincidence of living on the correct floor. The elevator was one of those hand-crank types with a folding grille, and I recall bobbing up and down therein, while it was stuck. I had to catch my flight across the country -- I was going back to college, it seems -- and having tea one last time before I went. I discovered I lost my passport somewhere along the way (possibly while flying up an escalator). I managed to sort of tell my dream-self where in the suitcase I usually keep it in real life, but when we looked, it wasn't there. I remember flying through a series of tunnels and bridges to get back to the museum-house to look for said document, and ending up in the roof garden, where I observed two of my friends in a heated dispute over a parking ticket. I never did find out what happened to my passport, though I believe the official explanation at the airport was that one of the museum artifacts ate it.

Day 10

The dawn block has been quite interesting (if frustrating) thus far. I got into a debate with a drunk person. Never a good idea, especially, methinks, when you're a debater like me. I tend to take it a bit more seriously than is warranted, even when it's not a formal debate. I really should have learned not to by now, especially considering that this isn't the first time I've had drunken (on his part) debates with this particular person. He too easily gets under my skin; lack of logical coherency will do that.

It actually began as a question of the effects of alcoholic intoxication versus sleep deprivation, which I feel somewhat justifies my blogging about it (also, it might provide some entertainment). See, he argued that my current level of sleep deprivation impaired my mental faculties to the degree that alcohol would. I disagreed, of course, and volunteered to take a (surprise!) short term memory test with him, and he assented.
I brought him to the same website I've been using throughout the experiment (I happened to click on the letters one.). I thought thusly: I did not want to comb Google looking for a reliable one when I already had a perfectly good one. He, upon seeing the page, rather reasonably asked if it wouldn't be unfair, because I had taken it before. So far so good. I assured him that it was randomized, that I had taken the same test for over a week with no appreciable increase in score. He begins the test. I immediately regret not logging out; he was going to tank my score for today! He made his first mistake at six! Having been victim to many careless errors myself, I allow him two more mistakes (He bottoms out at ten letters with a score of 7.25). Then, things get hairy.
"It's not a fair test," he says. "You probably just have a better memory than me."
Umm... (First sign that this will not end well.) My rebuttal shapes up thusly: a) It's a completely objective test; it's as fair as it gets. If I did in fact have an inherently better memory, it is no reflection on the quality of the test itself.
b) You agreed to a memory test in the first place. To renege upon the agreement with "but you're better than me" is unfair and distasteful. If you're afraid of losing, don't play.
He says, "I didn't know it was testing English letters! You're probably just better at English letters! That's why you picked it!"
My rebuttal: a) You have the nerve to question my honor (perhaps a little less eloquently, but I got the point across). Dear readers, if you know anything about me, know that there is little I value more than my honor. Given that my fuse seems to be a bit shorter with sleep deprivation, I think it was a good thing he was drunk when he said it; I don't generally make drunk people answer for their words, especially considering their severe disadvantage. But I digress. Just know that I wasn't beginning this debate in the best frame of mind; I don't take kindly to this sort of challenge.
b) Questions of honor aside, if you thought I would take unfair advantage, you need not have agreed to the test in the first place.
c) Would you prefer a test of Arabic numerals?
He says, "I didn't know it was going to be letters! And you're probably better at those too!"
Rebuttal: a) It's a flipping memory test -- what the hell did you think it would involve, if not letters or numbers?
b) If you think that my memory is superior in the majority of testable areas, then why did you agree in the first place? Recall that the specific purpose of this exercise was to test sleep deprivation versus inebriation -- this comes with the tacit assumption that our memories are somewhat comparable in a sober, rested state.
He says, "Well, what about shapes or something? How was I supposed to know that you would pick English letters [implication: when you're better at those]? You never asked me! What if I picked Gujarati [his ethnic background]?"
Rebuttal: a) Shapes would be valid; unfortunately, this website does not offer the option. (I have my reservations about testing "shapes" at a college level of mathematical skill, but that is a different kettle of fish, which I did not bring up.)
b) (This one is so obvious, I can picture you rolling your eyes.) If you had chosen Gujarati, that would have been entirely unfair, seeing as I don't speak the language. That is not an analogous situation, because we both speak English.
c) I never asked you what type of memory test you prefer, but I have the decency (perhaps unlike yourself) to select one in a field with which I assume we're both familiar.
Things rapidly spiral down the drain. He smugly latches onto the word "assume" as if it were the Achilles' heel of my case. "Oh, you assume," he says patronizingly, leaning in. Keep in mind that he is two feet away from me, breath reeking of alcohol -- I am not inclined to be charitable.
"Yes. It is a valid assumption that we both speak English, considering the language in which we are debating." Annoyed with his (drunkard's) tactics, I add, "Raising your voice and talking over me do not help your case." I really should just learn to walk away from this sort of thing. Several minutes later, speaking in a stage whisper, he accuses me of being loud. I kid you not.
Now, the debate goes on for a while, and it doesn't get any better. He raises the amusingly irrelevant example of "What if you picked Chinese?" (I wouldn't.) He said, less irrelevantly, that if two people have inherently unequal memories, then the comparison no longer works. (True, but you seemed to think the comparison was fine until you saw your results.) He seems to think that repetition will make his comparison of Gujarati to English somehow more valid, and argues that my talking in a normal tone of voice while he whispers clearly indicates that I am deranged. He accuses me of cheating because I'm looking at the screen while he takes the test (as if I would let a drunk person use my computer unsupervised). Finally, thank goodness, my roommate has the good sense to declare that she needs her sleep, and he leaves.

I suppose the (only) good thing to come out of this is that it kept me awake and alert the entire block.

Short term memory tests
Numbers: 12
Letters: 11.04 (skewed results; just think about how long it took me to get it up from 7.25!)
Words: 28

Day 9.1

At the risk of this turning into an dream diary (though I maintain that the quality of the dreams is somehow relevant), I had a dream involving a frozen swimming pool and acrylic paint. There was apparently an auction being held in a toolshed in the wilderness, and the two most eye-catching items involved were large canvasses done in acrylic. (They also happened to be the work of a college friend of mine, who, as far as I know, does not paint in real life.) Now, this little whitewashed shed doubled as a locker room for people who used the swimming hole not far away. I'm not sure what happened, but at some point, there were Asian ladies in bright floral print swimsuits climbing up the shelves of the toolshed, and the paintings were thrown into the water, which then promptly froze over, to prevent us from retrieving them. And then it rained packing peanuts. Indoors.

I woke from this dream rather groggy, and understandably a tad disoriented. (Wait... where'd the styrofoam bits go?) I was at about 75% for ten minutes or so, but now am at 90-95%. It appears that it takes ten to fifteen minutes for me to "recover" from a nap (that is, to get myself up and running at my maximum capacity for that block). If I don't recover by the twenty minute mark, then I spend that block running half-empty, or worse.

We depart for ski trip tomorrow afternoon. Here's to hoping it doesn't destroy my schedule!

Day 9

Today, I zombified out during the dawn block, rather than the morning block. Hence the lack of post/test results; that's when I usually take the tests, if you hadn't noticed. Here they are, much delayed.

Short term memory test
Numbers: 12
Letters: 12.5
Words: 28

These things are quite time-consuming. Not whinging or anything, of course.

Day 8.1

I was an absolute zombie this morning. You may think you know what being zombified feels like after an all-nighter or two -- you have no idea. I've been there, and this was twice as bad. If the aftermath of two consecutive all-nighters is 10% functionality, I was at maybe 2%, where 0% would be brain-dead. It took an astonishing amount of willpower not to crawl into bed and hibernate. I probably spent three hours just staring at the wall before my 10:30 nap. I had my laptop open and everything -- I just could not focus on it for any length of time. I had actually meant to post the very strange dream I had, but again, just was not physically capable of typing it out. That post read, "I had the weirdest dream jus t now. It wassssn;r luciid pwewsonne i and folledo'nt finmmmmm" at which point I clearly gave up. I'm not sure what the second sentence is supposed to mean...

I can still remember parts of the dream, though not as clearly as at eight in the morning, if I was at all capable of remembering anything then. Interestingly, it wasn't a completely lucid dream, but one wherein I had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn't real, but I was too caught up in the situation to really do anything about it. I was being chased through an abandoned warehouse, and some homeless guy pops out of a filing cabinet. He was terrifying; he had a massive, dirty grey beard, crooked teeth, and these absolutely feverish, murky yellow eyes in an otherwise expressionless face. I jumped out of a window.
Fortunately, it was snowing outside, and I landed in a snowdrift. It was getting dark out, and the only real light came from the orangy-yellow streetlamps. For some reason, I decide that instead of running away, it would be a better idea to try and hide in a pile of snow that was all of two feet tall. The people who were chasing me come into view; one of them is this pale, dark-haired lady in a black fur coat, carrying a walking-stick sort of like Lucius Malfoy's in the films. I seem to find that stick more frightening than the knives and pistols everyone else was carrying; she poked it into the snowdrift and I burst out of the other side, flat-out sprinting. She cries "After her!" and "Off with her head!" in a distinctly Queen of Hearts way.
I end up in the middle of a highway; I leap onto a passing taxi and somehow fall through its (open?) moonroof. All the cars start bottlenecking, and I know I'm being chased, so I yell, "Hurry up! Don't stop!" or something along those lines at the driver. He turns around -- and it's the homeless guy!
And that's all I remember. Wow, my subconscious is one messed up place.

Day 8

I'm finally starting to get tired at the right times -- a little before when I'm due for a nap -- which is a very good sign. That's me telling myself I should probably catch some shut-eye soon. Doesn't stop me from getting tired at the wrong times, but I expect (hope!) that will change as I adapt further.

Short term memory test
Numbers: 11.5
Letters: 12.33
Words: 30

Day 7.2

This nap was rather easy to wake up from; it feels like I've slept an hour, rather than only 20 minutes. And I had a dream! There were these mice (like the ones from Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH) living in a little underground town, and they ate cockroaches. They packaged live cockroaches in white cardboard tubes, and one would make a meal. I got to watch them being packaged in this lavender colored room; the machine looked like those baggage scans at the airport. At some point, the mice turned into people, except they looked like animated, cartoonish, mouse-sized people rather than real live people. One of them popped the lid to her tube of lunch, and the roach poked her in the eye! And then her friends lamented the fact that she could no longer go to the ball, since she needed eye surgery. Odd.

Speaking of lunch, it just occurred to me that I forgot to eat breakfast and lunch today. I think what happened was: I was thrown off by the extra sleep I got this morning, and forgot to eat breakfast. I then told myself that I would make up for it by eating lunch instead. Then lunchtime came and went, and I'd completely forgotten that I had vowed thusly, and assumed that I should skip lunch, as usual. Hmm... I'm not hungry, either. I'll remember to eat dinner though; I usually eat dinner.

Day 7.1

I definitely lost half an hour this morning. After my morning block nap, I did a bit of stretching and computering, and then settled down on the couch to do some reading. Next thing I know, I'm sort of curled up sideways against the armrest, I can't breathe, and it's 8:00 am. I gasp (surprise? lack of air?) and leap off the couch and finish my reading sitting on a table.

I don't even think I woke up particularly tired from that nap. I suspect it's the cold; my immune system's probably complaining and/or conspiring to throw me off this schedule. It's not my fault the bug's coming around before I've adjusted, sheesh. Although, in some weirdly ironic way, I likely only woke up after half an hour (as opposed to sleeping through classes) because of that cold wreaking havoc on my sinuses.

I wonder how far this will set me back?

Day 7

Feeling icky and a bit groggy after that last nap, but I'm not sure whether it's the sleep deprivation or the cold. I've moved past the sneezing phase into the itchy throat and sinus drainage problems phase. It's a major nuisance when napping; it takes longer to fall asleep, and I'm waking up to a very dry mouth. Running 75% full, or something thereabouts.

Short term memory tests
Numbers: 13
Letters: 12.75
Words: 25

I definitely had some trouble focusing during the words test, considering it's 90 seconds long (the others run multiple 10 second intervals). Sleep deprivation, anyone?

Day 6.3

Dashing this off quickly before I go to class:

That was the fastest I've ever fallen asleep. I literally pulled the blanket up to my chin, put a t-shirt over my face, and conked out. I was super tired going in, kind of average waking up (didn't want to), now running on 80-85%. The previous nap was similar, but less extreme. I think the sleep deprivation is starting to catch up with me. This is when the willpower needs to engage...

Day 6.2

Not about polyphasic sleep, per se, but... Wow, I had forgotten how wonderful it is to be outside early in the morning. I don't mean just awake, I mean out of doors. It's sunny today, blue skies, not-too-cold weather (that's somewhere between lukewarm and sockless-ankles-are-freezing), and campus is just beautiful before rush hour. Having lived in a big city all my life, I can certainly appreciate large swathes of green grass, fountains, and low buildings with wide-open skies in between.

It's not that I've never been outside early in the morning before; I was out the door at 7:00 am every morning in high school. It's not even that my cold seems to be going away (orange juice + green tea + cough drops). It's just that I've never really been this awake at eight in the morning, on the other side of the day. Usually, if I'm awake enough to appreciate the squirrels at this hour, it's because I haven't gone to bed yet. It's somehow different, having just woken up. I'm really getting to like this being-up-in-the-morning business, not just for the extra time in my day, but also for its own sake. I think I'll make this my running-errands-on-bike time, because a beautiful morning, however awe-inspiring, isn't quite enough to replace efficiency.

Day 6.1

I have discovered a remarkable, remarkably simple new concept -- the mini-snooze!

Now, the iPhone has its snooze function preset at nine minutes. Obviously, a nine-minute snooze would be devastating for an Uberman sleeper. But the effective time for these "20 minute" naps is actually somewhere between 18 and 23 minutes, depending on the person, the time of day, and a whole host of other factors -- so it's not completely inflexible, either. Enter the one-minute snooze.

Remember how I've set two alarms, spaced a minute apart, for each nap? Rather than waking up at the first one and turning both of them off as usual, this time, I switched each of them off as they sounded. I had another minute of horizontal time, during which I was awake (fiddling with a touch screen slider will do that) but not quite out of bed. The gradual wake-up (as gradual as a minute can get) is wonderful, the 100% full brand of wonderful; so much better than forcing myself upright as soon as the first alarm goes off, for fear of the comfy bed/couch/sleeping surface luring me back into the snares of sleep.

Oh, and I had a dream! Not only was it a dream, it was a semi-lucid dream! I've always wanted to have more lucid dreams. (I've only ever had a few.) I recall thinking, quite distinctly, I would be so amused by this, were I awake. I should try to remember it, so I can have a good laugh later! Unfortunately, I seem to be having some difficulty remembering what exactly it was that I found so funny in my dreamscape. There was a lot of dark green, and at least one other person, but that's as far as it goes. O, ye gods of irony, pick on someone your own size for once!

EDIT: Mini-snooze = wonderful; both feet falling asleep, not so wonderful. I managed to get off the couch (yes, half an hour later; the laptop is a foot away) and fall like a sack of potatoes onto the floor. Probably a better wake-up call than any number of alarms.

Day 6

This nap (dawn block) was somewhat easier to get up from. Actually, I thought I was running at >90% when I first woke up, but after a few minutes, it feels more like 80-85%. I was quite tired going in, and really looking forward to that nap! I think the sleep deprivation is starting to noticeably build up, though that should have happened a few days ago, methinks. Hmm... we'll see how it looks after the next nap.

Short term memory tests
Numbers: 11
Letters: 12.5
Words: 29

Day 5.2

This nap (night block) should not have been nearly so difficult to wake up from. The alarm did wake me up, but the physical act of getting out of bed was practically impossible. Would that be a result of today's crazy messed-up nap times, I wonder? I'm kind of scared that I reset my body clock today, in some odd way, so I would need to start over (as in, tomorrow would be day 1 again). That would be awful; I would be losing five days of adaptation! I need those five days! I'm going on a ski trip with my dorm this coming weekend, and microsleeping while hurtling down a mountain is just a fundamentally bad idea.

Day 5.1

I'm back in my room now, and feeling rather disoriented. Clearly have learned a lesson about intensive messing-about-with my sleep schedule, at least during adaptation phase. My naptimes thus far today looked something like this:

normal until parents came to get me at 10:15 am
10:20 - 11:00 am in the car (I was anticipating not sleeping during the day.)
4:10 - 4:20 pm, also in the car
6:15 - 6:40 pm, on the way back to school

I'm not sure what sort of an effect this will have. It might have thrown me off completely. Ah well, tomorrow will still be day 6 of the experiment. Almost a week.

Day 5

I think I'm coming down with some sort of cold. It's rather sudden; I didn't even feel sick yesterday. I don't think the polyphasic sleep schedule had much to do with it, aside from perhaps the sleep deprivation chipping away a bit at my immune system. Let's see how quickly I can recover from this on a polyphasic schedule; monophasically, it never takes more than a week.

Today is the day of the funeral (my grandmother's, if you were curious). Any emotional imbalance aside, it should wreak havoc on my sleep schedule. Naps will have to shift to "whenever convenient" (i.e. whenever we're in a car), and one or two might not even happen. We'll see how it goes.

Short term memory tests
Numbers: 11.38
Letters: 12.3
Words: 32

Day 4.2

I definitely had a dream this time. (Huzzah for REM sleep!) I'd suspected I've been having sort of mini-dreams these few days, but this time, I actually sort of remember parts of it. I was in the cafeteria of my high school (which was a very bright white before it was renovated) where one of my former art teachers was having class. We were making these grey styrofoam things with wires sticking out of them (explosives?). I was working across from a blond boy I didn't recognize, who had a sprained wrist in one of those black padded velcro gloves, and was having some difficulties with a giant pair of scissors; he was holding them at a very awkward angle, and he looked liable to stab someone with them. There were also all these broken raw eggs. I'm not sure where they came from or how they related to anything. Maybe he stabbed them?

I woke up at 6:40 feeling like I'd just slept for an hour, and I thought I'd overslept before I looked at the clock. I went back to sleep when I realized I had ten minutes to go, and now I'm a bit groggy. Running at about 90%, I'd say.

Day 4.1

Overslept (by about half an hour) on the 10:30 am nap. I never sleep through alarms -- and I mean never. What I do sometimes is, I take a peek at the time, and make the conscious (often very bad) decision to snooze/turn off the alarm. So I was terrified when I found that it was 11:30, and I didn't remember ever hearing the alarm go off. But then I checked my phone, and the alarm wasn't there. As in, I probably accidentally deleted it! And threw myself off again! WHY???

I set an extra alarm for each nap, a minute off, so I don't do that again. My primary alarm sounds like, as a friend put it, a nuclear bomb alert, and my secondary is my father's very obnoxious ringtone, both of which should be able to wake me up, even when I'm absolutely miserably sleep deprived. Which I'm not, probably because of that half hour. I'd say I'm running 95% full right now, and that's sitting in front of a chemistry textbook.

Day 4

I did end up getting some food in me after all; I went some of my dormmates off campus to In-n-Out. Not the healthiest stuff, but at 11:00 pm, you take what you can get, especially when someone is offering to drive. It was actually kind of strange; I was in the middle of my 10:30 nap when my roommate comes in to grab her wallet or something. I hear her key turning in the lock, and immediately wake up. She says, "We're going to get food, now. You still haven't eaten, have you. You should come with." I glance at the clock, which now reads 10:46. I say, "Sure, could you get them to wait five minutes?" I promptly fall back asleep, wake up a few seconds before the alarm goes off, change clothes in the remaining minute, and meet them in the hallway. All that happened in five minutes. I'm more than a little surprised that I managed to fall asleep and wake up in the space of four minutes.

Short term memory test
Numbers: 13
Letters: 12
Words: 26

I really think I'm just starting to learn the test at this point, even though the content is randomly generated. I'm only running 70% full right now.

Day 3.3

I survived Wushu (武术, Chinese martial arts) practice during evening block. Actually, I didn't observe any great difference in functional capacity -- granted, I'm a little more sore than I usually am after Wushu, but that's probably more to do with my lack of practice over break than the sleep schedule, methinks. But then again, I'm not very good at Wushu, so it's really more that my ineptitude has not increased, rather than that any (nonexistent) ability remaining intact.

I left practice about 15 minutes early to ensure that I got back to my room in time for my night block nap, and gave myself 30 minutes instead of 20, because the floor, despite the rug I bought, isn't very comfortable to sleep on. (I hadn't had time to shower, so there was no way I was going to sleep in my bed!) Unfortunately, because that nap ended at 7:00, I missed dinner. Talk about remembering to eat, eh? I'd forgotten all about dinner when I was setting that alarm!

Day 3.2

I've been thinking about the slip-up this morning, and I can venture a guess as to why that happened. It's because of Late Night, or rather, the lack thereof.

I'd said that I'd be having three meals a day, one of them during the night block, remember? Well, I haven't really been going to Late Night. A confluence of factors, namely dormmates not going, and my forgetting. This is fine under a monophasic schedule, but under this one, I think I do really need those three evenly-spaced meals. Without Late Night (even though I do have apples and things in my room), my metabolism probably slows down right around 4:00-8:00, which is directly before my getting breakfast. Hence the tiredness and sleepiness occurring around then. This basically boils down to: I need to remember to eat at night. Hmm...

I definitely zonked out a bit in math today. It was some dreadfully tedious stuff (half the class was spent reviewing material from the previous lecture), so I'm not terribly surprised. It's just... one would think that the extra hour I'd gotten would have helped.

Day 3.1

Fail! I came back from my morning nap all groggy and decided to do some stretching to wake me up. Next thing I know, I'm flat on the floor (very awkwardly, mind) and it's 8:12 am. I've just lost an hour of my life, and that's a setback of half a day or so. How frustrating!

I suppose it's good that I didn't spontaneously fall asleep for four hours or more. I can take all my subsequent naps on schedule and basically pretend that this never happened. I've lost a significant amount of that sleep debt I'd accumulated, but oh well. Let's see the sort of havoc this plays with my internal clock.

Day 3

And now begins the descent into hell (on earth). According to Aethelwine, whose experiment lasted for about 20 days, days 3 through 10 are absolutely miserable. That's about a week when I'm expected to be basically a zombie. Oddly enough, I feel incredibly awake right now. I can sit on the bed without any temptation to fall asleep. Definitely 10/10.

Regarding the out-of-ten system I've been using... I don't like it very much. Firstly, it's easy to forget whether I'm measuring alertness or tiredness (i.e. mixing up the two ends of the scale). Secondly, it's not very precise. (I know, measuring tiredness isn't very precise to begin with, but I like as much precision as I can get.) Halves would be annoying, but acceptable; any more decimals would be pushing it. Therefore, I think I'll switch to (whole number) percentages. Not only would it be out of 100, but when I comment that I'm running on, say, 85% full, it's self-evident that I mean 85% of maximum capacity.

Short term memory tests
Numbers: 10.85
Letters: 13
Words: 32

This is really strange. My "numbers" result for today has gone back done to approximately my day 1 number (though it's still a smidgen bigger), but my "letters" result is definitely greater, and my "words" result is a whole five words more! It shouldn't be happening like this; it's day 3! I'm supposed to be a great deal more sleep deprived now than I was two days ago. I'm less tired than I was at this time yesterday, to be sure, but day 1? Perhaps I am learning the test, so to speak. Even though the content is mostly randomized and changes each time, the format remains the same. Hypothesis subject to change, mind. We shall wait and see.

Day 2.2

I just took my evening block nap. The afternoon block went quite smoothly; I had three back to back classes, and was running mostly full in all of them. I zoned out for a few minutes in one of them, a lecture class, probably with a smattering of very short microsleeps (not more than 15 seconds each, I'd say), but I caught that pretty early. Besides, the lecture was quite good, so it wasn't hard to make myself focus on the professor. The rest of the time was definitely 10/10.

Day 2.1

It just got quite a bit more difficult. Towards the end of the dawn block, I was hit with this massive wave of sleepiness. I sort of had my eyes half-open, and was walking in circles in the small space that is my dorm room, because I knew if I sat down, I'd fall asleep. (3 out of 10 for the drowsy wave. It would be even lower, if I had not started walking.) There were definitely moments when I sat at my desk, doing absolutely nothing because I was completely drained of motivation, zoning out and staring at the wall, and then microsleeping a few times (I'd guess no more than 30 seconds each), and realizing I need to stay awake, and the knitting dangling from my fingertips just isn't doing it, leading to my getting up and pacing up and down the room. (Whew, run-on sentences!) But then I took my 6:30 am nap, and things got better.

The morning block nap was a bit of an adventure. I went out to the lounge, where someone had switched off all the lights (the lights are often on at night). I thought perhaps it was to conserve energy, and thought nothing of it. I went to the couch I took last night, and found that it, and a number of other couches, all had sheets and piles of blankets on them. My first thought (remember, I was tired) was Oh, how nice! Let me find the biggest, softest pile! And I almost sat on the poor guy before I realized that they were actually a bunch of drunk people who couldn't make their way back to their own dorms last night/this morning, and so had to stay over. The dorm had a party on a Wednesday night; can you believe it?

Anyhow, so I napped on a couch in the foyer instead. It was probably the shortest it has ever taken me to fall asleep. And I had a dream! I don't remember it very well, but I know my mother was in it, and something happened in the dream that caused me to wake up a few minutes before I was supposed to. I went back to sleep, and let the alarms wake me up.

Morning block has been fine. A little grogginess at the beginning, but that's mostly from waking up. After the shower (no mishaps this time!) I was really very awake (I'd venture a 10 out of 10). Showers are wonderful for waking me up. I might end up showering twice a day, when I get tired enough to need constant waking up.

Day 2

I'm starting to feel the drowsiness. I woke up from my 2:30am nap rather groggy, and this time, it didn't go away nicely like it did last time. I'm not having too much trouble staying awake; as long as I don't lie down, I should be fine. I can sit in a chair in front of the computer without too much difficulty; I don't need to resort to jumping jacks out in the cold or anything. Occasionally getting up and pacing around the room seems to mitigate most of the sleepiness. I'd call it a 6 out of 10, on the same scale as yesterday.

Short term memory tests
Numbers: 12
Letters: 11.57
Words: 25

Those results don't differ significantly from yesterday's. Actually, the "numbers" score even went up, which is odd, considering I'm definitely more tired now.