sabren.net archives

entries for 2002/7/11

the uberman sleep schedule?

Welcome. This blog was created to keep a running journal/diary of an experiment with alternative sleep methods. In particular, a small group of us are attempting to adjust to the Uberman Sleep Schedule, more technically described as a polyphasic sleep schedule.
 
The essence of it is a short 3 hour core sleep time in the early morning, and several 20 minute naps (every 4 hours) spaced throughout the day.
 
Why are we doing this? We'll one reason is just to see if its possible. Yes, we're freaks. But curious ones. But the main compelling reason is that we will get extra hours in the day. With a 3 hour core sleep and four 20 minute naps, we are sleeping only 4 hours and 20 minutes a day. On a full blown Uberman Schedule, you only have six 20 minutes naps, which means you are sleeping only 2 hours a day. That equals 6 extra hours a day! Time to catch up on reading, start a new hobby, learn a musical instrument, train for a new career.
 
Most people are monophasic sleepers, they get all their daily sleep in a single long period. I believe that we are perfectly capable of polyphasic sleep, which just means that we can get our sleep in several sleeping periods instead of one long one.
 
But how long do you need to sleep? Polyphasic sleep is not very common and the most cited examples are from popular pop-myth stories of Thomas Edison and DaVinci never sleeping, just taking catnaps throughout the day. But there is very little documented examples of polyphasic sleep. So to help fill that void, some friends and I are donating our sleep to science and attempting some polyphasic sleep schedules.

After adapting (around day 21) suddenly the relative distribution of the sleep stages (stage 2 NREM, SWS, REM) returned to nearly the same distribution a normal night sleep has (30% REM, 70% NREM). This is very unsual because normally REM sleep is only possible after at least 60 minutes of NREM sleep and only lasts for a few minutes, except in the last half of an 8 hour sleep, where you find a lot of stage 2 and REM sleep. But after having adapted to the Uberman schedule some naps contain a lot of SWS, other contain "only" stage 2 NREM (light sleep) and other contain REM sleep. That's what is being described at kuro5hin, being able to jump directly to REM sleep. But where he was wrong: You won't get only REM sleep, the sleep distribution returns to normal, that's all (but under very unusual and surprising conditions).

the "are you a serial killer" quiz?

The main character in the story is this girl... when she was at the funeral of her own mother.. she met this guy who was also there... but she did not know who he was. Well.. this guy happened to fit her bill of her dream guy so she fell in love with him at once... love at first sight, so to speak. A few days later... the girl killed her own sister. When the cops asked her why she did that... she gave a very shocking answer...
 
So... what is her motive in killing her sister?

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