Day 11 (Fighting for the New Life)
(8:38 p.m.) Slept 4 hours and 30 minutes last night and woke up at 8:30 a.m. My sister has been quite supportive. We drove to see this garden this morning. We arrived at 1:00 p.m. I found a chair inside and laid down immediately. I think I fell into sleep, although I am not sure how deep (My sense is quite numb this days). Woke up at 1:15 p.m. I found myself waking up in 15 minutes quite often these days.

Later I also tried to nap on the beach at 5:30 p.m. in vain. My mind was wadering again.

(10:30 p.m.) I am in that state again. Very sleepy. Maybe I should do a reboot.

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1:15 p.m. -- 1:35 p.m. Woke up at 1:30 p.m. Not sure how deep, though.
5:30 p.m. -- 6:50 p.m. Tried to nap on the beach, unsuccessful.
9:30 p.m. -- 10:20 p.m. The alarm didn't go off (I swear)
1:20 a.m. -- 1:48 a.m. Amazing. Although I felt tired and sleepy, I always have a short wake up around 20 minues. If I chose to I could still.

Day 10 (the Fall towards the Mono Side)
(3:01 p.m.) Dude, I am so mono now. I had a friend coming yesterdya and he was leaving today. So I had to go and have dinner with him. After trying to cut the grass in the backyard with my roomate (you should be surprised at how high they can grow if you let them), it was alreaddy past 9 p.m. So I had to head out in a hurry to meet him and another friend. I had an appointment today around that area. So I stayed at my friend's place instead of going home to avoid the 30 minutes driving and the traffic. Somehow I didn't feel like stick to the schedule. I crashed at 1 a.m. and slept all the way till 7:30 a.m. (I set the clock to 6:30 a.m. by mistake, though). Waking up in the morning, I don't feel rested at all. This is very intersting, because I just felt like I haven't been sleeping well for a long time.

Now look back what happened, I kind of regret that I was not able to keep the schedule. I could have waited another 20 minutes before going to my friend's place, and still stick to the schdule even when I was at his place. But I chickened out. The only thing that I have gained is the confidence that I can drive 5 hours today after work and there should be no problem.

I am driving to visit my sister this afternoon. Hopefully I can explain it to her and keep my schedule.

(2:03 a.m.) Just arrived. Tried to take a nap on the road side. The environment was actually better than the office. I parked my car at the corner of Carl's Jr.'s parking lot, where it was very quiet. However, I couldn't sleep because I messed up my sleeping schedule yesterday. Now I regreted it more. I am going to try a nap now and be back in 30 minutes.

(Next day 8:35 p.m.) Couldn't figure out how to work with that dial up of the computer yesterday so I gave up. Actually, I was able to nap at 2 a.m., which is sort of surprising.

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1:00 p.m. Skipped
5:00 p.m. Skipped (Yeah yeah yeah I know)
10:30 p.m. Tried at road side on HighWay 5 not successful (of course)
2:20 a.m. -- 2:50 a.m. Woke up in the LOUD alarms. Feeling sleepy.

Day 9 (Day 3 on 3-4-20 schedule)
(9.16 a.m.) I think I am even more sleepy today. I have to say that it is not a good feeling. I said before that I haven't felt much worse than before I join the schedule, and now I think I do. And a week DOES sound like a long time to endure to adjust.

I am having some appointment tomorrow, and I am going to drive 5 hours in the evening. So I think I'll do a 'reboot', i.e., crashing sometime in the evening, as early as possible.

(2:02 p.m.) I am right now both happy and sad. I took the nap at 1:15 p.m. and fell right into REM sleep. Good eh? But I was awaken by a knock on the door. I didn't want to move so I stayed there silently. No more knocks, I turned and fell sleep again, anothre REM. Impressive isn't it? BUT I was awaken AGAIN by a louder knock. *GROAN*. I looked at the watch and 15 minutes passed, so I gave it up. Needless to say, I don't feel rested (well, just image how you would feel if you get a phone call at 3 a.m. then another one at 4 a.m.).

Moral of the story: Buy a "No-disturb-if-not-necessary" sign.

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1:15 p.m. -- 1:30 p.m. Fell in sleep twice and being waken up twice in 15 minutes.
5:10 p.m. -- 5:40 p.m. Fell in sleep right away.
9 p.m. and 1 a.m. nap skipped, as explained in next day.

Day 8
(11:33 a.m.) Yesterday I was pretty sleepy. I stood up until 4:30 a.m. I wanted to stay until 5 a.m. but I felt very sleepy at the end. I knew that it might happen that I pass the period and ended up not able to sleep after 5 a.m. (it happened to me before). So I hit the sack and went straight to sleep. This morning it was very hard for me to get up. I managed to get out of bed at 8:15 a.m., after the third time I hit the snoozer. I sat in the bed with eyes closed for a while, stretched and took a shower. Now I am feeling a lot better.

So I think I have confirmed two things.

1. Morning exercise is more or less necessary even just for the purpose of getting out of bed. Delltamale on yahoo group uberman goes out for jogging every morning, and I'd say that is a good idea. However, I am saving the exercise for afternoon, after my nap at 5 p.m. This is because I think after a day's mental work, physical workout would be more necessary. So I would suggest some Yoga (if not taking too long). I'll go look up some of the QiGong links and post them here if I can find English version (FaLun Gong morning practice is supposed to be good, as far as I see, EXCEPT the basic concept of it is totally strange and against the general ideas.)
   


2. 4 and a half hour sleep WAS too much for me to go polyphasic. I thought I was just adapting well last week because I didn't feel too bad the whole time. The fact is that I was able to get away with a short night sleep and SOME naps during the day. I don't think this is a failure, though, because now I know I still have some schedule to fall back on even if I decide to quit being a uberman. After all, we have seen problems of coordinating the sleeping schedule with this monophasic society almost on all the posts and no one has a good enough solution. My plan is to be frank about it, let everyone know what I am doing, and nap everywhere I go.
   

BTW, you might see spelling or grammar errors in the posts, this is not due to lack of sleep. My English is simply not good enough catch them the first time I write them. =)

(3:47 p.m.) There is definitely a issue in coordinating with the rest of the world. I woke up from the 1 p.m. nap only to find out that the QA has been looking for me. There is a pretty seriouse bug in it and the build has to wait for me to fix the code and check in. Fortunately she knew that I mighbe be in nap so she waited for me patiently. I wonder what would happen if something a lot more seriouse occurr and you have to give up your naps. So I'd say uberman's sleeping schedule is probably best for people who don't have to be on call all the time. "Yes I know the world is coming to an end in half an hour but I really need this 20 minutes nap so that I can deal with it" might not be a good thing to say.

(10:16 p.m.) I was finally able to sleep at the 9 p.m. nap. However, last two naps don't feel that good somewhat. Normally I would feel refreshed after waking up from a nap (sometimes after the sleeping inertia). But for the last two I feel tired. I don't quite recall dreaming and I didn't wake up by myself. I wonder if it is because my body is just tired because I didn't get enough sleep.

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1:30 p.m. -- 2:00 p.m. I'd say it is a pretty good nap and I woke up 5 minutes before the alarm. Got up on my feet immdiately and feeling pretty good.
4:50 p.m. -- 5:20 p.m.
9.00 p.m. -- 9:30 p.m. The last two naps are sort of strange. I think I slept but I don't feel very refreshed.
1:00 a.m. -- 1: 30 a.m. Again

Day 7
(4:05 p.m.) So I took a three-hour core sleep last night, from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. I was very sleepy when I woke up in the morning and didn't want to get out of bed. This proves that my previouse 4 hours and 30 minutes core sleep was too much and that my nap during the day was really a classical nap. The funny part was that I actually woke up by myself at around 7:50 a.m. or so. Needless to say that I was quite surprised. But I made a mistake of not getting up immediately and waited in bed instead. Of course, I dozed off and was waken up by the loud alarm. And of couse, I felt very bad and regreated for it for the morning.

So my morning was a little bit sleepy. This helped my nap at 1:00 p.m. I dozed off fairly quickly but somehow something woke me up immediately. I was pretty upset about it because I could have had a good REM nap. I stayed in my chair for another 10 or 15 minutes and dozed off again. I am pretty sure that I went into sleep this time, because I didn't hear the two warning sounds at all (If you still remember the egg time with special featuring we bought last time). I definitely felt the sleep inertia and it took me about 30 minutes or so to get over it. After that I really felt refreshed, although only for a while. Right now I feel kind of tired and my mind is somewhat tense, sort of like one of the nights when I had to work overtime. But like I stated at the beginning, my sleeping has been like this for quite a while, so there is really nothing I feel that I am losing. Instead, I read quite a few books and even played the vedio game last night for a couple of hours. However, playing vedio game seems to make my mind tense again and hard to fall into sleep. Also because I am in this sleeping schedule for the time, I'd better utilize the extra time to do something more meaningful.

I read about potential negative effect that some people are concerned of. It looks to me that those negative effects are also similar to those caused by drinking. So I'll stop drinking to at least make it up. I am also doing training and trying to eat healthy. Unfortunately I caught a cold last night (you really need a blanket during the nap), so I might be off the schedule for a couple days if necessary. I'll see how it goes for today, though.

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1:20 p.m. -- 2:00 p.m. Dozed off then woke up immediately (probably by some sound). Then dozed off again at the end of the nap.
6:15 p.m. -- 6.45 p.m. Slept a littlte bit.
8:45 p.m. -- 9:15 p.m. 9 p.m. nap has never been good for me and I don't even get rest these days. This is really frustrating.
1:15 a.m. -- 1:45 a.m. Slept pretty deep because the alarm almost didn't wake me up. Now I am really sleepy. It'll be intersting to see how I feel tomorrow.

Day 6
Took a look at some of the links related to uberman's sleeping schedule and realized that the reason that I am feeling fine, even without the proper nap, was because I didn't do it correctly. I have been sleeping too much, that is. It sounds kind of funny but the reason of that is because I need to train my brain, according to a guy who tried it for half a year, to know that I am not going to take full sleep at night and it has to take whatever naps as a chance of refreshing. So last night I slept for only 4 hours. I am thinking of cutting it to 3 hours, though, because I found it harder to get up this morning. This kind of fits into the theory of 1 hour and 30 minutes sleeping cycle.

Two of my books are here. I also bought two hiking books about the local area. If I can go hard core polyphasic, I will be able to finish them. :)

(2:09 a.m.) I definitely think I should cut the core sleep time to 3 hours, because I am still not used to the naps. So instead of real uberman's sleep schedule, I think I am faking it, by putting in more energy. Eventually I might adjust but the process might be too long. I should set sometime to just do the core polyphasic. I think I should start with a Friday, so that I have a weekend to experiment it without affecting my work too much. However, the problem now is that I am planning driving 5 hours to visit my sister this weekend so it'll be very dangerous if I don't have enough sleep. And next weekend is the independence day.

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1:00 p.m. -- 1:30 p.m. Half slept I guess. During the nap I am easily waken by the sounds or voices around me.
5:00 p.m. -- 5:30 p.m. No sleep
9:00 p.m. -- 9:30 p.m. No sleep (I have never been able to nap at home)
1:00 a.m. -- 1:30 a.m. I don't know. I don't think so.

Day 5
After the almost complete slip yesterday, I think a "Day 1" should suite it better. I went to bed at almost 4:00 a.m. in the morning, and I thought for sure that I was going to sleep until the afternoon, like one of the "old" days. Surprisingly, I woke up at 8:00 a.m., again! Considering this is the fifth day that I am keeping this schedule, I'd say the effect is pretty impressive. However, I think I made a mistake. I figured that since I slipped three naps yesterday, I better make it up by sleeping more. So I went back and slept until 10:00 a.m. That seemed to be a bad idea, because I felt tired from the nap. And for the past three days, I actually felt refreshed after it.

Oh, during the lunch, my friend told me that she avoid computer or TV screens before she go to sleep. She felt that staring at the screen before going to bed makes it hard to fall asleep. I took the advice and read for twenty minutes before the nap. Well, I cannot say for sure if it worked, but I did doze off and woke up by the sound of a door closing. (I think a quiet environment is very important to nap).

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1:30 p.m. -- 2:00 p.m. Slept
6:00 p.m. -- 6:20 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. -- 10:20 p.m. unsuccessful
2:00 a.m. -- 2:30 a.m. Read before nap and was able to sleep.

Day 4
(The following is written on Monday morning 12:54 a.m.)

Have I ever told you that how stink I think the time-out in blogger is? I just lost another paragraph because I got a long email from an old friend! !@#!%!#$%!@#

Anyway, I woke up at 8 a.m. I found out that nowadays it is very easy for me to get up early, which I take as a good sign. Last night (which is Friday night), a friend called me asking if I could make it 11:00 a.m. for the lunch. And I was able to say YES! So no matter what happens, I have learned that a well-scheduled life can do you a lot of benefit, to which some might say, "DUH!" Well, I have found it so true that I have to share with everyone.

Anyway, another interesting thing I found out is that taking a nap outside your house or your office is not as hard as it seems. After lunch with my friend, it was 1:30 p.m. and I had passed my naptime. So I figure what the heck I'll just park somewhere and take a nap. So I just pulled over on the street side, pulled down the seat and dozed for 15 minutes. I could have gone more but I forgot how hot the car could be when parked directly under the sun. So there is another lesson for everyone, always park your car in the shade if you want to take a nap in it.

I was pretty excited about this road-side-napping success, because this means that I CAN do long hour activities and still maintain my sleeping plan. However, I was not able to keep the schedule for the rest of the day. First I was so upset that I couldn't even find a watch that I want around the area, that I drove a long way to another shopping mall and looked there. And I forgot about the nap totally. Then it was the birthday party, and I was not able to work out the courage to step out of the house and take my nap. So this still pose the same question of how our polyphasic sleepers can deal with the activities of the rest of the world.

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1:30 p.m. napped for 15 minutes. Missed all other naps.