Well, not quite.
Polyphasic sleep is the act of breaking up sleep into small chunks throughout the day. The aim is to sleep fewer hours without suffering through ungodly sleep deprevation. This is achieved by shortening the time required for the body to enter REM sleep. The body typically travels through 5 stages of sleep (stage 1, 2, 3, 4 and REM) , with stage 1 being the lightest and stage 4 the heaviest. It's during REM sleep that the body heals itself and dreams occur.
By starving the body of sleep for several days, it is forced to adapt and enter the REM cycle within a few minutes of falling asleep. By napping for 20-30 minutes every several hours, it is possible to sleep for 2-3 hours a day.
The biggest problem people face when trying to adopt a polyphasic schedule is the adaptation period. For three or four days the body is deprived of vital REM sleep, causing severe fatigue. After the first few days, the body must catch up on missed sleep and pay back the accumulated "sleep debt".
After the inital adaptation, the second issue facing the potential polyphaser is the scheduling of naps. While there is some wiggle room, naps must generally be taken on time, every time. Missing a nap or oversleeping can cause fatigue which lasts for a full day and is potentially disasterous during the adaptation period (requiring the whole adaptation to be started from scratch).
I will be attempting polyphasic sleep from the 27th of December. I have 8 days off of work, which will (should) allow me to adapt without needing to use my brain too heavily. Initially, I'm going to try a modified version of the dymaxion schedule, taking a total of 5 30 minute naps at 2AM, 5AM, 11AM, 5 PM and 11PM.
For the first week I will post daily video updates of my sleep deprived hell. I will also post blog updates for the first fortnight and use twitter to post my naps times for a month. My goal is to convert to polyphasic sleep (and survive) for three months.
This is going to be interesting.
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