Archive for February, 2010

Polyphasic Sleeping Diary 2010: Part 2

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

In January 2nd of this year, I once again began the transition to polyphasic sleeping. Polyphasic sleeping is a sleeping pattern where you don’t sleep through the night in a block (monophasic sleeping) but take a series of naps throughout the day or night. There are a variety of polyphasic sleeping styles, from the Everyman, which is a block of three hours followed by three thirty minute naps during the day, to the Uberman schedule, which consists of six twenty minute naps spaced four hours apart.

I had previously lived on the Uberman schedule for eight months in 2009: you can read about those experiences, as well as more about the sleeping schedule itself, here. It has been an interesting learning experience going through transitioning to polyphasic sleeping a second time, and I feel that I have learnt many new things this time round.

Below is my diary from January 8th-January 24th. The first part can be read here. I stopped keeping a diary at this point because after a month your body has fully transitioned to the sleeping schedule and, while the psychological problems with being constantly awake continue, you do find that your body naturally starts wanting to fall asleep every four hours. It become harder to oversleep and when you do it happens for shorter periods of time than you would naturally sleep monophasically. That’s not so interesting to write about. :)

January 8th:

12:31am: 4pm and 8pm naps went fine. Looked at clock twice during midnight nap and feel fine. I’m guessing that’s the sleeping tablet-induced eight hours sleep then…

8:44am: Took 4am with some trepidation but got up fine, with some difficulty. For the 8am I made myself sleep with an arm outside the covers and slightly propped up on the pillow. I woke up by reaching out my arm and picking up my clock exactly as it began to go off, which was quite interesting. Just eaten, feel slightly sick and trembly. Stumbled down stairs, so sleep deprivation has kicked in.

8:24pm: 12pm went fine, 4pm I woke up from but have a vague memory of voluntarily going back to sleep and dozing in and out until half five. Got up to deal with guest polyphasic sleeper but decided to take another nap to try to clear the aching tiredness. Up ended turning off the alarm without realising and slept through until someone called me at half 7. 8pm nap, however, went as usual.

January 9th:

12am: Feared I would not wake up again, so I made sure to prop myself up with pillow and sleep with an arm above the duvet. Got up with some tiredness but felt quite well within fifteen minutes. Had drunk some irn bru and Jack Daniels beforehand, so particularly proud.

12pm: I woke up from my 4am feeling tired. I took a short acting-stimulant at one but not after, so the fact that I was able to sleep does suggest that it is possible to take them and stay on schedule. However, after the nap I was the only person in the house, so after I got up from my 4am and checked my email I went back to bed without setting an alarm. I woke up at 9am. Consequently do not feel fatigued but do feel tired – oversleeping seems good at the time…

January 10th:

12:40 am: One observation a flatmate just made is that a part of being asleep is the comfiness of the duvet, and that when you take it away, you become tempted to stay in bed and oversleep, not because you feel too tired to get up, but because of the comfiness of the duvet.

3:55pm: 4am nap overslept by 45 minutes. 8am I woke up fine, but due to absolute boredom I slept until 12:30pm. Was woken up twice and felt awake, so polyphasic has worked physically, but my lack of a laptop is taking its toll on my ability to motivate myself to stay awake. Buying a new one tomorrow.

10:12pm: Everyone was tired for the 8pm, so it would seem that we all overslept. I was out til 10 exactly. Ah dear.

January 11th:

12pm: Woke up from 4am nap fine, but due to my guest having fallen asleep in my bed next to me and not having a laptop to work on, I decided it would be easier to just sleep monophasically. Woke up several times but reached the same conclusion every time. Eventually got up at half ten. The thing about monophasic sleeping is that when you engage in it while polyphasic, it does feel just like a light switching off – you’re out and then you wake up ten hours later feeling as if no time has passed at all.

5:49pm: Took 4pm late as was out in town. Took it at about 4:45 instead. Noticing a definite increase in the desire to roll onto my front as opposed to lying on my side – this suggests I have now fully adapted physically to polyphasic sleeping. Mentally I have some way to go.

January 12th:

Woke up at 11am after taking the 8am nap. This was particularly interesting because neither me nor my guest at the time had felt particularly tired. We lay down fully expecting to get up again and just didn’t. I have experienced this before which suggests something of a secondary phase of adaptation, where your body has physically adjusted but there’s still something going on to make you oversleep. Because I have no memory of switching the alarm off, I cannot say what this is. Naps have otherwise gone fine today, and have felt myself relax into REM sleep at will, which is good. I am going to stop monitoring every nap now.

January 13th:

Had coursework to do. Procrastinated by sleeping from 1 til 9. I am a bad person. And it’s still there… Also took every nap today late because I was working too hard on other stuff. I can feel my body rebelling as a consequence. 8pm nap was highly restful, not sure why. Boredom is definitely a major part of the battle to avoid sleeping – if someone wants to go polyphasic they really need to think up a variety of tasks that don’t involve computers, tvs or reading, cos you eyes just hurt after a while and your brains turn to mush.

January 14:

Out from 1 til 5. My bad. Boredom again. Otherwise naps kept absolutely fine, do not feel tired. Amazing.

January 15:

I’m pretty sure the willpower required to get through the night is never going to be there when the alternative is coursework. On the other hand, planning to take my naps in the library tonight. Oversleeping impossible.

January 16:

Stopped keeping diary. Polyphasic now.

January 18th: Woke up at 11am. Had an essay due. Electricity went out in my house so I decamped to the library with caffeine, clock and dinner. Now 12pm and I have not overslept. Yay!

9:33pm: Woke up disoriented as fuck for the 8pm – but on time. 8 naps. Excellent. Feeling slightly fatigued though, but will be heading to the library in a bit.

January 19th:

One other thing I’ve been doing when I get tired is to just sit myself comfortably and not move for a while to allow myself to physically relax. One of the consequences of being awake 22 hours a day is that you end up feeling really quite creaky. It also provides a useful demarcation between activities so you don’t feel like you’re just experiencing endless time and everything is bleeding into each other.

January 20th:

Well, that was an adventure. Discovered that sleeping in chairs produced same quality of sleep but made it impossible to oversleep. Successfully spent 3 days and I think 17 naps consecutively awake, feeling mostly fine (though powered on caffeine for the very early hours of the morning so I could get my coursework done). Took a trip to London to attended a training day on the 19th, the first all day thing since I went polyphasic. Took 8am on the train no problem, the 12pm was delayed until after lunch and was taken sitting on a sofa in a hallway at the venue: good quality sleep. The 4pm had to be crammed into an access break and consequently only lasted ten minutes, which left me feeling a bit rough. As a result, I was typing up notes that eveing at about 7pm on the train, and my body just started to start down. No kidding, my vision started to darken and my muscles started relaxing. I realised something was wrong when I looked at what I had just typed and I’d written “”powder enflamed mad guy com then I counted how many hapennies did we eah on has i’ sure but it all happens at 58 this week, :)” Put myself down for a twenty minute nap at 7:30pm and then when I woke up reset the clock for another twenty minutes for my 8pm. However, woke up three minutes before the alarm was due to go off in utter confusion unable to work out what I was doing. Took a few minutes to clear.

Streak ended when I ate a very heavy meaty meal just before the midnight nap yesterday and, although I made it through it fine, felt sufficiently ill and disinclined to stay awake with the looming prospect of coursework that I went to sleep in my bed at 1am with the intention of getting up at 7am. I actually got up at 1pm today. I have no memory whatsoever of the alarm at 7am, but I was awake at 9am. Set alarm to take a monophasic nap and get up several times, but each time either fell asleep or felt so warm and cosy I couldn’t up.

Lessons learned:

1. I do not want to consume meat anymore because of the way it makes me feel.
2. After 3 days wake, trying to set an alarm when sleeping monophasically is pointless. Just leave a day.
3. Beds have never, ever felt quite so comfortable once you’ve given up sleep. I was lying on a particularly squishy sofa at the training day and felt almost joyful sitting on it, it was that nice.
4. You do not feel rested even when naturally waking from monophasic sleep. I felt tired, drowsy and like I just wanted to go straight back to sleep again. It would be interesting to see just how long I could sleep for if I were to just stay in bed as long as I felt like it.

I now have so much stuff that has piled up while I fucked around this month that I can’t afford to sleep until about the 31st of January. That will be a challenge.

January 21st:

Room in which I was sitting got very cold, and suggested it would be difficult to sleep (hard to sleep when your body’s shaking). Ended up sitting up in bed wrapped in my duvet. Fell asleep polyphasically, if deeply, but could see the risk of having a nice warm bed to snuggle down in.

January 22nd:

It’s 12:29am and I have drunk only a few mouthfuls of energy drink, and feel mostly fine. Have an incident at the 8pm nap where I was woken early by feeling too hot and felt constantly confused until I sat down to go to sleep again. That nap was interrupted by a flatmate but otherwise passed peacefully and I felt much better.

6am: Aha! Oversleeping happened. Took an extra two hours that I didn’t know took while sitting in my chair. Discovered that Firefox’s sounds had cut out again and my alarm had never gone off. Desperately tired.

An interesting thing I have noticed recently is that because all my muscles relax when entering REM sleep, my jaw does so as well and I end up sleeping with an extremely slack jaw, which is a very odd feeling.

January 23:

Chose to oversleep last night, as coursework was in and I felt like relaxing. Didn’t set the alarm and slept from 3am until 11am. Stayed in bed until 3pm. Interestingly, no fatigue at any point. I went to sleep feeling wide awake, and woke up feeling wide awake. I just stayed cos of the comfy – sleeping in a bed tends to make one want to go back to sleeping in a bed. Highly addictive would probably be the best way to describe it.

January 24:

Took my nap half an hour later than usual. Seems to be okay up to half an hour. Thirty five minutes off and then you get progressively more and more tired after that.

More on my experiences of polyphasic sleeping here.

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Trans and Judaism: Inclusion from the Perspective of Several Jewish Movements

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

I’ve just uploaded a new article to my main website, called “Trans and Judaism: Inclusion from the Perspective of Several Jewish Movements“. I wrote it for a piece of coursework I have to do last year on an aspect of religions, culture and gender. I started off by dealing with Judaism’s attitudes to trans, bisexuality and conversion but as my word count mounted it became steadily more obvious that I wasn’t going to get it all in.

If any Jewish folks out there would like to write for God Made the Rainbow on their experiences as a minority within a minority, on whatever subject, I would like to hear from you. :)

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Going Polyphasic: 15 useful hints and tips

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

I’ve had to break myself into polyphasic sleeping three times now. It definitely gets a lot easier every time. But the first time is an absolute nightmare. Here’s some helpful tips that you may find useful if you also would like to go polyphasic.

1) Be determined. It takes a week to adapt to Uberman before you don’t want to curl up and die. Comfort yourself with the amount you’re going to get done, the euphoria you’re going to feel, and the fact that if you stick to it, even if you go monophasic at some point, you’re never going to suffer from sleeping disorders again. None of this is guaranteed, but seems to happen to most people and certainly happened to me.

2) Make a very, very long list of things that you need to do. If you’re a pretty organised person on top of things, include frivolous things that you’ve thought would be nice but never really had the time nor inclination for. I know we all have things we mean to do but don’t get round to, but those lists probably don’t include things like “Clean every wall in the house.” Make sure you include things that don’t require that much concentration, for when your brain feels like total mush.

3) I would suggest you will probably not be wanting to use the beds for the night naps, or at least not in any way that is familiar or sleep-inducing (so, napping on top of the covers on your side rather than cuddled up in the duvet). I find my most productives naps are taken in a comfy reclining chair.

4) You probably shouldn’t cycle, drive, or conduct crucial tasks that require fine motor control or a fully functioning memory for a week. I ad to have my coursework spell-checked before I handed it in.

5) Plot ways you can actively relax without falling asleep. This is something I definitely have had trouble with. There is only so much television you can watch before your eyes get tired, and when you’re out the adaptation period you will be spending a great deal of time alone and wide awake at 3am.

6) You will not be able to take drugs for the first thirty days, or at least, drugs which will interfere with your sleeping schedule. However, afterwards are largely uncharted waters, and I would be very interesting in hearing from anyone who has used drugs on a polyphasic sleeping schedule that they’ve maintained. This is well worth further research – the brain scan results of taking an REM-only polyphasic nap and LSD, for example, would be hugely interesting.

7) Expect to need to eat more than usual to compensate for being awake an extra eight hours a day. So make sure you’re monitoring your eating patterns.

8) Suggestions for interesting activities to stay awake include board games, fingerpainting your vision, jamming, sex, banner-painting, jigsaws, and other things that require non-intensive movement. You will be taking more exercise than your body is used to and not giving it its usual mechanisms for rest, so you will feel achy, exhausted and miserable sporadically and frequently.

9) You may wish to create a schedule that lists regular activities for you to default to. Pure Doxyk writes “Follow a schedule. Sometimes you just get sick of thinking of the next thing to do – I know I do. Building a schedule, either for your entire day or just for the times you tend to get bored, can be an easy way out in that case.” If you cannot think of anything to do, you will default to either sleeping or drug use, both of which are counter-productive to our aims.

10) If you can hack it, you will need to look at your timetable and work out when you’re going to be regularly out the house and suss an alternative sleeping place. Be prepared to sleep anywhere – once you are polyphasic you can induce a nap by closing your eyes virtually anywhere, including sitting cross-legged and slumped on a toilet. You probably won’t get as good sleep as on a bed but it should tide you over. Be prepared to be undignified.

11) Circumstances in which you should give up at least temporarily: if you become ill with something more than a sniffle or sore throat, if you have a heavy drug session, if you are going on an all-day action, if you are having an emergency, if you are having a deeply meaningful bonding session with someone, if you are going to get yourself labelled as terminally weird by the people you are with and this would adversely affect your career/ambitions.

12) If you’ve fucked up and fallen asleep for longer than twenty minutes, when you do wake up get back on schedule immediately, however awake you are. You need to keep the habit.

13) You’re going to need a countdown alarm. Mine came from Amazon but has now been discontinued, but I would suggest something like a Salter kitchen timer here.

14) If you have any specific tasks that you peg to your monophasic sleeping pattern, say brushing your teeth before going to bed, or masturbating in the morning or something, pick a specific time and frequency to do it in – day, night and days of the week aren’t going to mean very much to you…

15) You should obviously also go read everything on polyphasic sleeping. (Wikipedia has links to most of the polyphasics out there). You may wish to practice sleep conditioning to make sure you can get up immediately: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away-when-your-alarm-goes-off/. I think the way people nap is different to each other from what I’ve read, so I won’t give any specific advice on how you should do it, but I find lying down in a comfortable position but one that I can’t normally sleep in stops me from dropping off monophasically. I also found that I stayed conscious even when I was asleep and could actually feel the physical and mental shift from waking to REM sleep, so I learnt to “breathe myself down” into REM. You should learnt to master this for when you don’t want to sleep but need to (12pm naps are easy to skip…)

You can also check out my other resources on polyphasic sleeping.

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Fasting in solidarity with Yarlswood Women’s Detention Centre

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Republished from Radical Rabbit. I’m also fasting and this fits my sentiments entirely.

Today I am fasting in solidarity with the 84 women from Yarls Wood detention centre who are hunger-striking over poor conditions. Below is the testimony of one of the women – Majirola Daniels – who came to Britain in 1987. What is remarkable is that she has been in the country longer than I have been alive, but suffers this treatment simply because she doesnt have the right papers. This is a disgrace.

Mojirola Daniels – Speaks Out

Full summary of the treatment I received at Yarl’s Wood Centre

I am one of the ladies on hunger strike at Yarl’s wood centre. On Monday 8th February 2010 around 11.45am GMT time, some group of women stood at the centre of a hall in the centre. We were protesting about the condition at the centre and the length of time we spend in here. An officer approached the group and informed us that an immigration official would like to see us all to discuss the issues we have raised.

The officer told us to follow him down the corridor to the immigration office. We proceed down to the end of the corridor. When we got to the very end, the officer asked that we should go inside the office 4 ladies at a time. They allowed 4 women to enter and told us that they will let 4 more in when those 4 inside gets out. One of the manager of the center (a lady manager called Viv Moore) came form the long corridor and asked us if we wanted to go back to our rooms. We told her we were just waiting to see the immigration. She said we are just wasting our time and that nothing is going to be achieved from our protest. She then asked the officers in the room to come with her and as soon as they got to the door, the last officer locked the door on us. They all stayed outside watching us through the door window.

We were singing and chanting for about one and a half hour since we have been locked up, some of the ladies went to the door and asked to go to the toilet. The officers including the manager Viv Moore told us that we are not allowed to leave where we are. Some of the ladies started getting sick and collapsing on the floor. There was one asthma lady, one sickle cell lady and two others who were choking on the floor. We were all hyperventilating and sweating. There was no door or window open and we were all complaining of lack of air. Around 2.00pm, some Chinese girls asked the officers to go to the toilet and they were told that no one is allowed to get out. The Chinese bend down at the corner and pee on the floor. Few minutes later others copied them and wee on the ground. The officers were all watching and still refused to open the door. Some people decided to call he emergency service for the ladies having breathing difficulty. The police and ambulance were asked for and they called us back to tell us they are outside of the center but are not allowed entry.

About an hour after the police called us back, some ladies realised that the window was only closed not locked. They opened the window and got out into the compound. Other ladies went through the window and joined them. More were trying to get out through the window but the officers had seen what was happening and had gone round the compound to meet them. They were carrying police guard shield and wearing heavy jacket. They crushed the ladies who were trying to get out with the guard shield and pushed them to the ground. Some women were crushed to the ground and beaten up. Two ladies were physically injured and bleeding. The windows were protected with the guard shield and the officers holding on to the guard shield. We were all hysterical and upset and were begging the officers not to hurt the women outside. The officers laughed at us as more officers joined them and formed a line to force the women outside in one small corner.

Some women needed to change their sanitary towel cause they were on their period but they had to throw bloodied towel next to where we were standing. We were all exhausted and demoralized by 5.00pm and we had no choice but to sit on the soiled floor. There was no chair or anything to lean on. There was a helicopter hovering above outside by this time but the women outside were not allowed to move from where they were being crushed. Some officers came outside to offer the officers chips and hot drinks. They were replaced by new officers every hour. Every next hour, new sets of officers comes to replace them from their position. The women locked up and the 19 women outside were not offered any food or drink. There was no heat in the small place where we were locked and we had to stand in the cold snow without sock and jacket and the officers will not allow them to have jacket. We tried to get them jackets and jumpers through the windows and the officers smashed the window on one of the ladies fingers. Her middle finger was damaged and her fingernail came off. There was blood everywhere and he officers still refused her medical treatment. We were not moved from where we have been detained until 7.30pm.

We were told to come out in pairs and we were searched with around a dozen officers watching us. We were offered food and medication after the search and then lead to our wings. We were about 70 which consist many Nigerians, Chinese, Jamaicans, Zimbabweans and some nationals I don’t remember. I have been traumatised and victimised because of this experience. I can never believe this can happen in the UK and I am still in shock.

Please publish and pass this story to who ever is interested.

You can use the personal information that I supply below.

Mojirola Daniels
Nigerian
Aged 45
Came to UK – December 1987
3 British children.

Get involved at http://noborders.org.uk/

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