Polyphasic sleep plans

In about a week, I'll be starting my polyphasic sleep again. This will be my second attempt at it and hopefully I won't oversleep this time.

Monophasic sleep - 1 block of sleep
Biphasic sleep - 2 blocks of sleep
Polyphasic sleep - generally more than 2 blocks of sleep per day, though 3 can be referred to as triphasic sleep.

Description of Polyphasic Sleep
Polyphasic sleep generally refers to scheduled napping to achieve more wake time. This means to replace some or all of your normal sleep time with naps, 20-30 minutes long(about 25 is best). After a few days, you start to become tired which means you want to sleep. Unfortunately at this point we start to enjoy sleeping, same as how if we suffer mild sleep deprivation over a period of time we start to enjoy sleeping, because we feel the need for it. Days later, the sleep deprived feelings start to wear off. Schedules with a core sleep as well as naps take longer to adapt to, often even a month to become fully adapted.

Sleeping polyphasically causes your naps to contain the full sleep cycle, not just the first 20-30 minutes. At first you will only get the light phases of sleep, but as the conversion to polyphasic goes on, you will start getting deeper naps, into REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. Commonly it is thought that the naps contain only REM sleep. This isn't true, but they probably contain a significant portion of it relative to a normal sleep cycle. The naps are actually just condensed sleep cycles, from 90 minutes in to one short nap.

For example, if you sleep for 3 hours at night, say from midnight to 3am, then had 3 naps each equal to 20 minutes spaced out in the remaining 21 hours, you would still get 5 sleep cycles. A human adult monophasically is required to sleep 7 and a half hours in one single block. 5 lots of 90 minutes, which is how long each sleep cycle takes. It can be quite difficult for the body to adapt to having short sleep cycles, especially if mixed in with longer ones. But, with a bit of hope and strong mental power, overcoming the temporary physical weakness is merely a hard task to accomplish.


Now I've decided on a few things.

1) I have to sleep long enough that my parents won't worry about me and should at least let me try it for a while (at which point I can convince them to let me continue, if I succeed).

2) I don't want to sleep during school.
People often won't respect each other at high school. If people caught me napping, which is definite, they'll come and abuse me while I'm sleeping. Also, if it is a rainy day I cannot sleep in many places, only those which have people swarming around.

3) I am not going to let my parents stop me. Last time I tried, my parents stopped me because they were concerned about it. They obviously don't think a bunch of naps can replace normal sleep.

This time, I must try a different sleep pattern. Last time I was stuck between 5 naps of 24 minutes, or 3 hours and 3 lots of 20 minute naps (everyman). I'll not choose either of those, but instead I'll choose a variant of everyman sleep. 4 and a half hour core, plus 2 naps of 25 minutes. I can nap before school, after school, and sleep somewhere in between.

Perhaps it won't grant all the benefits uberman or full everyman would, but it is certainly better than monophasic or biphasic.


I deleted my past blogs about polyphasic sleep. They were repeated "I overslept a bit this morning, slept less than I would on monophasic still, and I'm okay". I'd say at the most I got to about 25% adapted. I think my greatest time successfully on the sleep schedule must have been about 3 consecutive days, then comes the hard bit. Which undoubtedly leads to failure (except this time).

I also tried biphasic sleep. It didn't work because I had not enough time in between the main sleep and the shorter sleep. That was a miserable blog, biphasic isn't majorly impressive.