Sleep Deprivation

I have been on a crazy schedule for nearly five months now. A few observations…

1. I rarely ever have dreams. My sleep times are too short and I don’t get into that deep sleep where dreams occur. I recently had a weekend where I slept for 9-10 hours on both Friday and Saturday night. I woke up very excited that I had dreams!
2. Regardless of how little sleep I got, I never felt tired during the first three months or so. For the last six weeks or so, I have noticed that I feel mentally fatigued during the day. I still do not feel physically fatigued at all. I think this is a result of making the decision to not give in to being tired. It is amazing what you can control just by making a decision and having the determination to follow through. Your body will cooperate with you if you know how to make it work. It is all mental, up to certain extremes and limits. I have had a harder time staying focused on tasks, and I have a harder time remembering a complex list of activities that I need to accomplish. I have resorted to making lists just to make sure I don’t miss something, and to insure the highest priority projects get completed first.
3. I have noticed several sleep deprivation symptoms going on. They include feeling light headed, vertigo if I stand up or turn too fast, headaches more frequently than normal, etc… As a result, I have been clocking out at Intel and going home sooner than 3:00am when I finish my water chemistry control scope. As a result, I have been getting 5 ½ to 6 hours of sleep several nights a week, which seems to be helping. Since the rental house is sold, I have much more flexibility in our budget and don’t need to work 40 hours there, if my scope does not require it.
4. When reading about sleep deprivation symptoms, I stumbled across some information about Polyphasic sleep. I remember reading one time that Thomas Edison only took four 30 minute naps a day, spaced throughout the day, without a long sleep period. I’m not sure I completely believed that. I always thought it was a personal detail about him that may have been exaggerated by legend over a very long period of time. Our body needs REM sleep to function properly. If we sleep for eight hours, we go through various sleep cycles. Typically, only 2-3 hours of the 8 hours is REM sleep. Polyphasic sleep is where you train your body to enter REM sleep immediately when you go to sleep, and skip the other sleep cycles. If you take four to six 30 minute naps a day that are 100% REM sleep, your body gets what it needs to function, without the additional investment of 4-6 hours of sleep. This gives you 21-22 productive hours a day, instead of 16-18 hours per day on a normal (Monophasic) sleep schedule. I guess it takes about a month to properly train your body to enter REM sleep immediately. I would love to learn more about this, and give it a try. Right now, I am of the Monophasic ilk, but I’m just not getting enough REM sleep per night.