My failure post

I've been dreading posting this, but here it goes.

About 12 hours ago, I woke up from roughly 24 hours of sleep. That means I fell asleep on day 15, and woke up on what should have been day 16. It was a choice to lay down for a nap a bit early--I went to sleep at 1 planning to wake up at 2, but that didn't happen. It actually wasn't 24 hours straight; I think I woke up around 1 AM and stayed up until around 3 AM, then went back to bed.

After trying as hard as I did, I cannot conclude anything but this: for me, for now, it was impossible.

I might post more thoughts later.

Days 13 and 14: Improvement I don't need to look for

I sometimes still nod off at low-activity times, although it's very rare now. Other than that, though, evidence for my successful adaptation is pretty easy to see. Throughout all of today and yesterday I've had periods where I've felt tired, but never debilitatingly so, and those periods of fatigue were only when I wasn't moving around.

Surprisingly enough, while I have had naps with dreams, I've not yet had any one nap that felt fantastic. In my first attempt at uberman I had either one or two (can't remember which), but the type of nap was very distinct; if I had one, I would have known it.

For the last nap of day 14 and the first nap of day 15 (I just got up from it) I woke up before any alarm went off, feeling good, although there was a small amount of disorientation for both of them (I didn't know why I had woken up, for example, at first when I woke up).

Day 12: Mixed Signals, but Definite Improvement

The time between my first and second naps today was bearable, but after I woke up from my second nap I was pretty zombified. After a long while, I got ready to start to walk to town, then did so. But after a while, I started dozing off while I was walking. I should have been alarmed enough then to stop and call for a ride back home, but I shrugged it off and kept walking, in the hope that I would be much less after a little more walking. At one point I woke up from standing on the side of the road, and watched my Mom's car pull over. About the time that I realized I had been sleeping in one place, just standing up, I realized that she must have seen that and was more than freaked out. I got in the car and we headed home. On the way I promised her I wouldn't walk to town again without someone walking with me. The promised wasn't forced on my part, since I knew that dozing, standing up, on the side of a 45 mph road with no sidewalk, definitely wasn't safe.

The third nap of the day wasn't that spectacular, but after the fifth and sixth naps, I had a very high amount of energy. That was cool enough, but then on the first nap of the 13th day it was the same thing--I woke up feeling energized, and so far (I haven't taken the second nap yet) it has lasted throughout the whole waking period, even through 25 minutes of sitting quietly in a passenger seat of a car.

Wow, day 13 already. It seems like a dream come true that I'm actually adapting.

Day 11 with evidence for adjustment

Since before my first nap (1:40 - 2:00 AM) today (6-23-08), I hung out with my dad so he could make sure I woke up from my first and second naps, and get me on my way to walking into town in the morning. He stayed up with me the same way on the morning of the 6th day, too. I remember what it was like, the first night, and by comparing the two, it became very obvious to me how much I had improved already in terms of energy.

In every car ride with him (four total for each day, two of which lasted more than 30 minutes) I nodded off pretty much constantly the first night I stayed up with him, but this morning I didn't even feel tired on any of the rides except for near the end of the last one, around 6:40 AM or so. Also, last time I distinctly remember being aware of, and fighting off, that urge to sleep. I remember it was there most of the morning that day, but today, I didn't feel tired at all, except for the aforementioned part of the last drive, and around a half an hour before Nap 2.

The effectiveness of my naps still does seem pretty random, though; some naps I'll feel so refreshed I feel jittery, but some naps I'll wake up and only want to go back to bed (although the latter is more rare now).

Day 10 and sitting in an easychair.

But first, I'm going to talk about day 9.

My first nap was a pretty good nap, but the second nap was a bit of a chore to wake up to. I went to town and back and took my 3rd nap. I woke up from that nap feeling as if I'd woken up from a "normal" night's sleep earlier than I should have. About an hour later, I was walking to a different room for something (I think to get socks) and I just kind of fell asleep while standing up for a bit. I woke up halfway down to the floor. I had enough time to catch myself, but I still made some noise. My mom rushed out and was clearly freaked out (I had just basically collapsed, afterall).

So I agreed that we'd go see a walk-in clinic, where they didn't give me any useful information that I didn't already know. I know, I'm sleep deprived, and I know, you don't suggest it. After a while of him repeating that and me repeating I'm going to try it, we left the clinic to barely make it in time for my 4th nap of the day. That nap wasn't particularly refreshing or disappointing.

A large part of the waking period from Nap 4 to Nap 5 was pretty miserable. Somehow I'd gotten a really depressed and hopeless about the whole thing. I started to feel better when I realized, you know what, I haven't overlept yet; I still have a chance, and a good one. Every nap since then has actually left me pretty refreshed, and I've been finding that I can sit in comfortable chairs and even lie down for a bit, without any danger of falling asleep or nodding off (unless I intend to like for my naps).

Now I'm getting pretty close to taking the fisrt nap of Day 10, and I am getting pretty excited over the idea that I could finally be pulling out of the harder part of the adjustment.

First dream nap

I had my first dream nap recently--Nap 4 (1:20-2:00 PM) of yesterday/day 7 (6-20-08), and this last nap (Nap 1 of Day 8) refreshed me more than a single nap had for at least a couple of days. Also, I've been trying out sitting on couches again when someone can watch me and make sure I don't dose off, and I find I can sit on them for longer than I could sit in a car without nodding off. It seems a bit early to say so, at day 8, but I could be already coming out of the worst part of this. Don't get me wrong, I would be ecstatic if I knew that for sure--it's just too much hope and not enough evidence to really get me excited.

A vague update on the past few days

There have been some changes since my last post, besides the lack of videos. I've decided to take every activity but the 6a and 6p "walk to town" out. I realized that I stay awake much easier if I'm just doing the stuff that sounds fun at the time. On the night of the 6th, I played with Knex pretty much the whole night with my friend, and I was wide awake the whole time.

And speaking of being awake, these first seven days of adjustment have been very confusing. I felt pretty much the same (pretty alert, not very tired) throughout the whole adjustment. There have only been 3 times where I felt seriously sleep-deprived. Two you can read about in previous posts, and the other is very recent: Between my 10:00 AM and 6:00 PM naps today, I was extremely sleep-deprived. It was the most intense sleep-dep I've experienced so far in this experiment, and thankfully, my girlfriend was over to help me stay up. Now, after I've woken up from my 6 AM nap, I'm back to normal again.

Let me define normal real quick, before I end this post: When say I feel normal throughout this experiment, I mean that as long as I'm not bored, I feel awake. As long as I keep myself busy. During these times, a to-do list and a box of Knex goes a long way. But when I'm feeling sleep-deprived like in the previous paragraph, all I can really do is stay physically active and bear it out.