Polyphasic Sleep Schedule

It's been travelling around the internet for years, so here are the obligatory links to the first places I heard about it nearly 5 years ago:

Everything2
Kuro5hin

Polyphasic sleep simply means sleeping more than once per day. There are many variations but the one most often cited is the "Uberman" sleep schedule. This is one of the most hard-core versions available, resulting in a mere 2-3 hours of sleep per day. So naturally that's what I'm going to attempt.

The current Wikipedia page on polyphasic sleeping is pretty decent as far as history goes. There are also some links to success/failure stories as well as proponents and detractors.

Just a warning... This is not to be undertaken lightly. While little formal research has been done, there is lots of anecdotal evidence that very few people can manage this schedule successfully. Even less is known about the long-term effects.

That having been said, there is a growing fan base for the idea. I suspect the idea will gain momentum for a while and eventually fade away again. Kinda like the low-carb diet (yeah, I did that one too).

So, here's my plan:

On Sunday March 26th I'm going to be giving up my normal nightly sleep and switching to 20 minute naps every 4 hours. My times are currently 12:30, 4:30, and 8:30 (interestingly, the times are the same whether in the morning or night).

Between now and then I plan to run through several tests/games to get a baseline of my reaction times and such on a monophasic schedule (so I'll have something more objective to compare to after the adaptation period).

Why am I doing it? Darn good question. My main motivation is a potential solve for my obstructive sleep apnea. Basically when I fall into a deep sleep, the muscles in my throat relax and I stop breathing. So then I wake up enough to start breathing again and the cycle repeats. This makes it very difficult to get enough quality REM sleep each night. So I started thinking to myself "what if on this schedule I didn't fall into such a deep sleep, since these are only naps, and I could enter REM sleep immediately?" Well, it sounded plausible in my sleep deprived mind anyway ;-)

So, whether it's completely logical or not, I've decided to take the plunge and try this out.

The games/tests I've decided to use are as follows:

1. Typing Test (3 minute)
2. Physical Reaction Time Test from either here or here
   
3. The "Simon" Game (still looking for where to do this from, might just find a copy and host it myself)
4. Visual Threshhold Acuity

If all goes well I'll get all the data into a database so I can do some analysis (plus I'm just plain lazy so the easier it is to track, the more likely it is I'll log/blog it).