Dr. H: I've actually been meaning to give this a try sometime since before I was on SF0, but didn't really have a good time to make the transition until recently. (Stupid classes.) Knowing this, help asked if I felt like collaborating with him on it, since buddies are supposed to make the transition far easier.

We went on the Everyman schedule, with a core sleep period from 4:00-7:00 eastern time (where I am; help napped at the same absolute time as I did, but in central time), and twenty-minute naps starting at 12:00, 17:20, and 22:40.

help:

Polyphasic sleep sucks a lot.

I'd tried to adjust once before, and it was easier this time than the previous one. The first four days went entirely without incident, following the schedule completely. I think it helped that Dr. Harmon and I had a system worked out whereby whichever one of us awoke first from the nap would call the other to awaken him. On the evening of the fourth day, I traveled from Minnesota to North Carolina, where he lived. I found the one-hour jet lag this caused to be much more severe than it is on normal monophasic sleep. I continued sleeping polyphasically, but my schedule got more and more irregular until I crashed on the seventh day of it, after which, I decided not to pursue complete adjustment to polyphasic sleep anymore.

Primarily because the costs of it drastically outweigh the benefits of it. Sure, you gain a few hours a day, but you also really mess up your social life and any sort of schedule you have. Work is nearly impossible, as is anything else that takes up more than a couple hours running. Going to see a movie becomes a scheduling nightmare.

In addition, at least over a week, I never got out of the stage where I was feeling slightly exhausted all the time. I got to the point where I would regularly wake up after 20 minutes sleep without an alarm, or rather, before the alarm went off, but I never felt completely refreshed.

I don't recommend this task to anyone.

Dr. H: Unlike help, I never found myself feeling constantly exhausted. This doesn't mean I was better at stuff than him - in fact it is because I had greater difficulty than he did. Three different times I found myself just starting to slip into adjustment mode, and then slept through two loud alarms and my cell phone ringing, to give me a normal monophasic night.

I bet I could pull this off with a partner who was in a position to forcibly drag me out of bed for about a week, but for reasons help stated, I wouldn't particularly want to.

By the way, in hindsight, I think the way help should have travelled is to switch to sleeping at the same absolute time, with the numbers changing to correspond to mine. Even so, this is tricky, and I second help's non-recommendation.