Sleep Cycles

I just read through this article, "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)", which was very interesting and went into some good detail.

I was wondering what people here have to say about sleep cycles? Has anyone tried any of the "polyphasic" sleep cycles (the most popular being "Uberman's sleep schedule", I think)? For those that don't know, this is where you sleep in short naps throughout the day (Uberman's is 20 minute naps every 4 hours throughout the day) instead of sleeping several hours back to back at night.

Apart from these semi-unusual sleep patterns, how many hours of sleep a night do you guys usually get? Are you, as the article above says, a "lark" or an "owl"? ..and how does this relate to life extension, does anyone know if sleeping longer is related to living longer? I know that a lot of people say that you should get 8 hours a night, but I find that hard to be able to squeeze in most of the time.

I vary between 6.5-8 these days, depending on my various projects/work/classes. I used to get much more, and it's a pretty noticeable difference from 6.5 to 8.5. I picked up a book the other day, Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival. I think she recommends 9 hours per night, and more in winter (9 may be the max, I haven't read it yet). I'm not entirely sure how science-based it is, but it looks interesting/entertaining, regardless.

I was wondering what people here have to say about sleep cycles? Has anyone tried any of the "polyphasic" sleep cycles (the most popular being "Uberman's sleep schedule", I think)? For those that don't know, this is where you sleep in short naps throughout the day (Uberman's is 20 minute naps every 4 hours throughout the day) instead of sleeping several hours back to back at night.

Ah sleep. It'd be one of my favourite recreations if it wasn't so time consuming. But, sadly, time consuming is just what it is. And that series of awesome dreams filled with great ideas is just as likely to end up being a black void or a replay of being at work. So instead of appreciating it, I'm stuck fighting it. Despite the fact that it's probably one of the all time best and easiest paths to improvement in both mind and body.

I actually did give the uberman sleep schedule a try when the story broke on K5. I even exchanged email with the author a couple times while I was struggling my way through it. Uberman's would have been perfect at the time, syncing up amazingly well with my school schedule. The one downside which killed the experiment for me was having two cats. When I go to bed they usually gallop as fast as they can to join me. That part would have been great. Hey, cozy atmosphere to lull me to sleep. But, the annoying part is that they also take about fifteen noisy minutes to situate themselves before lying down. I was tired, but not so tired that I could sleep with a cat walking around me or loudly jumping from place to place. That fifteen to twenty minutes was whittled down to zero to five pretty quickly. So work and school were no problem, but when I was actually free that same liberty wound up being my downfall. I can't recall if I lasted four or five days on it. But whichever it was, the night I gave up was among the happiest in my life.

Oh, and I fall dead center into the night owl category. The dream schedule for me is being able to go to bed right when the sun is just starting to show itself.

Edited by emerson, 14 June 2006 - 08:18 AM.

If you want to feel rested when you wake up try and wake at the end of an REM phase. This is the closest to being awake.



Try not to wake up in stages 4 or 3 slow wave sleep.

I use the above diagram often. If I have had long day or big night and have to get up in a few hours I will make sure I time it so I wake up just after or in the middle of an REM sleep phase. For example, i would feel just as refreshed if I wake up at or just after the first (2hr) or second (3.5 hour) REM phase. There is also a bonus of waking just after REM sleep phases. It's a great time for dream recall.

Now I can talk about dream recall and lucid dreaming for years so I will leave it at that.

Just remember that the times in the above diagram may vary from person to person but is generally a good guideline

Wow, nice diagram, thanks zoolander I will get some use out of that.

That is interesting to hear, emerson, about your experience with Uberman's. Has anyone else tried any "unusual" sleep patterns that worked (or didn't work) for them? I am thinking of trying some type of polyphasic sleep pattern in the near future and would like to hear if anyone has any advice.

Hey Zoolander, great info.

If you wanna give me a quick rundown on lucid dreaming that would be great. My g/f can enter this state basically anytime I want her to and it freaks me out! Sooo bizarre...I feel like I can hypnotize her which is pretty awesome but I can NEVER predict when she will snap out of it.

Ok. In brief though because I can get carried away.

Lucid dreaming is dreaming in which you are awake in the dream. Whilst you're dreaming you realise that you are dreaming and wake up in the dream. By doing so you gain conscious control within the dream. This means that you control what goes on in your dream without the physical constraints and consequences of the physical world. For example, you can swim to the deepest ocean without having to worry about breathing. You can create what you want and do what you want at the snap of a finger.

There is a catch though. Lucid dreaming is not easy to do. You need to recognise the dream whilst you are dreaming and wake up within the dream.

Dreams are said to be a manifestation of the subconscious mind. When you recognise that you are dreaming you are consciously recognising the subconscious. This is a pretty amazing and unique thing to do because the subconscious and conscious minds are not directly connected. They are said to be connected through the preconscious. Now you can drag the subsconscious memories out from your dreams through the preconscious and into your conscious state by recalling a dream as soon as you wake. But with lucid dreaming you are directly connected to the subconscious with a conscious state of awareness i.e conscious that you are dreaming

Now some people use lucid dreaming to play out fantasies. This can be a lot of fun. However, I think the benefits of being able to lucid dream are found in the ability to see what is going on in your subsconscious mind. The ability to see and interact with subconscious memories that for some reason you have not dealt with in your conscious state and therefore laid them down into the depths of your subconscious mind. However, it's not so deep anymore because you can lucid dream and see it. You can now deal with those memories. Deal with these subconscious memories in a landscape that does not have the consequences of the physical world. Consequences that you perhaps fear or do not want to deal with. The fact that you fear or do not want to deal with these consequences is most likely why the memory still exist in your conscious "too hard basket" subsconscious mind. To me that's what the subscious mind appears to be. A resevoir of information that we chose not to consciously note. Which means that there is so much more to what we have experianced. So so much more.

I can feel myself getting carried away. I'm going to stop there because I seriously could be here for hours and hours. I have had people tuned into my conversations about lucid dreaming for hours and hours at parties. I once lost my voice because I talked so long. I tried to stop but they kept on asking me to continue. STOP HERE.

Please keep in mind that I have no training in psychology and have not read much about lucid dreaming. The above information is information I have experianced first hand. My thoughts about the conscious and subconscious may not fit well with traditional pyschology. These are just my insights


If you want to learn how to lucid dream I could try my best to teach you some techniques.

If you can lucid dream already I can try and teach you how to get the most out of your lucid dreams. There is even a way to extend the length of the lucid dream. Shit I'm still going........STOP

Try this....if you wake up gently after a nap that last roughly 90-110 minutes I guarantee that you will have had a dream. You will wake up most likely just at the end of or in the middle of an REM phase and remember what you were dreaming about

You need to wake up gently though and not by the sound of some loud alarm.

There are so many neat tricks I could teach you

However, I think the benefits of being able to lucid dream are found in the ability to see what is going on in your subsconscious mind.

That's one of the main things I love about it as well. There's something so amazingly strange about the feeling that comes over me when I'm dreaming about other people and suddenly realise the dream for what it is. Realisation of the fact that all those lives which I thought I'd been a part of, the minds which had been to all appearances interacting with me just as anyone else I've met in my life would, even perceived knowledge of a world or ecosystem...that they're all part of me. It can be an absolutely mind blowing experience. Especially when you're in that state, and you're left to ponder the nature of consciousness and identity. It can really drive home the proposition that our individual consciousness is so much more than our image of a homunculus sitting in the middle of our head pulling the body's strings. The flying and the dream sex are pretty nice too.

Everybody who tries seems to get different results from the same methods. Personally, what worked best for me was just obsessing over it. The prelude, in my opinion, has to be training yourself to remember as many dreams as possible per night and to recall as much detail in all of them as possible. Having a lucid dream isn't of any use if you can't remember it, or if your recall boils down to verification of it happening and one or two misty half recalled images. You should be able to end the day being able to recite the previous nights events just as you could those events which occurred during that day. The best way for me was forced writing of all dreams into text files upon waking. For me that took a hell of a lot of discipline. Even a minute spent lying in bed after waking would be just that much more of the narrative which I risked forgetting. Eventually, with enough practice, a point came where I didn't need to write them down anymore. Sadly, I've found this ability doesn't seem to be permanent. A couple months of only keeping memory of the dreams within my head is always enough to slowly lower me back into a state of ordinary dream amnesia shortly after waking.

But back to the actual concentration on lucid dreaming. The initial trigger for me was a couple weeks with the word asleep written on one hand, and awake on the other. The concept being that one would deliberately ask himself if he was currently in the state of whichever word he saw when that hand entered his field of vision. I admit, I actually did cheat a bit though and just did a sloppy cursive a and s on each hand. Needing to constantly explain why those words were on my hands may very well have acted as additional pushes into lucid dreaming, but oh well. I took consolation in knowing that I wouldn't be forever labeled as "dude with words on your hands!".

The method seemed to be a total failure, and I brooded over it for quite a bit after washing the ink off. The disgruntled emotion carried across a number of days actually wound up doing the trick for me though. The joy of my first induced one was enough to get me into a second soon after, and past that it became a matter of practice and training, like any other skill.

Shit I'm still going........STOP

I'm giving myself the excuse of indulgence by proxy for this post. If my schedule prevents me from really getting any work in with lucid dreaming, I can at least vicariously enjoy another's potential to do so. Hooray for my minds endless ability to create excuses!

So I am gathering that you lucid dream and can do so almost at will now.

Here is a trick for you. It has been found that dreaming activates an area of the brain and nerve (Vestibulocochlear nerve) involved with balance.

When a lucid dream starts to fade it tends to lose it color and become desaturated. So what you can do is consciously activate the balance area and vestibulocochlear nerve by spinning around in circles in your dream. Spinning around in circles will effect your balance and subsequently activate the balance centres. This lifts the lucid dream back up.

I have a funny story about this.....

An inexperianced lucid dreamer once heard about this trick. So one day when walking down the street he noticed that everything started to lose its color. The reason for this, which he didn't know, was that a large group of clouds had gathered behind him blocking the sun. So he noticed that his landscape was losing color so he put his arms out wide and started to spin.

He wasn't dreaming and could not tell the difference between the dream world and the "real" world yet even though he had lucid dreamed.

Can you image the scene? Some guy spinning around in circles like some kid in a playground. Man, don't try this one at home

So I am gathering that you lucid dream and can do so almost at will now.

Here is a trick for you.

At will? The first thing which came to mind when I read that was, "Yah, in my dreams." At my best I'd say my chances are about 25-40% if I'm really trying for it any particular night. Higher if I'm willing to go all out and beg for help from an alarm clock. Sadly, being at my best for it also includes a recent history of good, restful, sleep. Actually, that's not sad, that's awesome. A good nights sleep should always get a thumbs up. The sad part comes from the fact that my schedule's become so scattershot recently that sleep deprivation is becoming more the norm every day. And I've been 'really' lazy about keeping track of my dreams. Ah well, for now there's always the new tradition of weekend sleep debt recovery. Even with my chances lowered, I should be able to grab on somewhere down the line. And, hey, it's training!

And that story is fantastic. I know I've actually found myself worrying about the same thing every now and again! My cues are a bit different, but that slight worry about getting the right take on the situation is dead on.

Just make sure you do your dream checks i.e look at your watch and try to bend the hands or switch on a light. Lights general do not work properly in dreams

zoolander, you have any good websites or anything that might give pointers on things to do? I am greatly intrigued by all of this.

I actually have a quick plug. I should preface this by mentioning that I pretty much just gave it a quick once-over rather than an actual read. Still, might be worth a look. I admit that I grumbled a bit when my skimming chanced on mention of astral projection, but the eagerness to placate both believers and skeptics was so strong there that I couldn't help but grin.

Wikibook - lucid dreaming

Hi, I'm 20 years old now, I often sleep much longer than 8hrs when I have the time for it. How does it work after 8hrs? Because it is true that sometime I wake up totally rested and sometime I feel as tired as I was before I'd go to sleep and have a really hard time waking.

My body would sleep for 9 hours if i'm averagely tired and dont put an alarm.
So i'm interested too for the further hours of the cycle

Anyone ever heard of the 1 second nap? Evidently used by Thomas Edison and others to tap into the "superconscious". The author of the article wrote an entire novel, at a rate of about 3 pages a day, using the method. Neat!

Try sitting in a comfortable position (with head support), and just relax your mind and body as much as possible, while rolling your eyes back like going to sleep. Try to keep your mind blank and relaxed in this state for a few seconds, and your mind will start to clear up and you can look at the problem from a fresh angle. Doing an actual 1 second nap is probably even better, though I haven't actually tried that before (and it's kind of hard (for me) to actually fall asleep quickly).

My sleep schedule is always a problem. I'm the kind of person who need to sleep 8 hours a night, but at the same time, I don't get sleepy until I've been awake for at least 20 hours.

there are so many way to nap and sleep these days.

What about a caffeine nap.

Taken from here

Sleep researchers at the Loughborough  University in Britain did several tests on fatigued drivers to compare the effects of different methods for a driver can use to stay awake.  They put the volunteers in driving simulators while they were sleepy and let them drive.  Some of the tests included rolling down windows for cold exposure, blasting the radio and slapping oneself in the face to try to stay awake.  But what researchers found worked the best was a Caffeine Nap.

The Caffeine Nap is simple.  You drink a cup of coffee and immediately take a 15 minute nap.  Researchers found coffee helps clear your system of adenosine, a chemical which makes you sleepy.  So in testing, the combination of a cup of coffee with an immediate nap chaser provided the most alertness for the longest period of time.  The recommendation was to nap only 15 minutes, no more or less and you must sleep immediately after the coffee.

The recommendation was to nap only 15 minutes, no more or less and you must sleep immediately after the coffee.

Immediately after a cup of coffee, I have to pee. I don't think I could pull off the "caffeine nap" without a diaper. [tung]

then try it with a diaper. No one will know.

My sleep schedule is always a problem. I'm the kind of person who need to sleep 8 hours a night, but at the same time, I don't get sleepy until I've been awake for at least 20 hours.

Oh so it's not just me?

caffeine nap

This actually works really well if I keep the nap short. If I sleep too long I usually wake up with a headache though.

I was researching this the other day and came across some good sites. Here you go...

http://www.dreamview...m/tutorials.php

http://forum.ld4all.com/

ooh, nice links. Thanks debu.

Immediately after a cup of coffee, I have to pee.  I don't think I could pull off the "caffeine nap" without a diaper.

Part of me agrees, the other part is donning a tinfoil hat while speculating on a connection between this technique and the ever nefarious adult diaper branch of the Illuminati.

Immediately after a cup of coffee, I have to pee.  I don't think I could pull off the "caffeine nap" without a diaper.

Part of me agrees, the other part is donning a tinfoil hat while speculating on a connection between this technique and the ever nefarious adult diaper branch of the Illuminati.

Shhhhh. They will read your thoughts and come shut us down. The adult diaper branch of the Illuminati is pervasive to the point of infiltrating every facet of our daily lives. I am going to go hide under the bed now. [hmm] [wis] [sfty]

Link to "Solving Problems In Your Sleep" article. New research is (evidently) showing that sleep is very effective in solving problems.

I've many times gone to bed wondering about a problem and woke up with the answer. The subconcious is very powerful and is released in sleep.