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.