You're reading it people, this is the seventh day of my everyman cycle, so I've already passed a whole week. Did I say a whole week? For all you normal sleeping people, it's actually more like 9 days already, in terms of time awake. On your 7 days. Hah!
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| 9 > 7 |
The everyman cycle is a polyphasic sleep cycle consisting of one 'big' block of sleep and some naps during the rest of the day, summing to about 4 hours of sleep a day. My big block is a 3-hour block from 4 AM till 7 AM. The naps last 20 minutes, and I take three of them, one about every five hours.
For more information on polyphasic sleep and my motivation for starting it, you can check out my first blog post ever and ever and ever.
You're all lucky I really didn't have an all that interesting day to write about, so I can get to the retrospective of how this week was, adapting to the everyman, the thing you're probably - I can only assume this, since that's the main subject of this blog - all so eager about and I promised three days ago.
I think waking up with Bebop will become a morning ritual just like going to the bathroom or breakfast are, it's the first thing I do after the bathroom and before breakfast. There's something dubious about only 26 episodes in a series, you want to have more episodes but at the same time you don't because you know, deep down inside your heart, that quality and storyline could decrease by having that. I'm not quite out of it yet.
I exploited my culinary skills by cooking eggs for breakfast and sausages for dinner, once more in the exquise role of royal cook. Will I get promoted to King Cooksworth when I get older? I sure hope so.
I finished on C++ around 1 PM and spent the entire rest of my afternoon and evening on messing around with assembly language and organizing my projects some more. We have this task for computer architecture where we have to implement a lot of interrupts in an operating system for a floppy, written in assembly, and it'll take my whole tomorrow to finish it, and even then it'll be a close call.
I also found one of those good 4-digit number locks for bicycles, I'll try to crack the code on that one anytime soon after I finished on the assembly-messing.
But now about my experiences on the everyman.
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| Worker napping on railway at a construction site a Wuhan North |
On the blocks.
I always take these from 4 AM to 7 AM. The first two days I overslept an hour or so snoozing off, and yesterday I overslept about the same but I felt much more tired since I didn't spend my overtime snoozing and semi-dreaming but being fast asleep, I must've woken while in anything but REM-sleep. All the other days it came along quite nicely, having no trouble getting out of the bed.
Yesterday I played out a really smart trick, which will probably, make that surely, will be repeated today. I only went to bed at five, so what did I do? I set my alarm at eight! It worked like a charm, I woke up, got out without a problem and was quite alright all day long. Which is quite remarkable since yesterday was a tiresome day with an obvious lack of true motivation, due to the lack of dozes - for any new readers, I liked the word 'doze' better than 'nap' - and oversleeping in the morning.
So I found the block is flexible as well, it doesn't matter if you do it from 4 to 7 or 5 to 8, you just need to be consistent with your naps, eurh, dozes during the rest of the day. As you can imagine, I was quite happy finding this out.
About the dozes.
I don't know if you like the word nap or doze better, but I'll never go back to the word 'nap' for the rest of my , without a doubt, successful blogging career.
These horribly failed the first few days, but I'm starting to get the hang of them. I keep myself in the same very comfortable position where no limb rests on another limb until I feel all my limbs relaxing and falling asleep. It's quite a funny feeling, and you know you'll be asleep in the next few minutes if you don't move. When you doze for such a short time, I only had the feeling of really having slept not more than four times, the rest was more like falling away and relapsing, and your dream seems like your conscious was just continued all the time. You get in that half-dreaming state without realizing it. I hope to explore that experience more during the rest of the time I use this cycle, which will be for another 10 weeks in the least. I plan on keeping this up a whole lot longer though.
I've also found out, but I already read it somewhere, that you can easily shift a doze back and forth one or two hours, just keep the interval between them regular most of the time and you'll be just fine.
When I go for a doze, I make thirty minutes time for one, ten minutes for the relaxing and trying to fall asleep, and twenty minutes for the sleep itself. Since you sleep so lightly, there hasn't really been any need to set multiple alarms, except for the ones at midnight, which I overslept two times by half an hour, and oversleeping those renders you quite tired...
And then finally, the adaptation till now.
I started on my first day with just sleeping the big block, in which I succeeded, and following the dozing pattern. But since I wasn't used to dozing away on purpose, I just laid awake for half an hour. I only had the first doze when it should've been my fifth, namely the afternoon doze on the second day. Starting then, it went a lot better day by day and it really started going swell from day five. I don't know if it's due to tiredness or habit, but I'm sure habit plays an important part.
I never had any trouble on sleeping the block, occasionaly oversleeping it, maybe to passively make up for the dozes not taken.
The general feeling of tiredness started coming on day number four, that's when I started feeling I was really adapting to the cycle. Or failing to, but since I'm feeling fresher than yesterday, I'd say it's working out. But the awesome part about the feeling of tiredness is, you have dozes during the day to catch it up. Nothing as refreshing as a noonly doze, followed by a shower. You're never that tired that you could just fall asleep randomly, and you can just take a refreshing doze to keep going for another few hours.
Do I regret it?
Why would I? Being conscious about the fact that you're awake and the world is sleeping is a remarkable experience, it fills you with a powerful and beautiful feeling. You can read on the feelings in detail in past blog, and be sure of it, in future blogs as well.
And it's not just taking nightly walks and bike rides that make it worth it. Just the fact that you have an added 4 hours a day and you can be productive all day long, it gives me another blow of self-consciousness that was quite satisfactory. All in all, I feel as if I've been reborn. I have the things I do now, and it feels as if I've cut off my feelings on things I encountered before starting this cycle. It's refreshing, and it makes me happy.
The only downside is getting used to it. The basic idea of getting out of bed at 7 AM is wonderful, but I don't think a lot of students are accustomed to it, just like taking planned dozes. But once you get used to it, and I still need to get more used to it, there are only upsides when you can combine it with your obligations like lessons, appointments and hobbies you have to attend. But the everyman is very flexible in that way so I won't ever have to quit or miss a lot of dozes because of that.
Win is all around it. Win.
And now, in the hope to see all of you join me in the glorious land of Everyman, I wish you a good day and night,
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