Courtesy of Dustin Curtis

Overview
I’ve always been fascinated by sleep and what happens to us while we are sleeping, but that’s for a later day. I came across this post one day and thought that I’d like to try this – Polyphasic Sleep – out for a little while and see what happens. Polyphasic Sleep is the idea of distributed sleep over a 24 hour period, usually with naps. Most people sleep in one clip over several hours (generally at night for at least 6-8 hours). Polyphasic Sleep has several different methods with the extreme called Uberman, which is six 20 minute naps over the course of 24 hours. I’m going to scale that back a bit to the Everyman (shown above), which is two 20 minute naps and 4.5 hours of core sleep.

Theory
Basically the idea here is that REM sleep, which is the phase of sleep where dreams occur, is the most beneficial to us. Now, I’m not sure that’s the case, but at least for this experiment, we’ll take it as fact. Everyone that’s been overworked and hasn’t had sleep in a long time, such as 24 hours or more, has experienced waking dreams. This is when you find yourself having a dream when you are awake, duh . This is your body’s self-defense mechanism to try and recover itself, despite you. So it stands to make sense that REM sleep is the phase of sleep that is most crucial.

Objective
As many of you know I’m big into productivity, but at the same time like my sleep as well. Lately I’ve been finding myself setting my alarm at weird hours, such as 2:30am, 4am, etc just so I can get up and get some work done. After doing it about 15-20 times, I would say that on average, I’ve been successful with it about half the time. Why? Well because I was exhausted and wound up hitting the snooze button until it was the normal time to get up, 6:30am. So because of my workload, I’d like to try and see how well this works out and if I can get extra hours back in my day (one of the things I’m aiming for this year), that would be golden.

Results
I will be posting my results on here and via Twitter as well. I figure by showing my results not only will it be documented, others curious to this form of sleeping can see the results of such an experiment.