So recently Manish and I have been lazy about oversleeping and it has gotten out of control. I had two nights in a row where I overslept by a total of four hours. Manish has two nights with almost seven hours each. Not acceptable!

So… here’s the deal. Each of us are putting up $1000. If ONE of us (no matter which) oversleeps for an hour or more, we have to each give up half our money. If both oversleep, we both give up our whole thousand.

Where does the money go? The Polynappers of Tomorrow Fund, which we’ll create. People who are attempting the schedule can write us applications and if accepted we will buy them a good sleep mask, travel pillow, and loud portable alarm clock. If they succeed, it’s theirs to keep. If they fail they send it back and send an additional $20 which gets added to the fund. At no point will Manish or I benefit from the fund, even if it grows to over $1000. We will also buy two copies of Claudio Stampi’s book and loan them to anyone on request.

I’m going to Massachusetts this Friday, so the bet ends then, although it might be reinstated when I get back. I’ll be there with my family, which should be interesting. I can have breakfast with my grandfather at 5am, hang with everyone all day, and stay up until 3am with my brothers and sister.

I had a total disaster of a day these past 24 hours. 30-60 minute oversleeps all over the place. We’re talking 3.5-4 hours total.

The biggest problem was that my new wakeup MP3 wasn’t effective. Volume was a bit lower and it faded into the Eminem song rather than jumping into it. My sleeping is so deep now that it’s pretty tough to wake me up. Went back to the old MP3… the seagulls weren’t so bad.

Thinking about having two options for naps - 25 minute and 35 minute. I’ll use the 35 minute one when I’m not very tired, to allow some time to fall asleep. As an experiment today I held a remote in my hand and pressed the button every once in a while to see how long I was actually awake for. That 25 minute nap was 10 minutes of sleep and 15 minutes trying to fall asleep.

That’s the big problem with oversleeping - one minor error causes a chain reaction. If you oversleep by even 30 minutes, you won’t need to sleep the whole time for your next nap. Then that causes you to be even more tired during the one after that.

I tested out the air compressor alarm… holy christ. I jumped out of bed, thinking I was about to be run over by a Mack Truck or something. Unfortunately I manually switched it off, so it didn’t wake me up during my following oversleeps.

Funny… I slept for about 6 hours today which seems like downright gluttony (and feels like it). If I got 6 hours back in the day, I would have been exhausted all day. Onward…

We down here in my room, me and big G. We dancin’ like there’s no tomorrow, music blasting, enjoying the early morning like it was meant to be.

Hibernator comes downstairs and knocks on door. I half expect it to be Ty. She says, “um, i live upstairs, it’s just where my bedroom is, you woke me up an hour ago, can you please turn down the bass, please??”

Big G games her up a bit and sends her back to her oversleeping ways. Bass turned down.

I overslept by 90 minutes. I’m not proud of this. In fact, I’m in a bit of a rage over the whole thing. I don’t think most people out there understand the precautions I’ve taken to ensure that I don’t sleep.

Well, here’s the latest. I’ve put my very loud air compressor in my bed, a foot or two from my face. If I remain in bed for 10 minutes longer than the alotted 25 minutes, it gets turned on automatically. I doubt there’s anyone who has successfully slept with an air compressor going off two feet from their face. If you look at the picture below, you can also see a crock pot in the bottom left. I was going to have that boil water and then have the air compressor splash it on my face, but that proved to be too complicated at the moment.

What’s frustrating is that I’m not actively making the decision, “this is too hard”. My own body is sabotaging me.

I’ve made a lot of changes which have dramatically helped eliminate oversleeping. Here’s a rundown of how it works :

• I spend most of my awake time in front of my computer. The computer has been programmed to produce a loud alarm noise every 30 minutes. This is to keep me alert and serve as a backup for the screen saver.
• My screen saver seems to be somewhat flaky, but after two minutes of inactivity it’s supposed to play a god awful beeping noise.
• I have a second set of speakers with no volume control plugged into the computer under the desk, just in case I turn off the main ones.
• I have removed the seatback of my office chair, so that instead of being comfortably supported in the case of an oversleep, I will fall backwards onto a pile of screwdrivers and other bumpy things. Since implementing this, I haven’t fallen asleep at my chair.
• In my bedroom I have a laptop that is duct taped shut to prevent sleepwalk-tampering. It’s connected to a 200W receiver with some large speakers attached.
• When it’s time for a nap, I press a button on a remote next to my bed. This sends commands to the duct taped laptop. The laptop then disconnects itself from the network to prevent me from sending it more commands or remotely connecting to it to turn off alarms.
• The laptop plays a 35 minute MP3 which starts out with 25 minutes of brown noise, and ends with a grand finale of an eminem song at full volume. The encore is 5 minutes of loud piercing beeps.
• If I’m still in bed 10 minutes later, the alarm turns all the lights in the house to full brightness, replays the piercing noise, and text messages a couple of my friends to come wake me up. They usually don’t, though, because there have been too many false alarms.
• To prevent me from just taking two or more naps in a row, the system plays loud beeping noises for the next hour. There is no way to shut these off, as the computer doesn’t reconnect itself to the network until the full sequence is finished. This annoys houseguests.
• Rap Music loud, enough to shake the doors and my desk, is played 24 hours a day, except during naps.

The next measures I take will involve water being dumped on my face via water fountain pump and possibly a winch which pulls me out of bed and into the air. I don’t know anything about winches, though. I really don’t like being electrocuted, but one of those dog collar things isn’t out of the question.

A lot of people will undoubtedly say “If you need to go through all this trouble, then obviously your body isn’t meant for this. Blah blah blah blah”. I am a stubborn person, and getting over 24 years of crappy hibernation programming is tougher than I thought it would be. However, I WILL succeed. I will literally do this for the next five years if I have to. It’s only a matter of time before my subconcious relents.

Perhaps due to my new commitment to not oversleeping, the past 2-3 days have really been great. I had a couple light sleeps in my chair (<1 hour), but the overall quality of both my naps and my awake time continues to increase.

Today, for example, I haven’t been tired for the past 24 hours. My minor oversleep of 30 minutes was because I was bored and just spacing out at my computer.

Each nap I’ve had in the past 24 hours was accompanied by an awesome dream, and naturally ended before my alarm clock. Usually when that happens I get another quick nap in before the alarm goes off, but when I woke up early on my most recent nap, I just got out of bed. The funny thing is that I was SURE that I overslept - I felt great and it seemed like I was in bed for hours.

It’s amazing that 15 minutes is now a significant amount of sleep to me. When I was a hibernator, adding 15 minutes to my night would do nothing - now it can keep me alert for four hours. It just makes me wonder what else I’m missing out on. Can I do work this efficiently? How about exercise?

Before I take each nap, I say out loud, “I’m going to enjoy a really restful, deep sleep for the next twenty or twenty five minutes. I’ll have an exciting dream that will make it an adventure, and when I wake up I will be totally alert and awake”. Doing that seems to keep my subconcious in check and prevents oversleeping. I can’t remember the last time I overslept in my bed - now I just close my eyes in my chair.

To combat those oversleeping incidents, I have a loud alarm that goes off every 30 minutes on my computer, as well as an alarm that goes off after not typing for two minutes. These alarms are automatically disabled when I’m on an “official” nap. I’ve also been playing relatively loud music 24 hours a day. Doing this seems to engage my brain a bit, making it harder to just drift off.

Oh, and check out this awesome pillow I ordered for mobile naps : Cocoon Travel Pillow, Small

Been a while since my last post. I’m still on it. I had a falling out around Thanksgiving with 3-4 days of extreme oversleeping. Where I’m at right now:

I tend to oversleep daily. Just random times. Seems out of my control. Like I will sleepwalk, turn off my alarm, go back to sleep. Or randomly fall asleep at my computer, or find myself in my living room, very confused as to what’s going on and what time it is.

I’m usually really exhausted and out of it at 6 am-10am, and then feel fine after 11am…almost like clockwork. But then I will oversleep at other random times when I actually feel okay, like 2pm.

It’s much easier than the first week. I’m averaging about 3-4 hours of sleep per day. My waking time cycles between full alertness and zombie mode. I often lose track of what time of day it is; it all feels much the same, except for sunrise–the magical time I come back from the worst of the 6AM cycle.

I think it’s going to have to get worse before it gets better. According to people that have successfully made it, they’re very strict in the trasition period. I’m not sure that I ever went 7 days without oversleeping. Perhaps 3, and then I’d have a 1-3 hour oversleep. Maybe the worst of what I went through wasn’t bad enough.

I’m going to have to commit to that level of strictness now. That seems the only way to improve from here. So that’s what I’m doing. I think I can get on this completely. It works some of the time–I’ll wake up from a nap feeling as though I just had a full night’s rest, ready to rock. It’s just a matter of consistency.

My planned naps move around all the time due to oversleep. No more. Even in the event of an oversleep, I’m sticking to 1/5/9. If I oversleep past a nap, I just wait till the next planned nap, and tired or not, I’m lying down. The 5-9AM cycle will probably suck for me, so every day i’m going to do some form of exercise, then shower, prepare an excellent breakfast, and then clean up…will keep me occupied.

From here, I expect this to take 10 days max to take full effect.

I’ve stopped counting exactly, but I’m around day 35 now.

How Steve Pavlina got on the schedule so quickly, I don’t understand. I do understand why everyone gives up before they convert, though. It is hard. Especially that first week. I don’t even think it’s possible to get on it unless you refuse to even consider that you might fail. That’s what I did this time, and it’s made quite a difference.

Today we moved to Better Than Your Boyfriend, which required me to go through all of the old posts and edit them. At times it’s easy to think that I’m not making much progress, but looking back at those old entries, It’s like day and night (no pun intended).

Here’s what it’s like right now on Day 35:

First of all, when it’s good, it’s GREAT. Right now I feel just as good as I did before converting. I could go for a jog, write an article, have a conversation, or drive.

When it’s bad, it’s not SO bad. In the beginning of this transition I felt awful. When I realized I still had three hours until another nap, I felt slightly panicked, not knowing if I’d be able to make it or not. Now I feel uncomfortable. I’d rather be sleeping, but I know that by eating some food and taking a walk I can get back to being alert.

I don’t oversleep anymore. No nap is difficult to wake up from. I don’t feel great after waking up, but I don’t feel bad either. A little fuzzy, I guess. However, I fall asleep almost daily when I’m not trying to. At first these naps would be 3 hours long or longer - basically until someone woke me up. Now I tend to wake myself up after an hour or so.

What’s frustrating about those random naps is that I never see them coming. I’ll be doing some work on my computer, and then next thing I know - BAM - I’m waking up and sitting on my couch. I literally have no idea how this happens. When I’m around other people I never do this - it’s just when I’m alone.

An average day is composed of :

19 hours of alert productive time
2 hours of actual planned naps
.5 hours of time spent falling asleep
1 hour of being tired enough to affect performance
1.5 hours of unplanned naps.

Before my day was :

14 hours of alert productive time
8.5 hours of sleep
1.5 hours of being tired enough to affect performance (though less tired than the same category in polynapping)

Even if this got no better, I would still stick with it for life. It’s a bit difficult to get through the tired / unplanned nap time, but the rest is great. Luckily, every day is a bit easier and a bit better.

If you are thinking about polynapping, or are trying it - DO IT. Commit to seeing it through to the end, no matter how unbearable the pain. It’s a small investment to make for the benefits you’ll reap in the end.

When I first started this schedule, the whole day was a hard period. I was a zombie.

As I moved on, the days started getting ok and the nights were hard.

Soon I felt tired from 11pm-5am, but was ok after that.

Ever since then my hard period has been moving forward and shrinking. Right now it's basically 11:30am - 2pm. This period KILLS me. Yesterday I was on the phone, and I noticed it was 11:05 - past due for my nap. I get off the phone and go to sleep, barely even tired.

I wake up and feel AWFUL. I'm fuzzy on what happened after that, but I know I woke up lying on the couch - and it DEFINITELY wasn't nap time. I don't even sit on my couches, so it was clearly subconcious. I feel like I've got one more hard push to get through and then I will be there.

My family is very critical of this whole plan, and I go to Massachusetts with them on the 23rd, so it's really important to me that I am 100% by then. I think if I can push through this hard period, I will get there. I don't feel like I need MORE sleep during the day because for the rest of the time I'm wide awake. It's 4:40am right now and I could easily read, ride a bike, or do anything. When 7am comes around, I won't feel the need for a nap. I just need to have a more consistent drowsiness level.

I'm on day 33, so I really would have expected to be fully adapted by now. I'm slightly disappointed that I'm not, but at least now I have more productive hours each day, even if a few of my new hours are tough.

Manish is back on the schedule, as I may have written earlier. His tough period right now seems to be around 5-9am, so I'm going to start going to his house to keep him awake during that time, and then he will come here during mine. We'll start this tomorrow, so hopefully that will push us the last 10 yards!

If you're awake from 11:30am-2pm CST and want to call me to help keep me awake, the number is (512) xxx-xxxx. Strangers are welcome too - I'm more than happy to tell you all about polynapping and answer questions.