Day 26:  It was a difficult morning.  This was most likely due to yesterday’s strange naps (predominantly light sleep) which didn’t feel very re-energizing and left me tired through much of the day.

(2012/04/02, (3:21,5, “eyes feel more irritated than normal”), (3:25,4.5,”decaf tea”), (3:49,3,”more sleepy than normal. nodding”), (4:10,7,”back to normal”), (4:53,5), (4:58,4, “laying on the sofa. OK in kitchen”), (5:10,6, “doing chores”), (5:30,3,”nodding off, laying on sofa”), (5:53,4,”very sleepy”),(6:05,6,”chores”),(6:20,5,”hard to program and write”), (7:10,7,”reading”), (17:50,7,”tired eyes”), (22:00,6,”movie watching, tired eyes”)).

However the rest of the day was normal.  Good level of work with about 10h of computer and 1h of exercise, … with some cooking and talking sprinkled in for good measure.

Day 27:  Oh Boy!  It happened again!  My last nap yesterday wasn’t ideal (see only 16mn above) and to make things worse, when I woke up at 2:45 it was in the middle of light sleep (which makes me groggy) … so I must have snoozed and totally overslept.  Of course by “overslept” I mean sleeping 5h55.  But surprisingly I felt wide awake after that.  I felt a little tired around 9am for 20mn but it was pretty much impossible to nap at mid-day, so I had to wait until 16:30.  I can definitely say that my body is starting to adapt in some form or another.   This can of course be seen as a failure to stick to the schedule, but I see the other side of the coin:  a few months ago, when I slept 6h at night I would feel tired, and would have a horrible time getting out of bed (I had to go to work without my 8h!!?).  Today, I sleep 5h55 … and I feel incredibly rested and awake.  So clearly, in spite of the mess of the past couple of days and in spite of this over-sleeping something is happening inside me.  But I’ll admit I’m not yet convinced about the possibility of fully adapting.

Today I experienced a somewhat dramatic event.  And just to show that I still keep my mental functions in working order (well, as good or bad as they used to be anyway), I’ll relate it here.  After my afternoon nap I went for a 12km bike ride to exercise and get some chores done.  On the way back I saw quite a bit of smoke in a field and attributed it to agricultural waste burning.  That farmer is burning a lot of stuff _ I thought.  But the flames were unusually high.  It got me worried.  I stopped.  Was anyone supervising that fire?.  It was too far to see. And then … black smoke, … and what looked like the tire of a truck.  Hum … dodgy!  I stopped a runner:  “can you tell me this address?  Don’t you think it looks unusual?“.  That monophasic runner ignored my concerns and ran on with his ipod.  But something wasn’t right.  So I stopped another cyclist, urged him to give me the address and I phoned the fire brigade straight away.  A few minutes later I trespassed onto their field to wave, shout and try to alert them.  The fire was already out of control eating away at a tractor, a pile of grass and starting with a little woodland.

Fortunately the fire brigade arrived at  this moment (picture) and were able to get the fire under control in 2h.

As a rough estimate, if I’ve been on Everyman for 24 days (the first 2 were 5h and 4h ), then I’ve lost 24*(8 – 4.5) = 84h of sleep.

Fortunately it seems 84h of sleep deprivation haven’t killed my empathy, emergency reaction time, and good citizenship!

Let’s now see how oversleeping (5h20mn total) affects me tomorrow.