Jermil's Sleep Blog

When I started this trial, I had all my time to myself. I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Anyone who hung out with me was gracious enough to adapt to my schedule. When I napped, they napped with me or occupied themselves in other ways and woke me in a half hour.

But when I went home for Thanksgiving, I traded in that extreme freedom for the opportunity to spend time with family. It wasn’t a bad trade-off at all. I’ll always choose spending time with my family over a silly sleep experiment.

I knew that if I did keep up with my naps, I wouldn’t be able to go certain places with my family because I’d have a nap coming up in an hour or so. Or if I did try to nap while we were out, I’d have to go back to the car or something and take away quality time that could be spent with people who love me.

I tried to get back into polyphasic sleeping once I got back to my world. I couldn’t adapt back though. I would set my alarm for 30 minutes and wake up 6 hours later with no recollection of turning off the alarm. After that happened for a few days, I decided I’d stop fooling myself. Especially since I’m going back home soon and I’d end up in this same boat again.

It was a WONDERFUL experience. The main thing I miss is the extremely vivid dreams every time I went to sleep. They felt so real but I got to the point where I was able to tell when I was dreaming. For 20 minutes 6 times a day, I could do ANYTHING I wanted and I had complete control over it. It was like playing a real life video game where the only limit was your supremely ridiculous sleeping imagination. I’m sad to have to give that up.

I would still recommend it to anyone that has at least a month to do whatever they want with their time. Hopefully everyone has a month at some point in their life to take control of everything they do. If not, that’s a different issue that would be covered in my main blog.

Thanks for reading this and when I start this experiment again, I’ll write about it here.

I embarked on a 9 hour road trip from Virginia to Michigan the day before Thanksgiving.  I wasn’t too worried about it since I knew there would be rest stops along the way and I could definitely get my naps in.  But it started out much harder than I expected.

I left around 4am.  I felt fine for a good while right up until my 6am naptime.  I came across a rest area in Pennsylvania right near 6 and slept for about 20 minutes.

When I woke up, the sun was rising.  I hit the road again feeling refreshed.  But about two hours later, I started feeling really drowsy.  I found myself nodding off once or twice and realized I had to do something in order to not plow into the back of a 18 wheeler.

Oddly enough, around that same time, my sister sent me a text telling me to call her if I get sleepy.  I called her INSTANTLY and we talked for about an hour or so until it was almost my naptime again.

After that nap, I felt a lot better and was able to make it the rest of the way with no problems.  I didn’t get caught in any traffic at all.  I wonder if I had to go 10-20 miles an hour, would I have become sleepy again and nodded off in the middle of the freeway.  

Hopefully I’ll never know.