It’s early morning and I’m just now tired enough to go to bed. As if the time weren’t bad enough, I feel like writing about it instead. After all, I’m not sure I could sleep just yet — the sun isn’t up.
I’ve heard there’s a syndrome which causes people to live 28-hour days and find it difficult to consistently live by society’s general schedule. Whether I have it or not, I certainly have the symptoms. It’s probably healthiest to go to sleep when I feel like it and wake up without an alarm clock, and that might work well for me if I lived on Mars, but I don’t, so it doesn’t.
One relatively popular alternative is the Uberman schedule, a.k.a. polyphasic sleep, in which your sleep consists mostly or entirely of naps, spaced about four or six hours apart and lasting thirty minutes to an hour each. The transition period is difficult, but within a week a body usually adjusts by learning to fall asleep and enter deep sleep much faster. The only downside is it locks you into a fairly strict schedule, and missing a nap is apparently like missing a night of sleep as a normal person.
The positive side of the Uberman schedule, which includes the name’s Nietzschean symbolism, is that it only requires around four hours of sleep every twenty-four hours, depending on the person. Having four extra hours every day would be a dream come true for me, especially when school gets going again. Besides, roads and 24-hour stores are almost always clearer in the early morning, and I love the pre-dawn glow of the night sky.
I plan to try it eventually, perhaps even this summer. Though I expect it’ll be hard to adjust among earthlings who tend to sleep only at night, it won’t be very different from what I’m already doing. This morning, however, is not a good time to start. It’s a good time to sleep.
