I’m not sure if I am going to try this or not. Sleeping is fun for me. To only do it for three or four hours in a twenty-four hour period seems bad.
What would my favorite doctor, Fergie, say, I wonder? (i like to call her Fergie. and no, its not the redhead princess that shills for weight watchers). She would probably tell me its a bad idea but who knows, maybe its just what i really need.
Demi
December 26, 2008 at 5:08 pmInteresting. I did this for a while as a kid without knowing what it was, out of perceived necessity. And for the opposite reason – I was avoiding REM sleep.
It doesn’t work. And Uberman can bite me.
I know this sounds like a strange thing to want to do, but I was having a problem with chronic nightmares, was perpetually exhausted as a result of my active avoidance of sleep, and needed to nod off without being frightened to do so. So I’d have someone I trusted stand sentry with explicit instructions and a stopwatch set for 20 minutes while I slept. If I seemed to be dreaming – any sign of REM, gesturing, speaking, screaming – or if the 20 minutes were up, the person was to wake me up immediately and we’d start over again from scratch.
And I’ll be honest with you – this is completely unhealthy. Your Fergie would tear you a new one for even trying it!
After literally weeks of this teen-brain-concocted experimental remedy bullshit, and a bit of Vivarin-popping to get through the rough patches, I ended up in a classroom to take a pre-Calculus final, and I don’t remember the final at all. I just remember a lot of blurriness and spattering in my peripheral vision – and I was scared the blurs might be rats, scurrying under the other students’ desks before I could see that’s what they were for sure. Not cool, to say the least.
The long term result of this exercise in teen idiocy is that I’ve never gotten back to being able to sleep a whole night straight through. At most, I can sleep for three to five hours at a clip. All this, plus a massive caffeine addiction that I am unwilling to give up. (Caffeine is my vital organ. If you shot me in the caffeine, I’d die.) 😉
But there’s good news – the nightmares are gone. Turns out that was an MSG allergy. Who knew? 🙂