Wednesday, December 10, 2008

The Uberman Sleep Schedule


On average, most people sleep for 8 hours, every day. That’s 1/3 of your entire life devoted to being bedridden. I don’t know about you but I have shit to do; hands to kiss, babies to shake and whatnot.

I happened to stumble upon a little thing called the Uberman Sleep Schedule. Basically, you end up sleeping for 3 hours a day, broken up into six, 30-minute chunks. I don’t know if it was named after Nietzsche’s insomnia or Superman’s speed habit, but damn if those guys didn’t change the world.

Discovered by singer Michael Stipe, your brain needs a certain chunk of time devoted to stage-4 REM sleep, the stage responsible for regenerative health, actual rest, dreams, and nocturnal emissions. The other 3 stages are just for showing off. Once adapted to the Uberman Sleep Schedule, you don’t have time to go through the first 3, so your brain is all, “aw fuck it, just give me the good stuff”. It’s making sleep more efficient; if we are all sleeping in Ford Excursions, we need to shift over to the Toyota Prius.

Here’s the best part: There are no studies that examine the long-term physical and psychological side effects. Ooooooooooooooooooh! I love science experiments. So, guess what I did…

Day 1
Shifting my sleep cycle is not easy. I don’t feel rested. I feel like I stayed up for a whole day. The naps are bullshit, too. I didn’t sleep at all during any of them. After every one I wake up and exclaim “this is retarded”, then contemplate quitting.

Day 3
Nothing has stuck and I am completely thrashed. Who the fuck thought of this? It was either a crazy person, or one of those guys in All Quiet on the Western Front who live under heavy artillery bombing for 4 days. Either way I am so grumpy and hating life that I could choke someone if I only had the strength.

Day 7
Things are finally starting to smooth out. My naps are going well and I’m actually starting to feel well. An interesting side effect of all this is that I eat like fat kid. Anything I want, in whatever quantity I want, I eat. You should see my dumps. It’s like going to the beach, sticking both hands into the shore line and pulling up as much wet sand as possible. It’s like that, but constantly. I crap like a Shetland pony. Shitland pony.

Day 15
I’m in the full swing of things and there are some interesting side effects. A good one is that my dreams have become super intense. The last one I had, I was running down a long hallway in some industrial office building with all these armed guards chasing me. They were firing, just trying to stop me. But then I was like, “hey, those insignificant worms can’t stop me!” so I turned around and beat them all to death, dodging bullets and knives. I was a one man army. Then the Pentagon blew up. I let out a maniacal cackle. Except it felt like I really was there; like I really should be doing this. That brings me to another side effect. I have the most rock-hard wood, ever. It’s not as great a thing as you would expect. Sure, my girlfriend wants to cuddle it 27/7, but I have completely lost my sex drive. Now sex just seems so…pointless.

Day 23
I have completely lost the concept of a day. Days no longer exist. Now I think in hours. “2 hours until I sleep again, 1 hour until I must feed, 7 hours until the sun rises again, 18 until the news comes on and I get to watch all the pathetic nobodies of the world scurry around in their short, pointless lives.” I watch my girlfriend sleep at night. How can she be so lazy? I’ve grown to dislike her. Usually I wander the halls aimlessly. I feel like I am in prison. When I’m not doing that, I’m either drawing up blueprints, schematics, things of that nature, salvaging raw materials (pieces of pipe, clock parts, stuff like that) or reading. Currently I’m reading Industrial Society and its Future by Theodore Kaczynski and The Book of the Law by Alister Crowley.

Day 31
I’m going to go now. My mission is clear to me, and I must leave hastily. I only have 2 hours to complete my work before I must rest again, and I figure I have a good 20 minutes to get away before the police arrive. I let my girlfriend live (although I don’t think she will want to stay in our relationship after what I did to her). I need her to live, to tell the world my story and why it must be cleansed. Otherwise what’s the point in being Jesus Christ if you’re not going to be recognized for it? Those pathetic low-lives. Those worms. I hope they appreciate what I have done. I hope they appreciate all that I have sacrificed for them. Me! I am the superior male, the Alpha Dog of this plane, and I sully my hands to save their wretched planet! Second to none, superior to all…

Day 2
Hey folks. Sorry for going all High School angst on you. I was kinda loopy. My plan to blow up the headquarters of credit card companies was not only blatantly stolen but also ill-planned. First off, I didn’t have nearly enough pipe bombs to take down one building, let alone five, and second, my pipe bombs were nothing more than pieces of pipe stuffed with clock parts. When the cops showed up they found me yelling and throwing garbage at an SUV, and the police chief later told me he had never seen a pair of underwear filled with as much crap, and frankly, he was surprised at how comfortable I (apparently) looked walking around in them. My girlfriend explained my situation with them. She’s not pressing charges because throwing a pillow at her doesn’t count for assault, and the credit card companies aren’t pressing charges because no one was hurt and they knew I was nuttier than squirrel shit. So the state is letting me peace-out for a few days in a mental health facility. It’s pretty rocking. The amphetamines they have me on to adjust to a normal sleep schedule are designed to keep me up for a while, and then have me crash. They give me a lot of gas. Which is fine by me.

I’m used to it.

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