Some background

Polyphasic sleep has intrigued me for a long time, but my knowledge of it was superficial at best. This changed recently, among others due to mention in LifeHacker. One tidbit that struck me was the idea that what we consider now "standard", namely sleeping one continuous block of time during the night, is actually a modern practice. Before electric lighting allowed us to stay active into the night, people apparently slept in what is essentially a biphasic mode, going to sleep soon after dark, waking up around midnight, then falling asleep again for a "second sleep". The time between sleeps was variously devoted to meditation, prayer, socializing, and obviously sex.

If monophasic sleeping is something evolutionarily and technologically new, what are the implications? We are all very aware of the difficulty many people have getting up in the morning, or falling asleep at night, or even the physical pain that can arise from spending so many hours in bed (this is probably very age-dependent).

In any case, one thing many if not most people seem to agree on is that we would like to have more hours in the day. I personally cannot understand "boredom". There are so many interesting things to do! In an era of readily available information, it is all too easy to accumulate huge backlogs of things one wants to read, talks/movies one wants to watch, music one wants to sample. There is also plenty of content one may want to produce (read: paper writing!) but there aren't enough hours in the day, and it's all too easy to be too tired to perform. So what is the solution?

During the last month I read quite a bit about different sleep patterns. I read about the 28 hour day, with sleep times shifting daily four hours at a time, coming back into sync with the standard 24-hour clock weekly. An interesting concept, but one that requires a very specific setup, and the gains appear to be rather limited. One ends up sleeping less, but not that much less.

Much more interesting are the "Uberman" and the "Dymaxion" sleep patterns: six evenly-spaced naps of 20 minutes each, or four naps of 30 minutes each, respectively... clocking a grand total of two hours of sleep per 24 hour period. Rather extraordinary if one can achieve it, and some of the reports online are extremely enticing. In particular, the resulting ability to fall asleep at will (and enter REM sleep directly) is very attractive. Conceptually, it is even more interesting that under either of these sleep patterns, one effectively doesn't have a time zone anymore. If one manages to sleep regularly every four or six hours (depending on the pattern), one lives in continuous time, barely punctuated by the short naps in a fully symmetric pattern. I do wonder how confusing this may be.

A less extreme regimen, and one that appears to be easier to achieve, is the "Everyman" sleep pattern. There are a few varieties of this, depending on how long the "core" night sleep is, and how many naps one takes along the day.

I have not yet decided what I'm going to attempt. My current guess is that some variant of Everyman may be best suited for my needs and possibilities.