After twelve days of polyphasic napping, I’m pretty much into the routine and have experienced the full 24 hour sleep/wake cycle enough that I’m starting to notice patterns.
Quality of sleep vs. conditions
Firstly, depending on the time of day, and what day of the week it is, I’m either napping in bed, or in my chair in the living room. This is due to my husband’s schedule, and I can’t nap in the bedroom while he is sleeping there because my alarm will wake him. Generally, while he’s up and about, I nap in bed. When he’s in bed, I nap in my chair. I wish I could say there was a constant pattern all week, but there isn’t really. His sleep times differ depending on the day of the week. One thing that does stay constant: every time I have to sleep in my chair, it is sometime during the sunlight hours.
How does this affect me?
I find that though I CAN sleep in my chair, and it’s really not as uncomfortable as it sounds, I do have a harder time falling asleep there and sometimes I don’t fall asleep at all and effectively end up missing a daytime nap. And because chair-naps only occur during sunlight hours, out in a public room, it may not actually be the chair that is affecting my ability to nap there.
We have blackout curtains on our windows, in both the bedroom, living room window, and over the sliding glass doors in the living room. Light does come in to the living room through the kitchen, though I cannot honestly say that light bothers my sleep if I’m tired enough for sleeping.
We also have two cats who tend to want to crawl all over me, or chase each other, or get into something noisy, or just be assholes to get my attention. If I’m already asleep, this won’t wake me up. But if I’m trying to get to sleep, this makes it very difficult. I will have a solution to this (spare room) once my visiting sister leaves, but for now, I cannot avoid the cats during this time. I’ve already found that I cannot nap in my office. It gets much too hot to sleep in there during the day.
Whether the chair itself is or is not an issue, it probably can’t be good for my back to lay in it the way I do. I had some backaches earlier a few hours after waking from my chair. So in the meantime while the spare room is occupied, I might buy a cheap sleeping bag, some foam, and jerry-rig a japanese style futon that I can sleep on the floor with, then roll up when I’m not using it.
Possibly Related Sleep Problems
Now, related or not to missing a daytime nap, sometimes I have trouble staying awake in the late evening, usually around 20:00 to 2:00. If we’re watching a movie during dinner, I’ll find myself nodding off close to the end. Though I generally wake up again almost immediately, the forceful brain shutdown is ill timed, and annoying, and persistent. If I don’t excuse myself for a nap when this starts happening, I experience a period of stop-start-stop-start and just feel like crap. My evening nap times are generally 18:00, and 22:00, and if I end up stop-starting anytime between then, I noticed that any actual REMd naps I get between then and 2:00 just leave me more tired, with drooping eyes that won’t stay open, even after an hour of trying to being awake and trying to do things.
Once I get that 2:00 nap though, I’ll either feel tired still for about a half hour, or I wake up feeling good. I can live with both of those conditions. But I think I might have to add an extra 15 minute nap at around 20:00 if this continues to persist.
The Results
This is actually an amusing anecdote.
I can’t remember EXACTLY when this took place, whether it was after my 22:00 nap, or my 2:00, but I believe it was the 22:00 one. My alarm went off, I sat up, turned it off, and just kind of stared into the darkness for a few minutes. I couldn’t describe being tired exactly, nor alert and refreshed. I was just there, awake. I vaguely thought about setting my alarm for another fifteen minutes, but decided not to. Instead, I came out into the living room, picked up my netbook, and sat down. My sister was using my husband’s computer to play WoW, so she was in the room with me.
I clearly recall (yet at the same time, I think I was doing it on autopilot), navigating to the Pink Pepper forums, and clicking on a “new posts” link for a topic dedicated to posting links to truly WTF art to laugh at, which just happens to be about 47 pages long. I recall starting to read, and though I could clearly see the words in front of me, they weren’t actually penetrating my brain and making any real impression aside from the fact that I got a vague feeling of dejavu. That I had read these posts before.
Couldn’t have done though, because I knew I had clicked on the “new posts” button, which takes me directly to the last post that I had read.
As I’m scrolling along, I’m getting more and more confused. Why were these new posts all dated from January? Was there something wrong with the forum time? I knew I was nodding off at this time, stop-start-stop-start, while trying to read this stuff, so I began to think maybe I was actually dreaming. It had that same ethereal, almost nebulous quality my dreams usually take.
And then I came across a post that I had made. Specifically, a reply I had made to one of the other artists who had said in response to one wtf image, “AHH the leg on that german shepherd”. My reply had been “It looks like a twist tie :(”
Somehow, suddenly, just by simply reading that one semi-humorous line, BAM I was fully alert and awake, realizing exactly what had happened, and feeling really stupid about it. I think actually coming across a post I KNEW I had made at some point made me realize that I wasn’t fully dreaming, that I was aware on some level of what I was physically doing and still able to take in information even if I wasn’t fully processing it. Oddly enough, after snapping fully alert from that fiasco, I was no longer tired. I actually felt pretty good.
Now wait, it gets better.
My sister, who had been a few feet away, told me that while I had been sitting there in my little daze, we had the following conversation:
Me: Which neighbor do you want me to delete?
Her: What?
Me: Which neighbor do you want me to delete?
Her: What are you talking about?
Me: Which neighbor do you want me to delete?
Her: Um….. what are you doing?
Me: reading
Her: ooookaaay.
I’d like to say that she was making stuff up, but I actually do vaguely remember asking her that question, as though it made perfect sense to do so. Funny enough, there was nothing to do with neighbors or deleting actually going through my semi-conscious mind at the time. I had just felt compelled to say something, and that had come out.
Though if she hadn’t brought it up afterward, it’s entirely possible I would have completely forgotten about it.
And this happened probably because I had crappy daytime naps.
What am I doing with all my free time?
I recently made a small list of things that I’d like to try and do/learn with my extra waking hours. At the moment, I have not started any of them, because I am currently trying to get already in progress projects completed and to fruition before trying to expand my knowledge on new things. Still, got more books read than usual, with some time to play games, write, and get some business ventures underway that I had already started. Only when I have tied up a bunch of those loose ends, will I take on any new projects.