Thread: Starting the Dymaxion Sleep Schedule

I've been thinking about starting the Dymaxion sleep cycle myself, so your posts are very interesting. I have one major concern though. How can you get the right amounts of melatonin? To the best of my knowledge it's a pretty important hormone, and it's production peaks at night. Any light, even small amounts of it, can really slow it's production. If you were up and about all night, wouldn't the body's melatonin production come to a halt?

Hm good point about the melatonin! I read on wikipedia that wearing glasses that block blue light should reduce melatonin loss. And then there's this, could melatonin be related to the increase in vivid dreaming in polyphasic sleep?

Anyway, I'm doing the Everyman 3-nap schedule. It's been around 10 days (not quite sure exactly, I don't make any logs), and so far it's going pretty fine I think (I've overslept only one core sleep, and one-two naps). Usually it's hardest to wake up after the core sleep, e.g. today I needed maybe 2 hours to completely wake up. I mean I got up, walking around, watching tv, and so on, but it took me quite some time until I was able to fully open my eyes :-) But then during the day usually it's all fine.

Lately I've got quite interested in the Dymaxion (the Uberman just sounds like pain in the ass with its 6 naps). So I've realized, this Everyman 3-nap is very similar to Dymaxion, where instead of the core sleep you have another nap. After adapting to the Everyman first, it should be fairly easy to switch to Dymaxion, for example by gradually reducing core sleep from 3, to 2, 1 and then 0.5 hours (and adjusting the other naps accordingly, add one more hour between them and make them 10 minutes longer).

As it seems to me, replacing the core sleep with a nap would probably not make a huge difference (in fact it might be better, given how easy it is to oversleep the core sleep). OTOH, adding one more hour between the naps, now that might be tricky. I usually get very sleepy during the last hour before the nap (unless I'm doing something interesting). Adding one more hour to that would make it a lot lot harder to survive until the nap. Though I probably can't judge correctly right now, as I'm still in the adapting period, it will for sure get better once you get fully adapted to it. And then Dymaxion might not sound so impossible :-)

Damn, it's been a while since I've written this much text on a forum :D