Day 14 - Post Core

Alarm: 12:00am

Geez, what a bumpy night. At least I don't feel completely horrible; just a little dizziness and eye pressure. I hope that I don't develop further sleep dep. symptoms through out today because of this interrupted core.

For the last week or so, laying down for sleep has meant slipping almost immediately into a dream with some degree of lucidity. Lucid dreams aren't by themselves unusual for me, however when I was a mono-phasic sleeper, they usually occurred in (or I only remembered) the last dream cycle.

I think that it is likely that I am so quick to wake up after early REM cycles during core sleep because, while I'm used to lucid dreams only being in the last REM cycles, I'm now experiencing them in the first REM cycles, therefore subconsciously I think that I must be close to missing my alarm and thus wake up once I drop back up to light sleep.

This effect, I imagine, is probably intensified by my recent adaption to nap sleeping; as I am waking after falling up into light sleep after but a single REM cycle characterized by a lucid dream experience. But why I am actually turning off the SleepBot when I do wake up early? I think that is because my phone's clock is set to 24hr display and in that foggy state, I'm not being quick enough to realize that 2200 isn't 2400.

8:30pm - 9:57pm

9:57pm - 10:06pm

10:06pm - 12:00am

Day 13 - Post Core

Alarm: 12:30am

As mention in Day 12 - Pre Core, we set our alarms forward by 30 minutes. Judging by the SleepBot, it would appear that finishing SWS, I began moving around in my sleep roughly every 20 minutes... does that mean that I got 4-5 REM cycles in?

When I woke up, I could remember more than one dream (one in which I decided was not very entertaining and consciously stopped it and restarted a new one), saw that I was 30 minutes past regular wake time, and was anxious that I had over slept until I remembered the temporary schedule change.

I also felt "thick-headed" for lack of a better work. For the next 20 minutes, I paced around the house switching on and off light switched in different rooms because I couldn't remember what I was doing, or going to do, or should be doing instead.

After that extended spin-up period, I felt great! and indeed was extra productive all the way up to Nap 1, which I was reluctant to stop for, but knowing that I would only be down for 20 minutes and what the repercussions for delaying a nap can by, deciding that I should go nap was not too difficult of a decision.

Day 11 - Post Nap 1

Alarm: 3:55am

My wife got in bed late, so I pushed the alarm back 10 minutes to ensure that we still got 20 minutes of sleep in, however, she tells me that she didn't fall asleep at all, but myself, I still slipped right down into a lucid dream where we were swimming in the ocean so I convinced everyone to lose their clothes because skinny-dipping is more fun.

It was difficult to get out of bed (and not just because of the good dream), the headache is still here and obvious, my eyes feel tight, and I'm not in the best mood (neither is my wife!). 

My concentration is still faring pretty well though, surprisingly; and in fact, I installed CGMiner on our two Linux _ nVidia machines, our Windows 7 + nVidia machine, and am now working on adapting it to our Windows 7 + AMD machine. If you're wondering, the problem is because CGMiner utilizes the CUDA cores which aren't typically accessible; nVidia makes them available by default but you need to install AMD's APP SDK to get access to theirs.

I checked out http://www.polyphasicsociety.com/polyphasic-sleep/overviews/everyman/ to discover a good schedule to recover from that horrible Core sleep this morning. I'm going to try out what they suggest, which is:

Which equates to this on our schedule:

Start	Stop	Duration
20:30:00	0:00:00	3:30:00
0:00:00	3:10:00	3:10:00
3:10:00	3:30:00	0:20:00
3:30:00	6:40:00	3:10:00
6:40:00	7:00:00	0:20:00
7:00:00	10:10:00	3:10:00
10:10:00	10:30:00	0:20:00
10:30:00	13:30:00	3:00:00
13:30:00	14:30:00	1:00:00
14:30:00	20:30:00	6:00:00

*I'm pretty sure that the site was intending those .3s to mean 20 (not 18) minutes, which makes those .2s more like 10 minutes to balance out the rounding error.

Day 8 - Post Nap 2

Alarm: 7:00 am

Perfect nap: was in bed on time to relax, slipped into a lucid dream within seconds, solved a programming problem while under, was not interrupted, and woke up seconds before my alarm sounded; now if only I could repeat this performance every nap!

My survey entry was failing to save to the spreadsheet, so I capitalized on that opportunity to redesign the form a little bit. I added section headers and a symptoms checkbox question, then reconnected it to the spreadsheet on a different sheet.

Even with the perfect nap though, that headache that began with pushing my core sleep so far back is still slightly noticeable, but it is not strong enough to warrant any kind of worry or medication.