I wrote this during a thunderstorm around 3 A.M. back when I was doing my polyphasic sleep 30-day trial in June 2015. I believe this was from Day 12 of the trial, when I was doing my best. It captures the spirit of that experience quite well-- silly, bold, and wild. It is brief (hey, it was 3 A.M.) but it speaks. Enjoy!
There’s no more, “Did you sleep through that storm last night?” There isn’t even sleeping through the darkness now. I’m awake for everything. If the power goes out multiple times in a row at 3:30 AM it matters to me now—it isn’t just something spooky to give me jitters for a few minutes while I roll over and try to fall back to sleep. I sure am glad I have a headlamp. :)
But yes, there is literally no escaping life now. Every time someone gets up in my house I know about it. I hear every fart that passes through human anatomy through the night. Boy, there are a lot of those.
I am intimately connected to life more than ever now, though at the same time I feel like I am alone in my room more than ever now. I certainly desire company much more readily than I did while monophasic, but honestly, I think being awake all the time has simply wedged this desire out of me rather than intensify it. It was already there, but it was too easy to suppress when I was sleeping 8 hours per day. Now I can’t ignore it.
Though I have not been in a second of complete darkness in the last 2 weeks I am not afraid of the darkness as it surrounds me now. There is a sense that, ooh, maybe I should be afraid… but I just am not. This is really more curious than anything else. Curiosity is undoubtedly the spirit of living polyphasically: if you are endlessly fascinated by life, then there is no amount nor intensity of life that can break you.
If a group of dogs is going to bark and, yes, howl at each other loudly at 1:45 in the morning, then so be it. It’s all outside my window anyway. Scenes that I previously might have been afraid to experience almost make me laugh now. When the lights suddenly flicker while I’m standing at my laptop and then go out with a deep crash in the distance, leaving me to see my startled face in the mirror only by the light of the [computer] screen, I feel like I am in a video game: even more so when they come back on and go out again. I hear the bowels of the house turn as electricity springs to life and then dies again, and I know that I am inside of some living contraption. I know that reality is not a lifeless, robotic, random world but a very much alive being—perhaps like a story. I hear trucks moving in the distance to presumably fix the behemoth of a problem, and this, along with the just perfect rhythm of rain outside, somehow confirm my suspicions.
It’s strange: I’ve had visions of something like this happening since day 1, thought that was to my laptop: instead, everything but my laptop has flickered out.
Somehow, I feel different being in the house now—the electric field is gone. I think the house is less numb now, and I am able to feel in my heart more readily.
Also, there is a bug on my laptop screen that I didn’t notice until the power went out. Perhaps it did not exist until then. Hello, bug. I swear, it looks like it’s inside the screen—if I turn the screen off it would go away, yes?
Ah, now a rescuer is here. They could be a few feet from my window. I wonder exactly what it is they must do. I can’t say I understand the electricity stuff all too well. I wonder if those men are polyphasic, too. Though I suppose they could just be machines, or even the sound of what I imagine to be machines. And they are only there for a moment… and then they are gone.