By oversleeping, I of course mean sleeping for 4 hours.  Yep.  It happened again.  Same time as always – 1:30 – 5:30.

I woke up feeling as if I was still asleep, but not as bad as the other morning when I wrote.  I was so tired then I felt drunk.

Anyways.  My additional precautions clearly were not enough to overcome my body’s rebellion.  I don’t know if I’m proud of that, or annoyed by it.

The basic principle is that you have to "starve" yourself for sleep, and limit your sleep to the nap blocks, forcing your body to adjust to those blocks as the only times it will see sleep.  Eventually, you will adjust to be able to get restful sleep during those short blocks.  Then the new pattern becomes normal and things should level out.

Unfortunately, I’m stuck at the half-way point, oversleeping every few days and throwing my progress backwards.  It’s very frustrating. 

So to try to combat this, I had taken a few extra measures:

1. Set 2 alarms, staggered by a few minutes
2. For the second alarm, I’m using my cell phone with sound and vibration.  Then leaving it on the glass table where the vibration is the loudest.
3. Leaving a light on – it is apparently easier to wake up (and I agree with this after doing it a few days), which helps avoid falling prey to the "Sleep Inertia" and going back to sleep after waking for the alarms.
4. Eating less meats/more vegetables.  I’ve been doing this anyways, but paying more attention as it is supposed to help improve your sleep quality and reduced the number of hours needed when on monophasic sleep.

Clearly this was not enough.  Especially when you consider my tendency to be able to turn my alarm clock off, even when I was sleeping "normally" and for a full night. 

This seems to be what happened this morning.  I woke to find my cell phone on my chest, and the alarm set for 30 minutes later than when I had initially set it.  I have absolutely no memory of this.

But this tells me I need to keep the cell phone alarm out of arms reach. 

I may also need a third alarm that won’t shut off after 30 seconds.  The watch and cell phone both don’t run for very long.  So far they’ve been adequate, but now that it’s really getting tough, I’m not sure they’ll get me through.

So, all that being said, I’m in for another day where I’ll start out really tired, then I’ll be so rested that I’ll have trouble with naps, making me tired again later on and finally getting the proper naps and evening things back out.

I had considered dropping this experiment if I overslept again.  But I’ve come too far now, and I can’t give up until I’ve succeeded, or it becomes clear that I simply can’t do it.  But for the moment, there’s still hope that I can pull it off.  But only if I step up my efforts.