Pre-polyphasic Sleep

As I mentioned in my previous blog, I am intrigued by Polyphasic sleep and wanted to try this for myself. Often overwhelmed by the demands of full-time work, being a mother, author, volunteer, soon-to-be student, and trying to eke out time for myself, I am looking for options. In addition, I have a non-monophasic sleep cycle as it is, so finding solutions to my sleeplessness in the middle of the night would be wonderful too.

Traditionally, my sleep cycle typically looks like this:

8:00 pm to between 12:00 - 2:00 am: Sleep
12:00 - 2:00 am to 4:00 - 5:30 am: Tossing and turning, wide awake
4:00 - 5:30 am: Possibly falling back to sleep
5:30 am: alarm and time to get up
Life
5:00 pm: return home from work

At this point I either fall on the couch and nap for 20 - 90 minutes or I push through until bedtime at 8:00 pm.
Weekends I nap once during the day for 20 - 90 minutes in the early afternoon, if needed.

So, for two days I tracked my sleep schedule. This time, however, I chose to get up when I was wide awake at night and be productive (hence the increased blogs, among other things). I chose to do this organically (meaning following my need to sleep with no alarm clocks). Here are my findings:

Friday, March 29

I woke up at 6:30 am.
1:30 - 3:00 pm: nap
9:00 pm - 1:20 am: sleep
I got up and decided to stay up until I felt ready to sleep again.

Saturday, March 30

5:00 - 7:00 am: sleep
3:00 - 3:20 pm: nap, awakened by my oldest son who I was telling about polyphasic sleep and he kept my nap to 20 minutes :-)
10:00 pm - 7:30 am: sleep

Sunday, March 31

6:00 - 6:30 pm: fell asleep watching a documentary
8:00 - 10:00 pm: I tried to fall asleep for two hours then just got up

Monday, April 1

12:00 am - 3:15 am: sleep
5:00 - 5:30 am: sleep, awakened by alarm

It's at this point that I think, why not just start this polyphasic sleep experiment and see how it goes? My sleep schedule has already started in that direction and I have the flexibility right now to test this fully. My thought was to focus on obtaining an Uberman schedule of naps at 2, 6, 10, 2 , 6, 10 but to initially allow flexibility at night until I had the schedule down during the day. Historically I am an early riser so my plan was to start with something like this: naps at 6 am, 10 am, 2 pm, 6 pm, and sleep from 10 pm to 2 am. So here it goes, Day One.