Polyphasic Sleep: Day 2

Urgh. Well, that didn’t go quite as I was hoping. I discovered that I didn’t much enjoy being awake on my own through the 16 hours of darkness we currently have here. Not as a habit anyway. The trade-off between the vistas of potentially infinite extra time and feeling like a very slightly warmed-over turd in human form sent me off to bed for a proper sleep at about 4:00 this morning.

I’ve not quite decided why this sucked as much as it did. I could definitely have forced myself to continue, even though I was feeling shitty, but I just didn’t want to. There’s obviously a barrier to cross with this, to get the initial physical adaptation going, and I think it may just be too difficult (for me, at least) to cross that barrier in the depths of winter. At the moment, it gets dark about 5:00 in the evening here and the sun comes over the mountain behind our house just before 10:00 in the morning.

That’s a lot of time without the sun. I found it difficult to do anything much active during the night — I didn’t feel like exercising, and I didn’t really fancy the idea of dragging Winnie out for a walk. We have a nice lighted collar for her, so there’s no safety issue with walking at night, but she was already confused enough that I didn’t want to make it worse. (Last night, she spent a lot of the night sitting on the sofa with me looking at me as if to say “Ian, you do know that it’s sleepy-time, don’t you? Can we do some sleepy-time now? Please?”. I felt sad.) I also found myself thinking a lot about the practicalities of this sort of sleep schedule. Rita and I often have some of our best talks late at night in bed just before sleeping, and I really wouldn’t like to give that up. On top of that, the prospect of having to organise life so as to never be more than four hours from naptime seems a bit daft.

I might give it another go in six months, when the days are long (about 7.5 hours more daylight than now!). For now, I think I’ll try to do what I was originally planning, to switch to a sleep schedule with a short 4-5 hour “core sleep” and one nap in the afternoon. That seems a lot more achievable. Rita has been trying to sell me on the benefits of napping for years — she is well initiated into the Inner Mysteries of the Church Of The Short Sleep — maybe I should start listening?

So, that all sounds quite pathetic. Chapeau to anyone who can do this for real, especially if they start off when it’s dark and wintry.