Polyphasic Day 5

Nap 37: 3:00am

Again, took some time to fall asleep. Awakening was among the hardest I've had to deal with thus far. Now that I'm awake, it's not especially tough, but somehow I just really didn't want to get up.

Nap 38: 4:30am

I added in the extra nap again just because of how generally poor I'm feeling. I wonder how much of that is due to just making the polyphasic adjustments and how much to the 2 hour block I had earlier. Again, it took a while to fall asleep. That doesn't make any sense to me.

Nap 39: 6:00am

Slept a little quicker and a little better. Starting to feel better already and it's not even 9, yet. It's possible I'm starting to move toward the upswing.

 Day 5: 2013/8/19

 Rather than bore you with the fiddly details that are mostly the same over and over, I've decided to move to a daily report. This way, too, I can hopefully talk more about the overall experience rather than getting caught up in the small stuff.

Today was feeling a little better overall. I've got high hopes that my body is getting used to the situation and it's all downhill from here. I did have a problem toward the middle of the day when I forgot to actually turn on the alarm before sleeping. I slept for an hour then woke up.

I find that -- special circumstances aside -- I'm actually waking up before my alarm a small majority of the time. I'm partly excited by this, but also partly worried -- I tend to wake myself up after only 10 minutes of sleep, and I'm just not sure that's enough -- I can't have gone through a whole cycle can I? I'm not sure what to do about this fact, yet. Should I get up when I wake up regardless of how long it's been? Should I stay in bed and attempt to finish a normal cycle (until the alarm)? For right now, I'm playing by ear: I see how I feel when I wake up. Mostly I feel like getting up.

As I write this, it's technically the 20th, in the dark hours of the morning, and this is by far the easiest night I've had yet, including the very first before the first polyphasic nap. That fills me with a sense of seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, and I'm hoping it continues to improve. As yet, I don't have any of the feelings of euphoria or enlightenment that some have mentioned that poly-sleep gives them, but I may just not be in tune to those kinds of feelings, I suppose.

As far as the sleep itself, I'm also a little concerned (confused?). I feel like I'm getting truly awful sleep -- tossing & turning, feeling half-awake the whole time, having trouble getting to sleep, etc -- and yet I wake up feeling pretty good all things considered, and I'm clearly not having the issues that no sleep at all would be giving me. I find that I often start dreaming almost immediately, even before I'm fully asleep. Maybe all of this is a result of drastically different sleep requirements and is the new "normal". Or maybe it's a sign that I'm not sleeping as well as I think I am.

Ah, well. Time for my last nap before waking up the kids for their first day of school.