Recently I did a little experiment on polyphasic sleeping: I tried out the uberman schedule for some days. It was quite interesting as I experienced some unexpected things.

One of those surprises was the state of mind I got into. I’m not talking about the tiredness that was coming and going at strange times, I’m talking about a somehow purer, clearer mental state. I entered it about 2 days after I started the experiment.

All this usual mental shatter came to an end. No distracting thoughts. It was kinda weird. My normal thinking progresses seemed to work as usual but there was nothing beside it. Just silence.

Somehow I felt like I did become an object observer of the world rather than being an active part of it. It was similar to the feeling the narrator of Fight Club mentioned, who suffered from insomnia: The feeling that “everything is a copy of a copy of a copy“. My state of mind felt clear though.

Of course, I also felt very tired at times and this pure state was interrupted by rather drowsy mental states when I just wanted to sleep, but after all, it was an exiting experience for me.

I’m not sure what caused this special state of mind, but I’ll definitely do some more experimenting on it. It could have been the sleep deprivation. Maybe my brain was just too tired to bring up any distracting background noise. But maybe it was because of this other form of sleep. There could be a bigger difference between napping and regular sleeping than commonly accepted.

I’ll definitely try to find out more about napping. Unfortunately, I can’t adapt to the uberman schedule because there is no way I can nap at the same times every day in case I’m not on holiday. That’s also the reason why I stopped my experiments after day 4 or 5. But I could try out the everyman schedule. Maybe there’s a way I could adapt to it. Anyway, I’ll tell you about the insights I’ll get.