"You see, my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing, the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags -- that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it." - Mark Twain

This was my Osho Tarot reading on Saturday, January 30th.

I've been on a trend recently of bringing lots of positive things into my life, but not wanting to let anything go. This is what I see in the Miser card. The breakthrough card represents my realization that what I'm doing in life is not working for me, and also not being very satisfying for my life partners. This has prompted a huge shift in my life, one which has been very sad but also represents the truth of the way things have been changing. The shift also moves me further along towards a being beyond all convention, the Rebel.

The Rebel is a good image for me; the sun on his shoulder links to my Apollo archetype. They say about this card: "His very way of being is rebellious - not because he is fighting against anyone or anything, but because he has discovered his own true inner nature and is determined to live in accordance with it."

It's amazing that no matter where I'm going or why, my freshly-packed full suitcase always weighs 52-53 lbs. If they'd just made the limit 55 lbs, I'd never have to repack anything.

Off to the Big Island tomorrow. Hail Pele!

I use the Osho tarot deck for my own guidance, and sometimes with my clients. I find it pretty rich; every card represents a solid teaching from Osho, and the art (especially the colors) ties in beautifully to the teaching.

I used to draw this one a lot, so I've gotten used to thinking about it. Comparison has to do with thinking yourself wrong because you aren't like someone else, or don't have what someone else has. When I find myself in envy, or more commonly feeling dejected because I haven't done the amazing things someone else has done with their life, I notice, and mentally think "I'm drawing the Comparison card".

It's pointless. It's something which turns the joy of knowing amazing people into the pain of not being them. But as the card illustrates, this is absurd. If the bamboo was big and strong like the oak, we would not have bamboo. We each have our own unique contribution to the tapestry.

I've been reading a lot of Timothy Freke's work since meeting him in Sedona last April. His basic spiritual perspective is that we are _both_ one-with-everything-that-is, _and_ this character in this story of our life. God and Man. He's a gnostic Christian, so this is basically his take on the story of Jesus. It's different from Buddhism, because Buddhism focuses heavily on detachment to realize your oneness - but Freke's approach, and from his perspective Christianity's approach, is to both realize your divine and eternal nature, and immerse yourself deeply in the ephemeral story of your life. To know your oneness, but to laugh and cry and rage as your separateness at the same time. To feel the suffering deeply, not because you're trapped in it, but because it's poignant and beautiful.

So it's making me look at my life again, like all good philosophy should. Suppose your life is a movie, and you want the movie to be interesting, but you know that it can't really affect who you fundamentally are. From this sort of a perspective, it's easier to understand why Jesus went through with the crucifixion - terrible suffering, but a deeply meaningful conclusion to the story of Jesus-the-man, whose suffering can't truly harm Jesus-as-God.

What choices would you make differently if your life was a movie you were writing/directing? What risks would you take? What patterns in your main character are getting old and boring, what do aesthetic considerations suggest he/she should transcend?

We started renovating our house in May 2005. As of yesterday, the painting is complete in the kitchen and on the second floor, with the exception of paint that goes on trim. And we have new linoleum (actually Marmoleum, a natural alternative) in the kitchen, which looks awesome. The only thing left in the first and second floors is trim! And buying & installing a cool light fixture to replace the bare lightbulbs we've got in the kitchen now.

Basement's going to take a little longer, but that's OK. I'm off to paint the walls in the stairway right now, so we can be done with paint for a bit.

I've decided to end my experiment with polyphasic sleep for now. I'm still experiencing way too much sleep deprivation after 10 days, so "it's not working", whatever this magic "it" is. Last night I slept nearly 8 hours, and it felt good. (I did have one point where I woke up in the middle of the night and wandered around the house, certain that I was supposed to be remembering something important before I could let myself go back to sleep... But it didn't last long.)

( disappointments and benefits )

I've been continuing to struggle a lot with the symptoms of sleep deprivation. This isn't supposed to be happening - adaptation should be pretty well under way by day 7, and largely done (apart from occasional yawning) by day 10. And yet, last night I was continuously struggling to stay awake during my 10:30pm-2:10am block. Generally, my circadian rhythms have been trying really hard to reassert themselves. (My daylight experience has been pretty energized.)

( Asking for guidance, getting better naps, actually sleeping a whole 3 hours )

The jury's still out on whether or not I'm going to be able to adapt to polyphase successfully. I hope so. But I have started making a list of things I want to get right next time I try this, that didn't go so well this time.

* 20 minutes needs to be the hard limit for naps, from when you lie down to when the alarm goes off. If you give yourself an extra 5 minutes to fall asleep, you shortly get 25 (or 24.5) minute naps, which are non-optimal.

* No oversleeping! What's the plan for not oversleeping? Ideally, three alarm clocks or something, and human backup when it's available. I could have avoided at least half of my little oversleeps.

* No extra naps! This was a reasonable idea I got on an individual blog (slip one in from time to time, as long as it's 20 min or less too), but the program seems to work best when you really push to get the sleep-deprivation-intensity pumped up as quickly as possible. (Then your system reorganizes, and it recedes quickly too.)

* Quit caffeine well in advance. I knew I was opening myself up for extra suffering, quitting caffeine basically 2 days before starting this program. Heck, it's probably still why I'm extra woozy today, over a week in.

* Get some soft, supportive shoes for wearing indoors. We take off our outdoor shoes when we come in; but being on my bare feet 22 hours a day, much of it in the basement, has made my feet pretty sore.

I think I'm going to use Friday as a decision point about whether to keep going. Many people give up at about the 2-week point. I just can't be so drowsy all the time, I need to have the ability to concentrate on things. And I want to be able to read without nodding off. It's still amazing that I'm as well rested as I am under the circumstances, but it's not good enough for sustained living.

Ok, something amazing just happened.

I was actually starting to give up on polyphasic sleep - I hadn't adapted, I'd messed the schedule up a bit, and I was really tired of fighting exhaustion so much of the time. But then I took my 6:10-6:30 nap this morning.

There was something like a timewarp that happened. Every thing you expect from much longer periods of sleep happened. I had multiple dreams. The overall time felt like much longer than 20 minutes. I woke up "in the middle of the night", at 6:19, and went right back to sleep. I feel really, really refreshed. I didn't have to fight with the alarm clock at all.

Here's the really wild piece - I was suffering from some joint pain, especially in my right knee as I go up and down stairs. (This is a natural result of sleep deprivation + walking for miles to stay awake.) When I woke up, my knee was all better, and other parts of my body felt relaxed as well. How did that happen in 20 minutes? This is amazing and beautiful.

Days since beginning experiment: 8
Total Hours slept: 17
Average sleep per day: 2 hours, 8 mins

In the first few days of this schedule, I overslept three times, getting 40-50 minutes of sleep each time. Then I decided that it was OK to take extra naps as long as they were short, and I stopped oversleeping. Now that I've figured out that the extra sleep - in _any_ form - isn't helping me adapt, and I've given up naps, I had another oversleep yesterday, of 40 minutes. My subconscious is proving to be a crafty opponent.

But I've done OK since then. Now that I'm more clear about the process of adaptation, I welcome the feelings of being severely sleep-deprived as a sign that I'm on the right path, and it will improve soon. The tedious part is just the long minutes of drowsiness, where I might nod off in front of a computer, so I have to find more active things to do. (Our basement is becoming neater night by night.)

I had a cocoa this morning. I figured it was pretty low caffeine, so it was safe. Since then, I've been more active and gotten more done, but I still feel like I could fall asleep sitting at this keyboard, so I think the dosage was appropriate. And refreshing.

My hope is that by tomorrow night (tonight), I'll be sufficiently well-adapted and well-rested to do something fairly passive, like read a book in a recliner, without having to fight off the sleep-urge.

One recent rediscovery: Showers rock as ways to pass time till the next nap.

I'm still having (intermittent) trouble with the polyphasic sleep schedule, and I think it's basically because I've been sleeping too much. During the first few days, I had trouble with oversleeping; that happened once on day 3 and twice on day 4. Then I got that under control, but I read on Steve Pavlina's blog his ideas about using extra (but still short) naps to make the transition easier. So I started throwing in a few of those - 10 mins here, 20 mins there. That worked for him, but he had an amazingly easy transition anyway.

As I reread PureDoxyk's book and other sources, it seems likely that I'm making my sleep deprivation less intense, which means I'm getting insufficient stimulus to properly reorganize under the new schedule. So, I really need to go completely without extra naps, just do the 6 regular ones, no more than 20 minutes each. (Which might mean that some are less, which is disturbing, but will also help me adapt faster.)

I am impressed with my alertness and sense of being well-rested at times, though. I had a great time at a Cuddle Party on Friday, and I was right-on as a healer yesterday when I saw a client. The worst times are at night, which points out that I haven't fully released my old circadian rhythms.

I have a box, slightly overstuffed, that I recently brought down from the attic. It's where I've put my memories. Letters, cards, programs, calendars. Things that signify who I was, where I was, who I was with at different times in my life. I'm not quite 40, and the box is probably 60 pounds.

Some of these things are obvious-recycle. I don't really need my ticket stub for "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back." But what about letters? Love on paper, from relationships ended many years ago. Birthday notes from now-deceased relatives. I could keep it, but to what purpose? If I recycle it all, am I untethering myself from who-I-was? I could scan it into my computer and recycle the original, which makes storage drastically more convenient, but takes a lot of time. Calendars are cool, I can look back and find out what I was doing in 2004, but they're also heavy, big, and difficult to scan.

What do you all do? Open for thoughts & advice. (After all, at least here, there's no new paper generated.)

I'm having two main problems in adapting to my polyphasic schedule. One is narcolepsy, having to struggle to stay awake. It's not continuous, it happens during some wakeful periods but not others. The other is oversleeping. So far I've had three oversleeps - 40 minutes each at 2pm Wednesday and Thursday, and then 50 minutes just recently at 2am. This is really important to nail; apparently oversleeping is the major reason that adaptation periods get extended, or that people wind up quitting the polyphasic sleep schedule.

Overall, my sleep total is right where I want it - between 2 and 2.5 hours per day. But the oversleeps are allowing my body to sneak in some REM sleep without having to adapt to getting REM in the 20-minute sleep cycles, and that's really counterproductive.

So, I'm recruiting my spice more heavily in ensuring that I wake up, but sometimes (as with the last cycle) I'm waking up in the middle of the night and I'm on my own. So better use of alarm clocks is in order. I thought I had my iPod alarm clock wired to a big stereo in the basement where I took my last nap, with loud volume; but when I finally woke up and checked things out, the volume was down. Alarming possibility that I got up and turned it down in my sleep... But more likely that I screwed up while setting it up.

One thing I forgot from Steve Pavlina's blog - extra naps are allowed. If I'm midway between naps and really dragging, adding an extra one is OK as long as I keep it to 20 minutes or less. I'll be using this if I have any periods that are as groggy as my last one.

The best way I've found to keep awake is lively social interaction. Going to a Cuddle Party tonight, so that'll keep me happy and awake for a while.

Running total: Hours on experiment, 92; hours of sleep, 7.5.

Ok, it's been 72 hours since I last "hibernated" (slept the night through), and in that time I've gotten about 5 1/4 hours of sleep, in 20-minute-or-so naps. I had one relatively big oversleep, 40 minutes. The difficulty here is that I've started to sleep through at least some alarms - when I started, I'd be up the very minute I set it for, turning it off & ready to go. Now I'm struggling to turn off alarms after 5-10 minutes of more than one going off. So this could easily turn into something extended. Time to bring in the bigger guns. (I've been using cellphone & iPod mostly so far.)

This whole thing is kicking my ass a bit today. It's variable - yesterday afternoon & evening I was very awake & alert, but overnight it was a real struggle. Now I'm close to nodding off, and basically just working to keep going between naps until my experience improves.

But, I think this is all about where I'm supposed to be on the program. Next stage, I should start remembering some dreams. (Haven't had any turn up yet, although the hypnogogic states while falling asleep have been a bit wild.)

When the spice get up, I plan to play some music. That seems to keep me engaged. Maybe some juggling too. Activity.

Over 48 hours since I started this program, and I've less than three hours' sleep in that time. (I should be getting 2 hrs/day, but of course I didn't nap well on the first day.) I'm definitely struggling some. Interesting, it comes and goes. Sometimes I'm totally together and feeling enthusiastic about my projects; other times, like now, there's a bit of dizziness and a whole lot of difficulty pushing forward with anything other than closing my eyes and lying down.

Went for a walk at 4am. Nice air at that time of day - I remember that from being a paper carrier.

I "overslept" for my 6am nap - basically I went up to the room to get ready, and fell asleep a few minutes earlier than I'd planned, so I got more like 25 minutes. Woke up much more groggy than from the other naps. This is consistent with the literature - 20 minutes is pretty ideal (with some individual variation); more is _not_ better.

Counting down to next nap...

Well, I'm about 30 hours into the new sleep schedule, and I've had only one hour of sleep in that time. (The other naps were duds - didn't get to sleep.) But I think I'm adapting quickly. I'm still definitely in sleep deprivation, but some tasks involving concentration, memory and visual focus are already easier than they were at 5am.

According to the experiences of others, the worst part of adaptation to the Uberman schedule is in days two-three. Basically, the next 24 hours or so. If I can make it through to Wednesday night, I think I'll be set. (Whether I'll be able to do anything productive between now and then is an open question.)

Went for a bike ride this morning. That was nice.

Ok, I'm barely into this, I'm basically just up past midnight, and I already feel the challenge setting in. Spouses have gone to bed, so it's just tired ole me in the big empty house right now. Could dance, could watch TV... It's the decisions that get you down, in this high-willpower type of experiment. So I think I'll make some - PureDoxyk recommends creating a list of specific tasks so that you have things to do while attempting to stay awake. Making a list is a great first task.