Sleep When You're Sleepy

So what do you think about sleep? Until recently, I thought sleep was basically a tax. The less I had to pay, the better. I liked sleep, of course, but it still seemed like a waste of time.

I heard about polyphasic sleep and got all excited. Unlike the usual monophasic sleep, or biphasic, if one takes a siesta, the polyphasic sleeper breaks his sleep entirely into naps. For instance, nap for 20-25 minutes, wake for 4 hours, nap for 20 minutes, wake for 4 hours...this works out around 1 or 1.5 hours of sleep for every 12 waking hours.

My wife quickly nixed this idea. But I still wistfully imagined those wee morning hours. What's the point of being a freelancer if you can't take weird naps and read all night?

Then I found a fellow who thinks that I'd probably forget everything I read. Even better, he thinks that one day alarm clocks will have a worse reputation than cigarettes. Trash your alarm clock, says Dr. Wozniak, and practice free running sleep.

Free running sleep is what it sounds like. Go to sleep when you're sleepy, and wake up whenever you feel like it.

Now, this article is so incredibly long that I don't think I've actually read the whole thing myself. You are officially advised to skim. In another article he discusses a technique called incremental reading, and I'm thinking he may have invented it to review his own work. So you may uncover little annoyances I missed; elsewhere on his labyrinthine site, he's rather supercilious about intelligent design theory, among other pet peeves.

And of course the whole site is geared to sell his memorizing software, SuperMemo. But I shouldn't criticize his business, because he has tons of interesting articles for free, and you can download several old versions of the program for free too, which is quite unusual in the commercial world. Still, I'm more excited about the free open source project it's inspired, Mnemosyne. (Yes, you can run Mnemosyne on a Windows or Mac too.)

Anyhow, the opening section on sleep deprivation will get you thinking right away. Why do we hate sleep so much, anyhow? Especially when our national addiction to measurements has actually uncovered all sorts of evidence on how important sleep is. For example, 40% of truck accidents are attributable to fatigue and drowsiness. Forty percent? What? And does anyone really think it's a good idea to keep hospital interns awake for thirty hours straight? Multiple days a week? For years? And have them prescribe drugs?

But here's my favorite quote from the article: heavy learners should be heavy sleepers. The hypothesis fascinates me, that we don't need sleep so much to rest our muscles and bones as to rest our brains. Your whole body feels tired, but if it's brain work that causes it, that might explain...why I'm tired all the time.

I feel lazy enough, sitting around reading or working on a novel or a web site all day, and then on top of that, I get all tired. I only feel justified in exhaustion when I've actually done some real work that involved muscles besides my fingers. Could it be that hard thinking (regardless of its quality) really does cause a physical demand for sleep?

I'm still amazed at the possibility. But if Dr. Wozniak is right, you only get a short window of sleepiness in each circadian cycle. And I'm just about to miss it.