Odd blogger.com problem

So the entry I created a couple days ago seems to have gotten in some strange state. Blogger THOUGHT it was published but it never actually got published so publishing kept failing over and over.

I finally deleted that post and now I'll bet this is going to work.

Anyway, if this does post I'll post an update soon.

The Quest for the Perfect Hexaphasic Week

I've had plenty of really good nights and plenty of bad ones. I think it's time I start focusing on a new goal. Eventually the goal is the Perfect Hexaphasic Week. Obviously I'll need a few milestones in-between, so I'm going to start with something very achievable: Three Perfect Days.

So what's a Perfect Day anyway? Here's my list:

• There must be no less than 6 and no more than 7 naps in a day (okay, you caught me, that's not EXACTLY hexaphasic, but it's close :-) )
• The max nap length is 35 minutes (the catnapper CD is 32 minutes long)
• Each hexaphasic nap must be taken within 1 hour of the scheduled times (that's 6 out of the 7 naps). This gives me a little bit of flexibility but hopefully not too much to get into trouble.
• Two consecutive naps must be at least an hour apart (that's an hour of waking time)

Since each "day" starts at midnight, today is unfortunately shot already. This morning I took an extra nap that turned into a bit of a mess. Plus I'm letting my wife sleep in (she had a rough night as well and is still recovering from her surgery) so I'm delaying my 8:30am nap.

I think the biggest key to success is going to be strengthening my discipline muscle. At this point I'm starting to revert to old bad habits with alarms and there's no way I'll succeed like that. For instance, my wife woke me up from 3 naps yesterday despite my "precautions". The only way I'm going to make this work is by not allowing myself to change the rules when I'm tired. It's amazing what you can rationalize when you just wake up :-)

I'll be numbering my attempts just to provide some extra incentive for success. Tomorrow is Perfect Day 1 of 3, Attempt 1

Okay, that's about it for now. I'm starting to fade fast without the 8:30am nap.

Day 28 - Dental device adjustment

I finally got in to see the dentist today and got my dental device adjusted. What the device does is pull my lower jaw forward. Pulling the jaw forward pulls all the tissue attached to it in my throat forward as well, creating more room for air to pass. There is actually a surgical procedure that does much the same thing except permanently. My wife wrote a bit about the surgical options available a couple weeks back.

Anyway, the device was moderately effective originally, but not terribly comfortable for an entire night of sleep. The amount it pulls the jaw forward is adjustable but only by the dentist. Now that I'm not sleeping through the night anymore I decided to have it adjusted to pull my jaw forward as far as possible. The difference is about a centimeter I think.

I've had 3 naps with the adjusted device and it appears to be much more effective now. I don't have to tilt my head back nearly as severely to sleep well now. I was even able to lay on my back with only moderate snoring and a couple of apnea events in a 15 minute period (previously I would experience very bad snoring and an apnea event every minute when laying on my back). It's not the solution to all my problems, but it's definitely a big help.

I've also completed a full day of catnapper naps now. I'm no longer waking up during the catnapper wake up section and I've slept over 2 minutes into the alarm track a few times now.
On the bright side I'm falling asleep very quickly even when I can't shut off my mind. Hopefully now with the dental device adjustment combined with the catnapper CD I'm close to a breakthrough :-)

Days 26 and 27 - More over-sleeping

In my last post I mentioned the catnapper CD and how the nap was different from a regular polyphasic nap for me. I used it twice in a row that day (day 25) at 4:30pm and 8:30pm then took a regular nap at 12:30am. The "regular" nap did no go so well. I wound up in a daze for the rest of the night until about 8am. So that's how day 26 (yesterday for those who have lost count) started.

I tried both methods of napping (from here on out a "normal" nap is without the catnapper CD and a "catnapper" nap is with the CD) throughout the day yesterday and decided that the catnapper naps were far more reliable. While it was POSSIBLE that I would feel more alert mentally after a normal nap, there was an equal chance I'd feel worse. My experience with the catnapper naps has been very consistent.

At 10pm last night I decided I would take catnapper naps exclusively for the next few days. If things go well I'll probably keep it up for a week or more (until I feel confident in the schedule) before making any changes.

The next question I've gotten is what kind of sleep do I get with the catnapper CD. From the video evidence it looks like I'm getting about 15-18 minutes of REM which starts as soon as I fall asleep. I'm falling asleep between 5 and 10 minutes into the CD (during the relaxation section) so as far as I can tell the CD isn't putting me in and out of REM.

I generally wake up during count down at the end of the CD, but occasionally I sleep through that part. To remedy this I've created my own version of the CD with a 25 minute obnoxious alarm track after the catnapper track. So far I haven't gone more than about 1 minute in to the alarm track before waking up, but it's still early yet.

I think what I like best about the catnapper naps is the guided relaxation section. It really helps you feel physically better rested when you relax well before falling asleep. I tend to be pretty tense during my normal naps.

Anyway, on to day 27. Today I thought I had somehow slept through that 25 minute alarm because I woke up after a 3 hour over-sleep this morning. Going back to the video however it looks like I actually woke up, restarted the catnapper track, woke a second time, stopped the CD entirely, and fell sound asleep. I don't recall any of that. Sigh. At least the alarm is WORKING :-)

For the 12:30am and 4:30am naps (the sole naps I have any problems with at this point) I'm going to set several redundant alarms on day 28.

Incidentally, tomorrow is 4 weeks since I started the transition and I haven't had a full week of success yet. Wow I'm stubborn ;-)

Days 21 to 25

Long time no post. Sorry about that.

Work continues on my Perl sleep timer. It's nearly ready for public consumption (I was really hoping to add a configuration interface first, but I'm starting to realize I'll probably never get around to that). It has been a help, but it's far from a perfect solution to my problems.

The last 5 days have really been quite a blur. My mother in law came into town to help out with Jackie's recovery and it really threw me off balance. Unfortunately due to the continuing apnea episodes I find myself very restricted in where I can sleep effectively. Unfortunately our guest room is where I've been napping. I have an appointment with my dentist on Friday to adjust my dental appliance and I have hopes that that will make it easier to sleep in more places.

The good news is I had a few really good nights over the weekend (where I didn't crash between 4am and 9am). The bad news is I missed several naps, over-slept by hours each day, and I'm a little sick again.

Of course as you all know by now, I'm the energizer polynapper. I'm still sticking with it. As I've said many times, when it's good, it's GREAT. I'm willing to put up with quite a bit (obviously) to make that feeling more permanent.

My mother in law went back home yesterday and last night sucked, so with a bit of luck and lots of determination I'll be back on track tonight.

I have a new weapon in my nap arsenal to help. I borrowed a copy of the Monroe Institute's Catnapper CD mentioned by Jeremy Zink and I'll be using that once or twice a day to start. I just had my first nap with the CD and it was a very different experience. Unlike a polyphasic nap I felt physically very well rested afterwards (not just mentally rejuvenated). I need to get some more comfy headphones for sleeping on my side though. I'll probably go pick up some cheapish ear buds tonight. If the CD continues to be this effective I'll buy my own copy in a couple days. (Thanks again Jeremy!)

Oh, and doing your taxes in the middle of the night is a nice use of the extra polyphasic hours... But taxes still suck :-)

Days 15 to 20

Crazy week. The daily details are foggy at this point so I'm just going to go over the highlights.

NOTE: In case it hasn't been obvious, I define each new day as starting at midnight, so Friday was day 0 and 12:00am on Saturday was day 1.

On my polyphasic days I've continued a 1.5 - 3 hour over-sleep per day. I haven't set a core sleep time yet, mainly because of everything else going on.

Day 18 (Tue) I semi-accidentally got 6.5 hours of sleep. My wife was in the hospital on Monday until Tuesday morning (she's recovering nicely, thanks for asking) . I had been debating whether I should just do a monophasic night to get through the inevitably hectic day on Tuesday, so I guess my subconscious decided for me. The cool thing is I got the entire thing on tape, which is a treasure trove of useful info about my sleep cycles and habits.

Day 20 (Thu, today) I did another monophasic night. This time it was entirely intentional, since I'm sick. Here's an interesting tidbit: Since I started this schedule every member of the family, all 3 kids and my wife, have been sick repeatedly. At least one kid has thrown up each day of the last 3 weeks with few exceptions. Often all 3 of them repeatedly. Not fun, but that's not the interesting part. While I've occasionally felt a twinge of being sick it never lasted more than a few hours. That is until I had that monophasic night on Tuesday. THEN I got sick.

Once I actually got sick the polyphasic schedule didn't seem very good when trying to get BETTER. I managed to make it through yesterday, but by the end of the day I just felt too ill to continue. So today I slept from 1:30am to 7am, and I took a 2 hour nap as well.

As far as sickness goes I feel better. I don't know if I'll be able to jump back to polyphasic tonight yet though. I'm tempted to do one more monophasic night just to get this out of my system entirely. As for my mental state I'm fuzzy and slow. Polyphasic sleeping has had such a profound impact on my mental state that I can't even imagine going back to monophasic long-term.

That brings me to my fun project of the last week. I noticed from all the video footage that my REM cycle seems to last something between 10 and 18 minutes. It's been hard to tell any closer what the ideal length might be since it takes me between 2 and 11 minutes to fall asleep each nap. At first I thought I'd simply increase my nap time to 30 minutes to provide enough time for 11 minutes to fall asleep and 18 minutes of REM. That didn't work very well since if it took me 2 minutes to fall asleep I would wake up after REM was over and feel like crap.

The second idea was to do ultra-short naps of under 20 minutes. I felt amazingly good with 2 to 10 minutes of REM but at the end of each wake period I was a wreck, and after a few in a row I felt a bit manic.

That led me to my current toy. I wrote a little program to wake me up after I've been asleep for X minutes. I've experimented with X between 15 and 18 so far, with 17 seeming like a decent compromise. The cool thing is this is based on how long I've been ASLEEP, not how long I've been laying down.

The program uses a deadman switch to determine when I fall asleep. I use a mouse button, which I press and hold when I lay down. At the point that I let go of the switch the timer starts counting down for the designated number of minutes. There are also a few safeguards built-in:

• A max timer in case you don't let go of the button for whatever reason (roll on top of it, etc)
• The timer resets when you re-press the button in case you accidentally let go when getting comfortable
• It also DOESN'T reset if you let go for more than a few seconds (in case you actually fell asleep but didn't realize it)

When the timer runs out, the program runs any number of "wake" commands you specify. In my case I'm just running winamp with a particularly annoying sound file I created. Winamp starts playing automatically when started with a file parameter.

Anyway, it's still highly experimental, but it's working pretty well so far. When I've polished it a bit I'll post the source (it's just a short Perl-Tk script so very very easy to modify). Maybe I should start a sourceforge project for it? :-)

Anyway, that's it for now. As things get back to some semblance of "normal" over the next few days I plan to increase the frequency of my posts again (and re-start my tests, and post my test data, and.... Wow I have a lot of plans... Heh). Oh, and if I do fall off the face of the planet I promise to post the source for my little script before I do (hate it when people talk about something like that and then disappear!)

Day 14 - Crash and burn

I think the most surprising thing so far on this new sleep schedule is that I STILL don't have enough free time. I've wanted to update this blog a few times the last 2 days but haven't had the chance.

So I guess the moral is, if you're in it just for the additional time it might not be enough to keep you motivated :-)

Now for the update.

Day 12 - Day 12 went pretty well. I was awake during all the right times and my daily over-sleep (more on that later) was 90 minutes as usual. I felt quite good except from 4am to 7am.

Day 13 - I was convinced I had everything solved. My "nap quality" was the highest ever. I don't think I had an apnea episode all day. Except for 8:30pm I didn't even take any back-to-back naps, no over-sleeps, nothing. Even for the back-to-back nap I set the time to 10 minutes for the second nap instead of 20. Worked great. I didn't actually FEEL the best I've felt on the schedule so far, but I definitely felt better than my monophasic-self. Even my test scores (which I'd been neglecting along with the blogging) were record setting.

Then today happened. Holy smokes. I don't think I've come closer to quitting than I did today. And that's knowing that my wife will kill me if I just quit.

What happened? Okay, since you asked...

• 12:30am - Took my nap, woke up feeling great
• 1am - Went to work as per my schedule, felt great, got a bunch accomplished. From here on out the times are approximate as best I can reconstruct.
  
• 2:45am - Started feeling tired early. I should have had another hour before any tiredness crept in.
• 3:10am - Feeling really tired now, I decided it would be "safer" to take a quick extra nap in the car before heading home for my 4:30 nap.
• 3:30am - Woke from the nap feeling not much better, which honestly should have been my clue to get home and take a more restful nap. I didn't though, and decided to push through until 4am when it was time to leave to go home for the 4:30 nap.
• 5:50am - Woke up with a start. I had passed out completely, at my desk, head crashed into the keyboard (and I had the indentations in my forehead to prove it). I have no idea how close to 4am I got, but honestly I'm glad I DIDN'T get halfway home or something... Yikes!
• 5:55am - Feeling like almost total crap, I decided (bad idea) to head home to sleep better. Sleeping better wasn't the bad idea. DRIVING was the bad idea. I made it home safely and didn't even come close to an accident or anything, but I shudder to think what might have happened.
• 6:10am - Got home, went straight to bed for a 20 min nap. I know I woke up and turned off the alarm but that's all I know.
• 7:30am - My wife woke me up (and boy was she not happy about it... Neither was I)
• 8:50am - Laid down for my 8:30 nap to try to get back on track, and ended up taking 3 back-to-back naps instead of just 1 nap.
• 9:55am - My wife woke me up again (even less happy) and I went back to work.
  

So that's what I call HELL.

I can't remember at what point I considered quitting exactly, but I assure you, I really thought "to heck with this" and nearly went down without an alarm ON PURPOSE. I didn't though, and I'm grateful I didn't give up. I'm also grateful my wife had my back or I'd be in even worse shape than I am right now.

Lessons learned:

• Sleeping in the car is still a problem and HAS TO BE RESOLVED ASAP.
• Don't drive sleepy (I'm extremely grateful I don't have narcolepsy... This single incident of passing out was very very scary)
• Maybe those 90 minute "over-sleeps" weren't such a bad thing!

That last point is really what I'm thinking a lot about. Scheduling a longer "nap" is also known as "core sleep" where you get a longer block of sleep in addition to or instead of one of your naps.

Since I've started this schedule I think I've had a 90 minute over-sleep almost daily. Contrary to my expectations, these have NOT had a negative effect on the schedule that I can tell. Yesterday however was one of the first days I hadn't over-slept hardly at all and I Crashed and Burned. Big time. With a capital C and B.

I don't really have a plan for this set in stone yet, but I'm tossing around a few ideas:

• A scheduled 90 minute core-sleep daily (probably from 11:30pm to 1am or something like that) which is better than a random over-sleep each day.
• A WEEKLY core-sleep (also known as a "reboot") of a few hours, maybe as many as 5. I'm pretty hesitant about this one though.
• Outfitting my mini-van with an actual mattress in the back so I can sleep in the frickin car in an emergency. This adds a bit of inconvenience though since I won't be able to chauffeur the kids around, I'll have to trade cars with my wife to do that.

Of maybe more than one of the above.

I was also toying with the idea of resetting my day counter to 0 since last night was so bad, but I'm not going to do that. Although it was pure hell and extremely inconsistent, I didn't actually give up and go back to monophasic sleeping. So, I'm going to count it as yet another learning experience (in a LONG line now) and keep incrementing the counter.

Onwards and upwards.

Day 11 - New plan

In an effort to avoid car naps, I'm going to limit myself to one nap in the car each day. This will be a 7th nap just to make sure I'm functional for the rest of the day until I can find a way to sleep in the car effectively.

To make this work it means I need to cut up my work schedule into 3 separate 3 hour chunks. This gives me enough time to get back and forth to home to sleep/eat.

I've already got approval to work from 5am to 1:30pm. The 1:30pm time is less flexible since I want to be home to help out my wife in the afternoons. So I'm going to slide the 5am time earlier and work instead from 1am to 1:30pm. I live about 10 minutes from work without traffic.

Here's my thinking:

• 12am - 12:50am: Nap/eat
• 1am - 4am: Work (3 hours)
  
• 4:10am - 4:50am: Nap/eat
• 5am - 7am: Work (2 hours)
  
• 7:10am - 8:50am: Get kids ready for school/nap/eat
• 9am - 12:30pm: Work (3.5 hours)
• 12:30pm - 1pm: CAR NAP AT WORK
• 1pm - 1:30pm: Work (1/2 hour)
• 1:40pm - 4:30pm: Watching kids so my wife can work, run errands, etc.
  

To make up for the car nap at work I'll be taking an extra nap at home sometime. I'm currently thinking 10:30pm but we'll see how that goes.

For those that added, yes, that's 9 hours of scheduled work not 8. The extra hour is for when things slip a little.

The downside to this plan is I'm essentially going to be "at work" for 12 hours of the day for a while. Between that and watching the kids, most of my "extra" time will be taken up (i.e. no extra time for video games, house work, or side projects..). On the other hand I get to feel fabulous and spend an extra 3 hours with my kids each day ;-)

So that's where I'm at. I'm going to start it tonight unless my wife has some concerns.

Day 11 - Frustrating night

After my successful midnight nap I was really looking forward to the rest of last night, but it ended up being a mess. To make matters worse, the audio I recorded (the most important part for seeing if the apnea played any role) was useless. All background noise.

That's the last time I change things without a "test nap" to make sure it's working. I had attached an external microphone to my video camera to get more detailed breath sounds and ended up with this hum that I can't make out anything over.

So, I laid down at 3:30 for an extra nap leading in to the 5am hell block and woke up at 5am. Doh. Fortunately, over-sleeping in the back seat of the car isn't as painful as when sitting up, but it still hurt.

Okay, I thought, I just got my 4:30 nap too is all. No biggie. An hour later I couldn't think anymore so I went to lay down at 6am. I woke at 7:30. Two 90-minute over-sleeps in the car. Ouch. Literally.

So I came home for the 8:30 nap not wanting to risk another car nap and that went fine (as far as I can tell without audio) but I took another nap at 9:30 just to make up for the car naps. That one must have gone very badly (didn't tape it) since I woke up and could barely think straight.

To top it all off, I went to get my license plate renewed and stood in line for 2 hours. Just what I wanted to do when I could barely keep awake anyway.

As I was saying in my wrap-up post from yesterday, having the video footage to look back on and use to improve things has really helped my attitude when I over-sleep. Losing the footage today with TWO PAINFUL over-sleeps just kills me. Argh.

It's days like today where I can understand how some people give up on this schedule. Of course this isn't much worse than a monophasic day for me (and it's bound to improve with my next set of naps) so I have no intention of giving up. But if I slept well monophasically I'd be sorely tempted to just say to heck with it.

Day 11 - First nap without an alarm!

I actually woke up about 30 seconds before the alarm went off for my 12:30 nap. I even remembered a dream. Very cool.

Day 10 - Daily wrap-up

Today wasn't a perfect day by any means, but considering it was my first day back and work, I had an extra-long waking period, and I over-slept for 90 minutes in a CAR SITTING UP, I think things are going remarkably well.

Personally I find this sleeping schedule a lot more adaptable than my monophasic sleep. While there are more sleep periods per day, there's room for sliding. I can nap early or a little late (and hour and a half late proved too much, but an hour would probably be fine) and I can add naps if things go badly. It doesn't take a day to recover if you add 2 or 3 extra naps to make up for one you missed.

Not to mention how much I can get done in the middle of the night while still being alert during the day.

Thinking back, I'd say most days I've added 1-2 hours of extra naps/over-sleeps each day so far. Some might consider that a failure, but I'm learning something from every "failure". Not to mention the fact that with an average of 4 hours of sleep a day I feel fantastic for all but maybe an hour or two a day now. I felt worse for longer when I woke up from a monophasic night.

More and more my naps are "good" naps. I had 4 good naps today out of 8 and that's a HUGE improvement. I can definitely tell the difference.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that my wife is the one who first suggested videotaping a nap. If you have the means, I'd say anyone switching to this schedule should try it at least once or twice. In my case, instead of frustration when I fail, now I'm actually excited to see what went wrong. Every time something goes wrong I get to see EXACTLY what happened, which allows me to devise a plan to change it in the future.

For those analyzing the quality of a nap, here are a few things I've found:

1. To see if you're in REM don't bother watching the eyes. They're not the best indicator (for me anyway). A better indicator is whether you move or not. During REM sleep your muscles are paralyzed but your brain is active. This prevents you from acting out your dreams (and of course for some people this doesn't happen, leading to things like sleep-walking). During other sleep stages your brain is shut down and your body is just relaxed. This means you twitch, roll over, etc.
   
2. Get an external microphone and put it somewhere close to your face (but not where you'll blow on it). This allows you to hear your breathing. It should be steady and fairly shallow. Most people don't snore during REM so if you're snoring that's a bad sign.
3. See how you react to the alarm. If it's a good quality nap you should start stirring fairly quickly and when you open your eyes you should look somewhat alert and refreshed.
4. Download the movie to your computer if possible. This saves time with the analysis and lets you do some more thorough analysis. Definitely try to get a movie or sound editor that lets you see the wave form of the audio track. This lets you quickly scan the wave form for regular breathing patterns and any abnormalities

There's probably more stuff. I think I'll add something to the wiki (see the links on the left) about it.

Okay, best get some stuff done before work. Good night to all you mono/bi-phasic sleepers out there. Good morning to you polyphasic folks.

Day 10 - Long waking period

I'm coming up on hour 5 for this waking period. My wife had to go out so I've got the kids and it's their "running around being crazy" time of the day (as opposed to the "really sleepy so I can cheat and put them all down for naps" time of the day).

I haven't passed out, but I'm definitely slowing down majorly. I only have another 30-60 minutes to go so I think I'll make it. I wonder if this will have any impact on tonight's naps though. Hope not.

Okay, guess that's all I've got to say then. Yep, must be slowing down.

Day 10 - 5am block is still rough, but getting better

I've found a few useful things in the last day:

1. Using my dental appliance and sleeping with my head arched back to open up the airway results in a perfect nap (well, 4 for 4 so far anyway)
2. Naps in the car are not as restorative, and the dental appliance doesn't seem to help (which really throws a wrench in my plans... I was hoping to take 2-3 naps a day in the car and that won't work unless I can find a way to sleep better in the car)
3. Never over-sleep in a car. Ouch.

I had a 90 minute over-sleep this morning at 6am in the car. Talk about feeling like sh*t after waking up...

Even with all the minor and not-so-minor problems I've had I have to say I'm just as determined to make this work. If not more-so. Many of the things I'm finding that work are simply impossible with longer sleep block. I'm definitely a bit bummed today about where I'm at versus where I wanted to be by now, but every nap is a learning experience at this point and I'm getting better and better at this.

If anyone has any ideas about how I might sleep in the car more effectively leave a comment. I'm currently reclining in one of the bucket seats for the nap, which is probably resulting in my tongue relaxing too much and closing off the airway. I can't sleep on my back in bed either, so I guess I shouldn't be so surprised. I was hoping that being mostly upright would help (and it does a little) but it doesn't help enough.

Oh, and I'm 6' 2" so curling up in the back seat MAY be an option, but it may also just hurt :-) I figure I'll try that out next.

Eating

I've had a few comments about this and I forgot to mention this back around day 2. I realized quickly that eating BEFORE a nap was counter-productive. I've been eating mainly after waking up, occasionally an hour before a nap. If I eat much closer to a nap than that I don't feel as good when I wake up.

I've been sticking to my lacto-ovo (milk/cheese and eggs) vegetarian diet about 99% of the time (my wife made some sausages one day, I was weak and had a couple bites :-) ) . I'm still planning to gradually start reintroducing meat into my diet after about a month. I went to an all-you-can-eat place last night (hmmm, another potential reason for that over-sleep?) and had just vegetarian fare. That was a very strange feeling...

Anyway, lacto-ovo vegetarian is pretty easy since really the only thing off-limits is stuff with meat in it. As opposed to a vegan diet where anything with animal products in it is forbidden. I don't think I'd have the willpower for that one. The hardest thing is when my wife makes steaks or something for herself and the kids and I'm eating a salad... Ah well, even if I end up not being able to manage meat on this sleep schedule it's worth it!

Day 9 - Over-sleep analysis

Wow, okay. No memory of that. Not good. Apparently I set the alarm, woke to it, and I must have on some level intended to reset it for another nap right away. Except I didn't actually set it the second time.

I was obviously out of it in the video, but I did all the "ritual" things after a nap. I got up, turned off the alarm, thought I turned off the camera (must have missed the button) and got ready for a second nap right away. Except I never actually set the alarm for the second nap. Odd.

The good news is that except for this waking up and not remembering it bit, the 2:30 nap was a "good" nap in the sense that I didn't show any obvious signs of apnea episodes. I used my dental appliance that holds my jaw forward (which happens to also be very portable, which is nice). I'm going to take the rest of my naps today with it and see how they go.

As far as why I over-slept, last night I went out with some friends for the first time since I started the transition. We went to dinner then a movie. I took 2 naps in the car during the festivities. Maybe somehow I wound up pushing myself too hard? Maybe the naps in the car weren't good enough quality? Hard to say.

Anyway, I guess what this really means is I need to NOT take back-to-back naps. Too much room for missing something when I'm just waking up.

Day 9 - Major over-sleep

I had almost forgotten what it was like to wake up monophasically. With my past week of experience under my belt I can say it definitely sucks. It's an odd mixture of being "rested" but "foggy" that I really don't care for.

It's really hard to describe, but I'll try:

• PHYSICALLY: I'm rested, alert, and feel good. I feel like I could stay awake all day.
  
• MENTALLY: I feel like I've missed 2 naps. I'm processing things more slowly, everything feels sluggish, I'm out of it, and I feel like I need a nap.

What happened? I laid down at 2:30am for an extra nap in preparation for the 5am block and my sons came in to get me at 8:30am (or 7:30am pre-DST time). So a 5 hour over-sleep, essentially when I slept monophasically.

I'm not 100% sure what happened yet, but I recorded the "nap" so I do have video evidence of what I did. I suspect I messed up starting the nap MP3. The video is transferring to the computer now so I'll know for sure in an hour or so.

Two things:

1. This just strengthens my resolve to stick with a polyphasic schedule. I really don't care for this feeling at all. Yuck.
   
2. When I started the polyphasic schedule I had planned to do a large block of 5+ hours either every other week or once a month (hadn't decided which, figured I'd play it by ear). I still think it's probably a good idea for health, but I'm going to dread those nights now.

With any luck I'll recover my senses after a nap or two. I suppose on the bright side I can use this to transition to daylight savings time :-)

Since I'm writing anyway I should note that so far I haven't had much luck with my experiments trying to avoid apnea during my naps. I had a number of bad naps yesterday (maybe that contributed to the over-sleep, who knows). I'm not out of ideas yet though.

Day 8 - Extra naps worked, but were quite hard to manage

The extra nap plan ended up doing the trick. I wasn't as awake during my hell block as I am during the rest of the day, but I was functional. Of course, under the plan I was essentially sleeping 20 minutes out of every hour from 3am to 7am, so I wasn't terribly productive either :-) Falling asleep every 40 minutes is tough, even for someone who can normally sleep at the drop of a hat.

It's not a practical long-term solution, but I'll take it as a first step. Far better than being a zombie and risking over-sleeping.

Out of curiosity, I decided to video-tape my naps during the day yesterday and at night last night (which I of course transferred to the computer so I could do some analysis of the results... Am I a geek or what?). I was curious to see if there were any differences in the way I slept during different parts of the day. Sure enough, there are. At night, I snore and stop breathing regularly, even during my short naps. During the day I don't. I'm not sure why I sleep differently at night, but there are a few potential solutions to the problem now that I have something to attack.

First, I can use all my apnea tools (a BIPAP machine, a jaw positioning device, etc) and see how I sleep using those. Since this is just during the night naps it shouldn't be terribly inconvenient (I won't have to lug the stuff to parties for example). I wasn't able to tolerate the CPAP/BIPAP machine for a full night, but I might be able to for a 20 minute nap 2-3 times a night.

Secondly I can add naps during the night (not as many, hopefully) which should make up for the poor nap quality with quantity.

Thirdly I can try napping in other places/positions. Sitting up in a chair for example. That kind of thing can be painful for a longer sleep, but it should be tolerable for 20 minutes.

This is probably going to take a week or more to sort out, so I don't plan to keep a daily record of what I'm currently trying unless I hit upon something new or interesting. I'll definitely update with things that work and things that don't though. Maybe it'll be of help to another polyphasic apnea sufferer someday.

Day 8 - Testing my hypothesis

So if I'm right, taking some preemptive naps should help me with my 5am to 9am "dead" block. I've had 6 naps since 8:30pm and felt just fine before my 4:30 nap. It's 5:20 now and I'm more awake than I was the last the last couple of days but I'm far from on top of my game. So, there's definitely something more to this tiredness than naps and nap quality.