It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s… The Fog™! The Fog™ will eat your brain, causing you to lose consciousness and not remember a single thing! Were you sleeping? Were you staring into space? Were you robbing a 7-11? You may never know! Bwahahahaha…

On a more serious note, yes, I experienced roughly four hours of “The Fog™” this morning, scattered between 3:00 and 10:30. For several periods during those hours, I simply have no recollection of anything that occurred. No dreams, either. Obviously, I have to assume that I was asleep for at least part of those four hours, but the interesting thing is that I don’t recall falling asleep, or even waking up. In my memory, it’s literally as if I was at this place, doing this thing at this time, and the next thing I know, I’m at a different place, doing something different, with the clock reading two hours later. My memory almost seems to temporarily “shut off”. I imagine it has something to do with microsleeps, but either having many of them in succession or even just blacking out entirely. Very strange, and not something I’ve known to occur with polynapping. (I almost blamed Friday the 13th, then realized that today was the 12th. Doh!)

Strangely enough, this brain fog doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect on my sleeping patterns. I didn’t oversleep my 2:30, 6:30 or 10:30 nap, and I did sleep well during all three of them. (Actually, I haven’t overslept or skipped any naps yet, which is a miracle in itself!) My 10:30 nap was incredibly restorative, but dreamless, which suggests that my body is still adapting. Either my 2:30 and 6:30 naps weren’t restorative (causing the fog), or they simply couldn’t overcome the raw sleep pressure due to being awake in the early morning hours. Regardless, I can’t see any negative short-term effects. I wouldn’t be surprised if my adaptation was delayed by a day or two, but right now, I don’t even see signs of that.

In conclusion, I’ve definitely run over a speed bump, but I’ve yet to determine how damaging it was (if at all). At first glance, it seems that the brain is more resilient to screwups than most people realize - but it’s really too early to tell. According to some records of successful polynappers, I should be approaching the low point very soon. Hopefully, this morning was it.

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Forgive me Father, for I have sinned… I have done the most blashphemous thing a polynapper can do by lying down in bed when I should not have been! Fortunately, the resulting slip was only an hour, but I’m still kicking myself because it could have been much worse. I’ll have to be more careful about that…

On a positive note, at least part of that hour was filled with vivid dreams (implying REM sleep), which is said to be a sign that the adaptation is taking hold.

Otherwise, things are going extremely well. I’m obviously suffering some drowsiness, but it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as it could be; I think the ambient blue light actually does help! I’ve also become better at waking up to an alarm. Isn’t it amazing how the threat of being drenched can do that to a person? (When my cell phone goes off after a nap, I have 60 seconds to get out of bed before the second alarm dumps water on my face.) Amazingly, I’ve only been soaked twice so far.

So far, so good. I’ve fallen asleep during every nap I’ve taken today, though I can’t say that they’ve been very refreshing yet. No oversleeps (*knocks on wood*)! In my previous experiments, Day 2 has usually been the killer, but I’m confident that I’ll be able to pull through this time. There isn’t much to report right now; I’m feeling pretty much like anyone who just pulled an all-nighter would feel - pretty tired, a little out of touch, but nothing unmanageable.

I’ve been taking the Brain Power test once every 12 hours so. Though I only have three scores so far, the results aren’t what I’d have expected. While my accuracy and overall performance are decreasing, my reaction time and concentration level are actually improving… I’m probably just getting impatient.

In other news, I read an article awhile back about blue light and its effects on alertness. The lights in my apartment are now covered with blue tissue paper.

At 6:30 this evening, I took (or in this case, attempted to take) my first polyphasic nap. I didn’t sleep at all, but that’s not a major concern at this point - falling asleep will become too easy soon enough. I’ve decided to follow a standard 2:30-6:30-10:30 Uberman schedule, with no intermittent naps unless absolutely necessary.

To measure my progress and give this whole thing some hint of being scientific, I will be taking this online test at least once per day. My baseline result, gathered about 4:30 today, was 116.52. (Apparently, I’m faster than most, because the average third-run score is 93.59. :D) At that time I was alert, healthy, and otherwise “normal”, so I expect that my score will continually decrease over the next week. When it returns to that baseline (and hopefully exceeds it), I will consider the adaptation a success.

I’ll also be recording some other objective measures, but in lieu of writing a post after every nap, I’m going to create a permanent page for all of this data. Look to that for the less wordy updates.

Disclaimer: This is a survey of all profiles visible to me on Facebook, and is obviously not scientific. Take these results with a grain of salt; not only is this only representative of a Midwest-centric population, but college students are known to be less than truthful in their profiles. Additionally, Facebook has limitations (such as 500 results per search), and only profiles which specify both Religious Views and Political Views are included. Several religions which don’t show enough followers to offer any correlation have been omitted.

I’ll analyze these results later; I’m just posting them right now. What’s interesting to me is that of all the religions listed, Christianity is the only one in which Conservatives outnumber Liberals… I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.