Random polyphasic musings
Some thoughts about polyphasic sleep:
- There seem to be as many methods of adapting as there are people. I've heard from many successful polyphasers lately - a particular lot, actually, which means both a) wow cool, catching on! and b) I'm super behind on my emails; sorry if I've neglected you - and nearly all have told me about their unique plan for switching schedules. Many are gradual, and some people have entreated me to more formally redact my preference for "sudden" adaptations - which I will now happily do; it seems that gradual adaptation methods work just fine, for people with the gumption to stick with them. (Just like sudden ones.) I'm thrilled to back up a level and say that all that seems necessary to switch sleep schedules is getting and staying on the new schedule for 1-2 months, and that people's efforts to find a more comfortable way of doing so than just dropping into the new schedule like I did seem to be nothing but helpful. Good work, everyone who knocked up and stuck to their own adaptation plans!
- Scientifically this is obvious, but the feeling of there being a default sleep-schedule active in/on your body is really, to put it mildly, interesting! I've been reading about entrainment and kinesthetic and somaesthetic rhythms a lot lately - topics that dovetail my interests in sleep and martial arts nicely - and simultaneously, I've been pushing at the edges of my own default schedule, by being depressed and sleeping for shit. In so doing, I can feel the push and pull of my body, an undertow of rest and activity that's both profound…and polyphasic. The feeling of being in rhythm with it when I wake at four, or lay down for a nap at just the right time, is physically similar to the feeling of swimming in rhythm with the waves in water. I wish I had a more detailed memory of what it was like before, but the only thing it felt like back then was a confusing churning rush - all I ever did with my entrained schedule, I think, back then, was fight against it, or feel it as simply part of the general chaos. I'm not even close to an expert on acting in concert with it now, though I've done so successfully for periods of time over the last several years; I am still definitely someone who struggles regularly with schedules and sleep. But the process of learning to change the schedule required learning to feel it, and that alone has been worth the price of admission, I think.
- Not to beat that subject to death, but the lines between sleep and rest are really…warbly, and also interesting. The degree to which I can maintain good…what? flow? let's use flow, I guess…by resting, even if I'm currently sucking at life and can't or won't sleep, is surprising and cool. Paying attention to the rest-activity waves leads to finding little ways to respect them, or to not resist them, to say it another way; and these have smaller, but still useful, effects. Resting your eyes, putting up your feet, meditating, and putting food and drugs (in which I include caffeine and the like) in the right spots, have definite effects, and I hazard to say, can sometimes substitute adequately for sleep. (Sometimes! Not totally! Don't do that Internet Thing and take that as my saying that sleep can be eliminated. I have no official opinion on that, other than that the question itself is fascinating.)
- Having strong social ties really helps with having strong sleep. From a different angle, it's become part of my personal lexicon to define "strong social ties" as "ones I can sleep around"! I used to only be able to sleep in public when I was alone, but in recent years that's expanded; and the value of parties I can knock out at, friends I can curl up in a chair around, and shoulders I can lean on while I get my twenty minutes has become a thing very dear to my heart.
- I wonder if social sleep can become a thing. I love the idea.
- Wow, when I write off-the-cuff about stuff like this, my prose is really muddy, kind of pseudo-academic and weird; my sentences parse oddly like Kant's to me. (I love Kant and have read him a lot, but he was an aggressively bad writer. It's actually kind of cool in its own right, to read someone whose thoughts were so brilliant, and whose pen was carved from dried shit.) Also, to say I tend to digress is…::dies laughing:: Ah well, as a devoted fan of writing, I'll be the last person to say mine doesn't need a LOT of work. That's just a reason to do more of it, though - sorry, world! :)
- I'm seriously considering writing this second sleep book. Would love anyone's thoughts on the matter. I've done a chunk of research and written most of a proposal for publishers. The book would be on sleep modification: The history and current developments in humans changing their sleep-schedules. I find both the history of how we slept and changed how we slept, and the future of how we sleep and allow each other to sleep, utterly riveting; and like my first book, about polyphasic sleep as a modern lifestyle, there's that pull of "this doesn't seem to be out there; I may be nobody special but surely someone should start talking about this, so if I feel the urge I should". I'll keep ya'll posted if/as it goes further, but again, if you have thoughts, hit me.
…Aaand I think that's enough meditative typing for this morning. :) Have a great day, all.
Originally published at counterclockwise. You can comment here or there.