Thread: Ubersleep Book Excerpt / Open Question Time

Hi, you guys! Thanks for inviting me to your very impressive site...I wish I had more time to look around, but zow, there's a lot of information here and it all looks really nifty. (Last time I visited here, two hours just *poof!* disappeared!) To let you in on a secret, the very first sleep experiments I ever did were attempts at lucid dreaming, so it's a subject very close to my, er, brain.

(I even had a few very minor successes, but I was never good at writing my dreams down, which I think contributed to not getting very far. Maybe I should look up some topics here and get some advice for trying again? Anybody knows any particularly helpful posts/threads I should read, by all means clue me in!)

Anyway, if you haven't guessed yet, I'm the author of the book on Polyphasic sleep schedules that's just come out. Asher tipped me off on my site that you guys might like to read an excerpt, and I thought in addition that maybe I could be available for a little while to answer any questions that would be useful residents of your forum.

There's a preview of the Ubersleep book available here (which is also where you'd go to buy it, if you were so inclined); the preview shows the covers (the paintings are titled "River of Sleepers" I and II, and they're by an artist I know who made them just for this book!) and the first 11 pages or so, which includes the (newly updated) Table of Contents, so that should give you a good idea what's in there overall. (There might even be an "easter egg" or two though, because on retrospect, I think I added at least one section that didn't make it into the ToC!)

So, since the beginning's covered, I figured I'd pick my excerpt from one of the later sections. I'm not posting my personal favorite, because I suspect that most people won't find the short paper I wrote on the Philosophical Implications of Polyphasic Sleep nearly as interesting as I did.

However, I bet you all would find the section that directly addresses dreaming interesting, wouldn't you? (Hopefully, by posting this, I'm not giving away too much, and deterring people from actually buying the book! It's only $5 though, and as I've maintained since the beginning, if the price and the value of information by themselves don't make it worth buying, then no amount of "keeping it secret" is going to help. I have a thing about shady marketing campaigns, heh.)

What I *want* to post is the whole section on Physical Effects of Long-Term Polyphasic Sleeping, which includes a bit on Dreaming as well as Lucid Dreaming, but that's a four-page .pdf and too big for your board here. So instead, I'll just reprint the part on Lucid Dreaming below, in plain-text (it does look a bit better with formatting!), and here's a link to the four pages on my own server. I hope that's satisfactory, and I look forward to your comments!

PDF of the "Physical Effects" section here.

-------Begin excerpt on "Lucid Dreaming" (this is copyrighted BTW)----------

Lucid Dreaming. Lucid dreaming is a fascinating phenomenon that involves achieving a degree of wakefulness without interrupting a dream. There are a great many people who have an interest in this phenomenon, and most of them wish to bring it about more often. (Anyone who's had one will probably understand why -- they're insanely cool.) Because lucid dreams tend to happen more readily when the body is stressed or the sleep is unusually deep and/or fitful (exactly the circumstances under which we tend to have very vivid dreams), it's been said that sleep deprivation may help bring about lucid dreams. Sleep dep, as well as other methods for unbalancing the body, are sometimes used as temporary measures so that a practitioner can have a few lucid dreams and then, if they know what they're doing, learn to recognize them and bring them about in normal sleep.

Many people report an increase in "lucid" dreaming activity during the beginning of their adaptation, during or just after the adjustment period. (For people who aren't familiar with the phenomenon, it can be a very powerful and/or unsettling thing to suddenly have lucid dreams -- they are, however, totally harmless as far as I know.) I find this unsurprising, and moreover I'm glad there's some perk to alleviate the ickiness of that kind of sleep-deprivation!

Several people I've conversed with have told me, with great excitement, how useful polyphasic sleep could be, if you were really into lucid dreaming and wanted to work on it. For one thing, you'd have up to six chances a day! Also, maybe a polyphaser's dreams remaining more vivid (depending on the polyphaser and on the schedule) even after adaptation is a sign that lucid dreaming would indeed be easier to bring about on a polyphasic schedule. Unfortunately, I've never known anyone who's primarily used polyphasic sleep for that. From what I know about lucid dreaming, it's probably difficult enough that trying to master it while simultaneously becoming polyphasic is just too much.

My recommendation, which you should take with a grain of salt since I'm no expert in lucid dreaming, is this: If you're interested in studying or experimenting with lucid dreaming, I imagine it would be more useful to get the hang of the basics of lucid dreaming first, and then do your polyphasic adaptation (preferably to Uberman, for maximum effect). By "the basics", I mean getting used to writing down your dreams immediately upon waking, and developing a routine of asking yourself a trigger question, such as "Am I awake?" on a regular basis. (Google will give you much better information on lucid dreaming than I ever could, though.) And for goodness sake, if you pull it off, please let myself or one of the Polyphasic group-maintainers know!

[End excerpt]