Monday, April 30, 2007

Day 0 - Prologue

Tomorrow is the big day: I'm going to start my Uberman Sleep Schedule. I will reduce total sleep time to 2-2.5 hours by splitting my nocturnal sleep into several naps all over the day. For everyone who still doesn't know what Uberman and polyphasic sleep is all about, click on "Polyphasic Sleep?" for all the info.

Some facts about me:
I'm a 20 year old German, currently living somewhere around Cologne. Some might think that this is too young to try out Uberman, but I think I'm ready. Plus I don't think that I will have the time again for this in the next years. I just finished my Zivildienst, a popular alternative to the military service every male German has to do. It's 9 months of work in a social institution, in my case it was the nearest protestant church. Now I almost have no work, no duties, nothing at all until October.

I have been healthy all my life. I don't even remember the last time I had a flu or something like that. I have no allergies, no chronic illnesses. For Uberman I will completely change my diet to almost vegan. I think I will still eat some milk and eggs in bread and pasta, but I will avoid anything else. I'm not a heavy coffee or alcohol drinker, so that won't be a problem.

I first read of Uberman in early February and I was amazed in an instant. I was searching for a method to sleep less, and after I found some websites about weird meditation training that would take years to learn, I found the "Uberman Sleep Schedule" and read Steve Pavlina's Blog. From that moment I prepared myself for my own Uberman sleep. Since then I slept kind of biphasic with a 6 hour core sleep and a 25 minutes nap in the middle of the day. Yes, a 6 hours core sleep is far from short, but until then I slept about 7-8 hours a night. I used my 25 minutes nap to get used to daytime napping and to train myself to fall into sleep as fast as I can. I think I had about 1 or 2 REM naps in this 3 months, but I'm not really sure of that. At the same time I learned to stand up immediately after the alarm. This didn't take more than a week. After all, I think I'm really prepared to face this.


My sleep schedule will be a classic Uberman, 20-25 minutes of sleep every 4 hours. But instead of the standart 4-8-12 schedule I chose 3:20 - 7:20 and 11:20. Today I will go to bed at 12.50 am set my alarm to 03.50, since I'm planning to start with 30 minute naps in the first two days. And yes, I will use an alarm(this wonderful thing on the right), not a timer. There is no am and pm in Germany, so I won't be able to mix this up when setting the alarm.

So why am I doing all this? It's the same reason that drives everyone into this: More time. There are too much books I want to read, too much games I want to play. I want to spend more time with my piano and maybe learn how to play a guitar. And besides I want to hang out with my friends. One could argue that I DO have enough time (until October), but that's not enough for me if I can push it. In addition I'm really curious if it works for me, and if and how the perception of time and this world changes.
I'm looking forward to the results!



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