Collegiate Times

While most people are used to sleeping through the night and waking up for an entire day, a cycle known as monoph asic sleeping, another eccentric sleeping pattern has been suggested as an alternative to the traditional "good night's sleep," and its users claim it increases their energy and productivity while allowing them to wake up automatically with less drowsiness.

This proposed sleeping method, called polyphasic sleeping, involves taking 20 to 30 minute long naps about every four hours throughout the day, resulting in only 2 to 3 hours of actual sleep each day.

Also known as Uberman's Sleep Schedule, this sleeping pattern sounds like it would do nothing more but leave people in a persistent groggy state that everyone feels for the first twenty minutes or so upon waking every morning. Even advocates admit the first week or two needed to adjust to this bizarre sleeping pattern is very difficult. However, once adjusted to polyphasic sleeping, most users report that they can fall asleep almost immediately while having little trouble waking up 30 minutes later, and they often experience more vivid and even lucid dreams.

It has been commonly recommended that adults receive an optimal nine hours of sleep each night. "Between the seventh and eighth hour is when we get almost an hour of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the time when the mind repairs itself, grows new connections and puts it all together," said Cornell Professor and sleep researcher, James B. Maas on the Kirsch Foundation Web site.

REM is a very important stage of sleep because of its involvement in memory consolidation, and a lack of REM sleep has been associated with decreases in mental alertness and cognitive function.

So what if the longest stretch of sleep someone experiences in a day is only thirty minutes long? Apparently, the human body adjusts to a polyphasic sleep cycle and adapts in such a way that a person will enter the REM sleep stage almost immediately after falling asleep.

Polyphasic sleep has known to be especially effective to those who need to stay vigilant over long periods of time, including people in military environments. It is also useful to astronauts and even certain animals that need to stay alert to danger during both day and night. The performance of these individuals might suffer if they stayed asleep for more than an hour at a time, and polyphasic sleep seems to be an advantageous alternative.

So what about the average college student who may view this outlandish sleeping schedule as a good way to get more studying and school work done during the week?

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