Thoughts on adaptation
I've basically just finished another adaptation to E3. I was doing some sort of polysleeping with a 4.5 hour core or longer before the holidays, but starting January I decided to get back into it for real.
Problems and Solutions
The best I was ever adapted was way back in December of 2009. I stayed adapted for months after that but it seemed like I gradually lost the ability to take good naps. Eventually I noticed some other symptoms, put 2 and 2 together and came up with 4. I believe I was iodine deficient. I was aware of this risk of my diet (any diet low on processed foods is low on salt, and iodized salt is where the vast majority of Americans get their iodine from) and I started taking iodine. It took some months for the condition to fix itself, and more months for me to nail down the correct dosage (despite the recommendation of many blogs to take up to 10x more, I found the USDA's recommended dose to be best). This was not helped by the fact that hypo- and hyper-thyroidism have many symptoms (including insomnia) in common.
I use drops of kelp extract, which can be purchased at any vitamin store. If you eat a meal that includes Kombu (kelp, found in Japanese cuisine) you might want to skip the iodine for a few days, as Kombu has insane amounts of it.
This was the big thing hampering me, and finally having it figured out I'm amazed at how easily I can fall asleep for naps. I suspect I may always have been slightly deficient. I was surprised at first that this made such a difference, and, being skeptical of the placebo effect, I have tried stopping taking it (or just observed the effects when I was away from home and forgot to bring it with me) and I am 95% sure it's a real effect. There at least is a plausible mechanism, so I don't think I'm too far out in left field here.
While iodine deficiency makes it hard to fall asleep, if I take Vitamin D, I both don't feel tired and don't get good quality sleep. After a while it builds up into an overwhelming sense of fatigue and I just crash. I don't understand this at all but I've proved it multiple times. Fish oil has the same effect, probably for the same reason. So, instead of taking Vit. D all through the winter like I probably should living in Chicago area, I take some whenever I feel a cold might be coming on. The effects of a 1000-3000 mg fade in over a 24 hour period and last about 24 hours, during which I will get crappy naps and sleep extra. (I have not actually had a cold since before I started the paleo diet...)
Polysleeping makes me more sensitive to the foods I eat, especially during adaptation. Wheat, even just a slice of bread, seems to cause hours of oversleep over the following day or so. White rice has a lesser effect (potatoes, though, seem fine, so it's not the starch that's the problem). Chocolate, especially dark chocolate, if eaten in any quantity, prevents naps for a surprisingly long period of time (up to 24 hours it seems).
Decaf coffee, if drank in the quantities I would prefer (four cups or about two normal sized mugs), makes my sleep crappy even after five hours. This surprises me. I am pretty sure it is not due to residual caffeine, because I experimented with regular coffee. Small amounts of regular coffee after a nap do NOT prevent me from sleeping for the next one. That surprised me even more. There are active elements in coffee besides caffeine; I suspect one of them is responsible, but in small doses is not noticeable. I suspect that this new ability to have a little regular and still sleep is due to no longer being iodine deficient, but I don't really have a way to prove that. I note that this brings my experience in line with many on the mailing list who have found small quantities of coffee helpful.
Adapting
I've done this before, to varying degrees of success. This time, it took about 40 days. I was not anal about oversleeping. I took the naps for a few days, reduced core to 4.5 hours, then after a week or so to 3 hours. There was only one day where I was a zombie for a little bit. The rest of the time I was just not at my peak, but still functional. This was definitely my least painful adaptation. The video game of choice this time around was Minecraft (start at your own risk).
Data
My wife has a Zeo, and I've used it for a core and some naps. The core, unsurprisingly, was about 50% deep sleep. I believe 1.5 hours of deep sleep is about what a monophasic sleeper gets in a night. The rest of the core was split between light sleep and REM, with slightly more light than REM. I have two cycles in a core, and the first one has no REM. None of that is surprising. What did surprise me is that all three of my naps are pure REM. I thought only the first one was. Additionally, I can remain semi-conscious while the Zeo claims I'm getting REM. This is good to know. Always take your naps, even if you don't think you're sleeping!
Theories
Multiple times on the list it's been mentioned that you tend to go into REM at specific times during the night, and those times are more-or-less constant from night to night. Considering this and the fact that my naps are almost entirely REM, it seems logical that naps cannot really be moved, and indeed this is my experience. I can skip them (to the detriment of my intelligence) but not really move them. This is contrary to other people's E3 experience and I will experiment with it in the future. Also considering the fact that I only get deep sleep at night in my core, I am more confident in my theory that any schedule that is only naps (uberman) is only possible for people who naturally require very little or no deep sleep.
I’m not dead
Summer, vacations, social occasions, the fact that I never really got 100% back on a good schedule after Christmas, and a mysterious growing inability to sleep for my naps eventually killed my polysleeping, though I never completely stopped napping. I believe I've figured out what went wrong and for the past few weeks have been attempting to go back to the schedule that worked so well for me, Everyman 3. I need more time.
Re-adaptation has been significantly easier than the first time. Already I normally wake from my core before my alarm and am not too groggy afterwards (in great contrast to last time). It has been difficult for me to get up from my 7:00 nap on time, though. As my naps improve in quality I'm restricting their length. I have not experienced zombie mode at all. In general, I am not being as anal about things this time.
I switched from using placebo's sleep track to earplugs, it's an improvement.
E3 #19: Almost back to normal
I overslept my 7:00 nap a fair amount the past couple weeks, but I think I've got that under control and I've started actually sleeping for my naps again. I wake up after my 3 hour core without an alarm (which is set for 1.5 hours later just in case). In another week I expect to be quite well adapted again.
None of the other schedules I've tried work nearly as well as E3. I probably could have stayed on E4 if I could have kept it up another few weeks--I was getting to be well adapted when allergies wiped me out--but it's not worth it to try again. E4 is too hard to maintain.
E3 #3
Already doing much better. Trying to take allergy meds before I have a bad attack instead of after. No longer having trouble getting up from naps. Falling asleep for them and waking right before the sleep track ends. Had a great nap at lunch time; I left the light off in the closet I sleep in and I think it made a big difference. I don't expect it will take me too long to feel back to normal if this keeps up.
Going back to E3
...allergy season and other schedule disruptions have totally messed me up. I'm going back to the schedule that worked the best for me. 23-2, 7, 12, 17:30. I've probably been averaging more like 4.5 hours of core per day the last few days; hopefully it won't take too long to get back on track.
E4: allergy attack
OK, my allergies had all gone away when I went off wheat, but my spring allergies are apparently not the same as whatever I'm allergic to the rest of the year. Benedryl takes care of my allergies but knocks me completely out. My naps are good if I don't oversleep, not so good otherwise. I've been pretty lax but am still adapted, though sometimes it seems more like E3 than E4. I think it would only take a couple of days of super strict compliance and all my naps would be great but allergies are making that hard. On the plus side, when I'm awake I'm usually at 100% mentally.
I get dreams in my noon and 17:30 naps now, but not really in my 7:00 nap anymore. Go figure. Also, just before 4 am I get an intense bout of REM. Interesting how my body has started distributing REM around the day now.
E4 58.7
Had a lucid dream during my 7:00 nap today. Lucid dreams are much easier to hold onto than they were when I was hibernating. 2:15 core seems to work well for me.
I overslept a bunch at various times during the weekend as my stomach was still messed up. But today I'm back on the bus and have not been feeling tired at all yet.
It's nice to finally be adapted. It may have taken almost two months, but I stayed functional throughout, which was my goal.
Expect my posting frequency to go down; I don't know how much exciting stuff I'll have now...
Differing sleep requirements
Different people need different amounts of SWS (slow wave/deep sleep). If you look at some sleep studies, you can see that there's a fair amount of variation.
Your body plays "catch-up" with SWS. If you miss out on it, you'll get into it sooner in your sleep cycle, and, importantly, you will sleep more intensely.
There is no evidence that our bodies do the same thing with REM.
So, putting these facts together, we can deduce that SWS, if you are deficient, will crowd out REM. Fortunately, you don't need too much SWS. The one study I'm thinking of (which I couldn't seem to find again) had subjects who got 40-80 minutes of SWS and one subject who got ~20 minutes of SWS (numbers not exact, but you get the idea).
Pretend you're doing uberman:
If you need 20 minutes of SWS per day, you can get that in a couple of naps, leaving plenty of time for REM and transitional sleep stages.
However, if you're one of the people that needs 80 minutes of SWS per day, you need four of your six naps (probably five if you include transitional stages) just to satisfy your SWS requirements. This leaves very little time for REM sleep.
A schedule that doesn't provide enough REM is not a workable schedule, so: my hypothesis is that dymaxion, uberman, and similarly rigid schedules are only feasible for individuals with low SWS requirements. I believe this may explain why some people seem to find switching so easy compared with the rest of us, who never really seem to manage to adapt to the extreme schedules.
I seem to dream less for my naps on E4 than I did on E3, which is what triggered this train of thought.
(I apologize for the lack of references, the studies I've read have been (mostly?) mentioned on the mailing list but I can't seem to find the ones I'm thinking of at the moment.)
E4 55.6
I thought I might have broken my adaptation because I overslept my core several days in a row (due to the stomach thing and then just not being vigilant) and wasn't sleeping well for naps, but today I didn't oversleep at all. Took a bit for me to really "wake up" after my core but I was moving around and not sleeping. I was even productive after my head cleared. I've slept for both naps so far today (quite well, too, at noon), so hopefully I didn't damage things too much.