[Dragaera] Sleep cycles

[Lydy Nickerson]

Jon%20Lincicum wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Jerry Friedman" <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com> 
> To: dragaera at lists.dragaera.info, "David Dyer-Bennet" <dd-b at dd-b.net> 
> Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 11:08:01 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific 
> Subject: Re: [Dragaera] Sleep cycles 
>
> --- On Fri, 1/22/10, David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b at dd-b.net> wrote: 
> ... 
>   
>>> I find I get an energy peak just about when I should be 
>>> going to bed most days. 
>>>       
>> Me too. 
>>
>>     
>>> I think a 28 or so hour day might work very 
>>> well for me. 
>>>       
>> When I was in college in the early '80s, I heard of a 
>> Caltech student who arranged his schedule so he could have 
>> six 28-hour days in every week. It sounded like heaven 
>> at the time. Now I need less sleep, and though the day 
>> we go off daylight savings time may be my favorite day of 
>> the year, I suspect that 25 or 26 hours would be perfect 
>> for me. 
>>
>> Jerry Friedman doesn't use caffeine or anything like it. 
>>     
>
> While I'm no expert on sleep studies, anecdotal "evidence" that I have heard regarding such subjects leads me to believe that humans are very adaptable critters. We can probably adjust to just about any length of sleep to wake cycle, provided it is regular, and that it involves some amount of REM sleep. 
>
> In general, I've heard that long cycles are less efficient than short ones. The "DaVinci" sleep cycle (aka Polyphasic sleep ) of 4 hours wakefulness to 15 minutes of sleep is one of the most efficient in terms of ratio between waking/sleeping states. Thomas Edison is reputed to have slept this way. 
>
> Longer periods, such as the 18 hour/6hour ratio that is common for most adult Americans involves a greater percentage of time asleep. (3:1) 
>
> I've also heard of those on 24-hour sleep cycles, which involves staying up for 24 hours, then sleeping for 24 hours. This means spending half your time sleeping, rather than 1/3 of the time (as in a standard sleep cycle) or in an 16:1 ratio as in a Polyphasic sleep pattern. 
>
> I would imagine a Dragaeran on a 20:10 ratio would get about the same amount of sleep over the course of a week, month, and year as an Earthling. It's possible that the ratio is slightly higher, however, due to the extra 2 hours of wakefulness in each day leading to a slightly less efficient sleep pattern. 
>
> Or perhaps it's normal for Dragaerans (and Easterners) to sleep two or more times in a day. (Though there does not seem to be any text evidence I can recall that would support such a theory). 
>
>   

I'm studying sleep right now, hope to become a polysomnographic 
technician, which is fancy talk for a sleep tech that puts all the wires 
on your head and watches you sleep.  Current thinking is that people do 
best if they can consolidate seven or eight hours of sleep.  Although 
some people can get by on six, most that do are experiencing sleep 
deprivation.  Naps can be restorative, but they hav a high chance of 
causing you not to fall asleep at night when you need to.  The myth that 
people work best on a 25 hour day has been disproven.  It was the result 
of an early experiment, but has since been found to be experimental 
area.  (They didn't properly control for small lights in the office.)  
So that's what I know, which isn't much, I admit.