End of 2 weeks: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I'm posting this a week in arrears, and have given things a lot of thought in the intervening time. So I'm going to post what I've seen as the pros and cons, plus the stuff that fits in neither category, and try to make some  decisions going forward from there. Before I do that, though, I thought I'd summarize my week.

On that last day of the 2 week period, I was sick. A cold had been going through the family, and when sleep deprived your immune system is weakened, so I'm not surprised that I got it. Still, I wasn't the only one, and I didn't get it faster or keep it longer than anyone else, so the immune system dysfunction must not be >too< bad. Either way, at 3 that morning, sick, a pounding headache, tired, and tired of being tired as I had been for the whole previous week, I decided to call it quits. I had reached my 2 weeks, and was in enough of a pickle that I thought I needed to at least recover before going further.

So I slept. It ended up being kind of a normal night, just as if I had been sleeping normally all along. In other words, the polyphasic tests didn't appear to harm my ability to sleep monophasically. But when I did wake up, I was still tired. Oh, well, I thought, I was sick, had been deprived, and so on, it makes sense that I'd still be tired. But the same was true the next day. And the next. In fact, I didn't feel any better (or worse) than I had during the polyphasic tests. My only conclusions are that either A) I've broken something more than I thought, or B) my perceptions are out of whack. Given that I've felt just as tired for strings of days many times before, I'm inclined to believe B, but I'm not ruling out A.

Now that it's been a week, and I'm still feeling just as poorly (though less sick), I'm figuring that really nothing is improved by going back to monophasic, and maybe I should try polyphasic again. If I do, I could try the same plan, the U6 plan, or an Everyman plan (3 hrs at night plus 3 or 4 naps during the day).

So last night I went to bed a little early (feeling tired!). I was woken up about an hour and a half later by a screaming infant who was pretty inconsolable, so I was very much awake by the time she'd gotten to sleep. At this point I decided to try polyphasic for the night since the monophasic was pretty ruined anyway. Good news again: I switched over just fine. I had a little trouble falling asleep for the first nap, but no trouble for the second. In addition, I dreamed pretty fully and memorably, and woke up 2 minutes before the alarm.

So I figure I might as well keep experimenting at the very least. Not sure if I'm going to switch poly styles, yet, but I'm probably leaning toward keeping to one style in hopes of improving things by adapting better. I'm probably also going to try to reread a lot of the articles I'd read before to see if any of them say things I'd missed about how to get better sleep or feel more refreshed.

So, the promised list, as I see things:

Pros:

1. Clearly, the time gained. By sleeping less than 3 hours per day, I'm gaining 4 hours from the normal 7 I had been sleeping. If I were to switch to an Uberman 6 and cut times to 20 minutes or 15, I'd be gaining even more time.
2. A new ability: sleep just about anywhere just about any time, and have it be more useful than previously. I can't say it's as perfectly useful as polyphasic proponents would have you believe, but more useful than a nap last month? Sure thing. I'm also less hung up on what bed or pillow I'm using; I used to be pretty picky just because I had trouble falling asleep with foreign ones.
3. Being a pinch-hitter. 5 times during 2 weeks, someone really needed something late at night, and I was able to volunteer and get it done 'cuz I was up anyway. Twice were dropping people off for red-eye flights, and three times were taking care of children. If you don't have children around or friends/family that travels, this might not be important to you (plus it's more benefit to others than yourself, if you're inclined to think that way), but I found this to be pretty useful.
4. A feeling of security at night. My wife mentioned that she does indeed feel safer knowing that if someone were to attempt to break in I'd already be up and aware and we'd have a leg up on handling the situation. Similarly for any other nocturnal emergency. Probably not a big deal, really, since those things almost never happen anyway, but again, the feeling is there.

Cons:

1. The extra time at night doesn't appear to be as useful as daylight hours. As I've mentioned, I've been feeling just fine during the day, but every night has been a struggle and I experience the night through a kind of haze. Sure, I've gotten some things done (some extra work, read a book, played a couple of games), but nothing truly outstanding was accomplished.
2. Being tired of being tired. As I mentioned, I'm always tired at the moment. That's not unusual for me, so I can't say it's due to the polyphasic, but at least for me, the feeling itself is compounded when I wake up, and I can ignore it other times. Since polyphasic means more naps, it also means waking  up more often, which means noticing my pain again. This gets old quickly.
3. Social calendar & inflexibility. I can't say for certain that you can't skip naps, or what the effects thereof are, or those of moving naps, or anything else. But I can say that if you're feeling crummy you're going to want to follow "the rules" as close as you can, and having to sleep every 3 hours kinda sucks for being out doing anything.
4. Having a different schedule from your wife kind of sucks. It'd be nice if we were able to go to bed at the same time and get up at the same time and all of that. We've both missed talking for a little before conking out.
5. Having a different schedule sucks, part 2. If your wife wants to watch a Dr Who marathon and you have to stop every little while for a nap it kind of puts a damper on things. You can't even watch 2 movies in a row. Maybe this goes with #3, but I'm mentioning it separately because, at least for me, this is really, really important -- I spend a huge amount of my time with my family and I'd optimally like to spend more, not less.

Weird stuff:

1. Dreams? I think I'm dreaming more often and remembering more often, but that's not saying much. Even if it were true, I'm not sure that'd be a real plus since I'm not convinced that dreaming is all that cool.
2. I'm still baffled by the fact that I'm getting 3 hrs sleep per 24 hr period, have a perfectly normal feeling day, and yet enter zombie mode at night only to be normal again in the morning. I assume that will continue now, switching to poly again, but I'll definitely mention it if not.
3. Unlike Pavlina, I don't seem to have a problem with days stringing together in my mind. For me, the light/dark cycle, and the zombie/not cycle are enough for my mind to separate things just fine. Even though this is the absence of an item, I'm marking it just because Pavlina thought it was incredibly important. Also, having the string of days experience might be kind of cool.