Good morning everyone. One of the most interesting “life hacks” (to use a buzzword) is polyphasic sleep. Polyphasic sleep is the process of breaking one’s sleep into small intervals. Right now, as you can tell from the picture, I'm wicked tired. I am experiencing day two of biphasic sleep. Last time I tried this I had an extremely intense experience. In this post, I'm going to relay that experience of lucid dreaming, hallucinating, and astral projection to you. Enjoy.

To commemorate polyphasic sleep, I am posting this at 2am (in New York!), right in between my two sleep segments.

My Bizarre Experience

Last year I tried polyphasic sleep for the first time and had a wild experience. Polyphasic sleep is separating one's sleep cycle into more than one segment. You can break sleep down to anywhere from two to six intervals, and the more intervals your sleep is broken up into generally the less overall sleep you get. Under the Uberman system, you get a total of 3 hours of sleep in six 30 minute naps throughout the day—insane. Advocates of polyphasic sleep claim that it increases productivity and happiness while saving time on sleep.

Last year I got interested in polyphasic as a freshman year in college. Basically, I wanted to optimize my time and experiment with my body. Polyphasic promised feeling more awake with less sleep—a win, win. On top of that, there are legends of this type of sleep cycle bringing on intense lucid dreams and meditative states in between sleep segments. I was in.

As a beginner, I chose the biphasic sleep which splits sleep into two 3.5 hour segments. It’s a simple recipe: sleep for 3.5 hours, wake up for 2, and sleep again for 3.5. I had a bizarre experience to say the least. The first time I experimented with polyphasic sleep it brought on intense lucid dreams, an out of body experience (astral projection), and visual and auditory hallucinations. Here is my story:

For the previous months I had a rigorous nightly and morning routine: sleep at 9:30, wake up at 5:30, workout, and meditate. The schedule remained the same except for a period of being awake from 1 to 2:30 am and moving my actual wake up time to 6pm. I was pumped. Do you ever have a hard time sleeping when your excited? I’m no insomniac, in fact I can go sleep basically wherever, whenever—my family envies me. But that is besides the point. As the neon lights of the clock faded from my vision, I drifted away to wake back up in the middle of the night. From here I’m going to skip to the trippy part, and it was weird to say the least.

The Hum: My auditory hallucination

I jumped in bed quite ready to go back to sleep. It was only an hour and a half gap, but enough to trick my brain into wondering what the fuck I was going on. The first few times one tries polyphasic, the brief waking period between segments feels very weird. Specifically, it feels like a caffeine rush while one’s body is really tired, and at the same time, it is oddly relaxing. Prolactin levels jump in the brain during this time period and that is what I attribute the weird feeling to (and lack of sleep :D).

After I layed down and closed my eyes, my mind was spinning but my body was tired. As this disconnect between mind and body began to narrow, I pick up something very peculiar. I heard a distinct humming sound from deep within my pillow. Imagine a slightly high pitched hollow sound that seems like it is real, but it is not obvious from where it would be coming from. You haven’t heard it before—is it the heaters?—you may wonder, then again you are usually not up at this time, so you ignore it. It continues.

The louder the sound got, the more paranoid I got, and the more paranoid—the louder.
I began to realize that the sound must have been from within my mind. I must be in a weird leeway between the dream world and waking reality. “I’m fully conscious,” I stampered! Although this little hum freaked me out, I persisted in trying to fall back asleep by focusing on my breath, which is a meditative technique. Little did I know, the craziness just begun.

Lucid Dreams

Lucid dreaming, if you are not familiar, is the experience of being conscious and controlling in the dream realm. At first glance, it seems impossible and “woo woo” at the very least. Not only is it a real state, but people openly seek these moments of complete control in the dream world. First timers almost universally try to fly or have sex. Even more bizarre are the dream characters: after realizing that one is in a dream, if you were to ask the other people in the dream, they will deny that it is a dream—freaky. Nonetheless, lucid dreaming is a documented but hardly studied area of psychology; little did I know, I set myself in the perfect conditions to bring on intense lucid dreams.

“It’s a dream! I’m in a dream!” is how every lucid dream begins. The dream was set in my dorm room, and unlike most dream settings, the room looked completely normal. I was lying in bed sleeping (in my dream), and conscious of this, my mind started rising out of my body. It felt so real, as though my mind was actually being separated from my body. I slowly glided towards the ceiling and looked around the room; it was hard to navigate so I was just kind of being pushed upwards. Remember, I was completely conscious, just as you are aware of the text on the screen right now. If I was born as a hunter-gatherer 10,000 years ago and I had this experience, I would easily jump to the conclusion that I really did separate from my body. It seems that we are inclined to think this way—you can hear the choir of New Agers claiming that this was a real out of body experience. It could have been and it felt real, but we’ll use Occam's razor for this one. I snapped out of this “Astral Projection,” and woke up. Worried I would hear the hum again, I quickly went back to sleep.

Mind-ripping experiences like this one continued over and over again throughout the night. Each time it happened, I was allowed to venture farther from my body. I cannot help but emphasize that I was conscious. I was experiencing a certain type of lucid dream. A total of four times in the night I felt myself—the part of me which I call “I”—lurch out my my body, each time in a setting that looked exactly like my actual room, and I would slowly float away. Sometimes I’d drift into my dresser and subsequently bouncing off of it, other times into an upper corner of my room to casually look around before I was snapped into my body again.

Visual Hallucination

Aside from the OBE lucid dreams, I also had several normal lucid dreams throughout the night. This leads us to the most interesting parts of the whole experience. The Hum was not my only waking hallucination. After a rather vivid lucid dream, I woke up and visually hallucinated. My brain brewed a mental stew, part dream part reality. By mental I mean it informally: I was mental. I felt crazy. Here is exactly what happened:

On the wall in my dorm room, there was a builtin board that I placed pictures of things I wanted and places where I wanted to go. Basically, it was a collage of beautiful women, beautiful landscapes, and a Dobsonian telescope (yeah pretty nerdy). Right after I woke up, I adjusted my gaze towards the “vision board” and the board was spinning. It was not spinning on the same way that the rotation feature on a smartphone rotates a picture (about the center). Rather, it was a morphing pinwheel, a kaleidoscope of colors that slowly sunk back into the wall as my picture board. As it spun, it was not two dimensional because it actually popped out at me and only became two dimensional as it went back into the wall.

I like to think of this hallucination as one of those rare times where I saw my brain glitch. And truthfully, experiences like this are hard to describe. In the same way that the elements of psychedelic experiences rarely can be placed into categories we call words, the intensity and oddity of this experience makes it similarly hard to convey.

Conclusion: Polyphasic Can Fuck You Up

Bi-phasic and tri-phasic sleep has a lot of potential to make one feel more awake during the day but it is quite a shock to your body since most people have slept in long intervals after the age of one. Experimenting with sleep in this way may cause vivid lucid dreams or even hallucinations as in my case. Last night I tried biphasic sleep since the experience I recounted in this post. I did not hallucinate this time but I had the longest lucid dream I have ever had. Have fun sleeping!

Learn more:
Ekirch, A. Roger (2001). "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles" (PDF). American Historical Review. Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. 106 (2): 343–386.
https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/polyphasic

TL;DR

I fucked around with my sleep and my brain fucked me back. My first experiment with polyphasic led to an auditory and visual hallucination and intense lucid dreaming including four astral projections.