My topic for this post is sleep, and ways I have found to cheat it. About a week ago I had a panic attack and realized I had way more work to do than is possible for normal Chip. So I turned into super Chip. I did some research to help me in my endeavor. I found a whole online community of people who don't like to sleep and try to find ways around it. The first thing I discovered is polyphasic sleep. Polyphasic sleep is a schedule in which you get your sleep in several small doses. Most humans sleep on a schedule called monophasic sleep. That is, they just sleep in one large chunk. There are several different styles of polyphasic sleep. The first one I discovered is called Dymaxion Sleep. It was invented by Buckminster Fuller. He's the same guy that did the big ball at EPCOT center. Baically, on this schedule, you sleep about 30 minutes every six hours. Refer to this link for more info
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,774680,00.html. This looked pretty cool. Bucky did it for two years and then quit because it was inconvenient for working with other humans. However, after a little bit more research I discovered that there is no known person other than Bucky who has ever been able to do this. You can look on Youtube and find video logs of people who have tried this. They eventually just sort of die.
Next, I discovered the Uberman sleep cycle. This seems slightly more hardcore than Dymaxion, but it works out to about the same. On this schedule, you sleep 20 minutes every 4 hours. This actually looks doable. Here are some links. {questionable source was deleted here to protect you} Another really good blog is written by
Puredoxyk. This article is an overview of all of them. She is very experienced with polyphasic sleep. and actually has been able to do it. I don't feel like going into the medical theory behind these but, you can find it in articles on the above sites.
The next one I discovered is called the everyman sleep schedule. This is basically what I do during exams. Except, I never get past the adjustment period. This one requires you to sleep a "core" chunk of sleep of about three hours. Then you take little twenty minute naps during the day. I might actually do this one after exams are over. You can look at the puredoxyk article for more details. I finally settled on a biphasic sleep patern. I kind of stumbled onto this one accidentally. I got home from school monday and I was completely exhausted. I proceeded to sleep three hours. I then woke up and ate dinner and started my homework. I noticed that I just didn't seem to get tired. I kept chugging along with it till about two. I then read the wiki on polyphasic sleep. It mentioned biphasic sleep. Without research, i decided to do it. I decided to sleep from 3-6 am and pm. This was just fine because it turns out that sleeps cycles are 90 minutes in length. i'd get two at a time. I did this for a week. Unfortunately I didn't really adjust. I was more functional and got more work done than usual. I will continue until I panic during exams and switch to everyman like I do every year. After a week i have discovered that some tweaking is needed to accomplish this pattern. People generally like to bother me starting at five. five is about a third of the way through my second sleep cycle. So, I have decided to sleep just one cycle in the afternoon and perhaps three at night. One variation recommends this. This will prevent people from interrupting my naps and suffering my wrath. I will say that week one worked. However, Last night I went to bed at three and woke up at noon. We'll see how week two goes. Here's a fun link to chew on
http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/cat_steve_dont_eat_it.php
