Polyphasic sleep (getting by on 3hrs of naps a day)

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Basically, what you do is take a nap every 20-30 minutes every 4-6 hours in the day. The first week will be very difficult and you'll need to *fight* to follow the schedule no matter how your sleep deprivation is making you feel like sh*t.

Then afterwards, your body will soon adjust to this new schedule and you feel well rested despite only napping a few hours a day. You'll still feel very sleep deprived again if you miss a nap.

I guess this is not practical if you have a job or a very active social life but when I was in college and taking more than my recommended courseload, I resorted to this to keep up. I also tried it out of novelty at first but it later became more of a necessity once I structured my commitments around having so much free time available..

Anyone try this?

I've read about this a good deal. Thing is, as an ADHD patient, I suffer from restless sleep. It's hard enough to fall asleep once every day, let alone six times very interesting concept though.

I think I'm almost doing that without even trying, but my naps are longer, more like 2 hours. It seems to me that I've divided every 24 hours into 2 days i.e. repeat breakfast, lunch, dinner and other routines - twice in every 24 hours.

I think it was Dali that sat at a table holding a pen upright in his hand and had a nap. When the pen fell, it woke him. He said he never needed more sleep than that.

I read about this a while back, it interested me, but I don't like the idea. While the extra time would be nice, I'm firmly into the routine of sleeping once a day.

Heh. I just started working on the Uberman. For the record, the Dymaxion (day divided into 4 blocks) has no recorded instances of success except for Bucky Fuller, and his success is in doubt.

If you're worried about the way the Uberman works, you could try the Everyman (3 hours at night, 5 hours awake, 20 minutes asleep until you get back to the 3 hours at night again).

Anyways, I've had some trouble with oversleeping (I've been forgetting to turn on alarms, my alarm clock getting unplugged, etc), but I'm keeping at it. Aside from the days that I oversleep, I've been doing really well.

Edit: BTW, these are the articles I read when starting:

Steve Pavlina's Uberman log

PureDoxyk's article on Everything2

and tes' article on Kuro5hin

This has become semi-normal with me.