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Comment by quinncuatro | Hacker News Reader

I'm not so sure this is accurate. Speaking entirely anecdotally here, as I haven't done a lot of research on sleep trends. But ever since I saw Inception, I got into lucid dreaming. I only got lucid a handful of times over the years, but in trying to do so I changed my sleeping habits. I get about six hours of sleep every day, but I'm at a point where I fall into REM the minute I'm out. It's supposed to take an hour to fall into the cycle, but I've had cat naps that last about fifteen minutes with a full on dream. Since REM is the part of the cycle where your body rests the most, I feel that if I fall into the cycle sooner rather than later, I can safely shave a few hours off my sleeping time. Just my $.02

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Thanks for your $0.02. I'm the author of the piece, and I know what you are talking about. I tried to cheat sleep for a year by sleeping approx 4.5 hours per day. More here: http://qz.com/430415 (slept 3.5 hours at night and took 3-4 naps of 20 mins in the day)

My experience was the same. I used to fall in REM very quickly, many times in the 20 min naps. Here I say REM but really I mean dreams and I'm taking dreams to be a proxy for REM.

> "Though a tiny fraction of people can get away with much less."

Why is that?

This article describes such a person; might shed some light:

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/02/what-its-like-to-need-h...

But you ave it up so it was not what you thought it would be then?

How do you know you are in REM sleep by the way? Can you only dream during REM? I do often dream in the 9 min between my alarm snoozing, even if I do it a couple of times in a row. Does that mean I'm immediately back in REM sleep?

I did this for a year in high school (bi-phasic, 1.5h + 4.5h). Had to stop because I was disrupting my parents at night, but I had very good results overall. Felt like I had more energy during the day and enjoyed surreal relaxing times awake at night.

One thing though: I had a really hard time waking up from the short nap and had to have my girlfriend call me to wake me up every day. If you don't have a (girl/boy)friend to help you with this, or a very aggressive alarm clock, YMMV.

Another friend is doing a similar cycle right now and it's the same for him ... he has some friends ("accountability partners") who will call him to wake him up daily from his shorter nap and I think they talk about how their day went and then hang up.

Not all dreaming happens during REM sleep, so it's possible that you're not changing your cycle that much but still dreaming more.

When I'm in a good environment and haven't slept all too recently, I can also easily get a 15-minute 'cat nap' with full on dreaming. I sometimes wake up from them multiple times in a mild dream-state panic, but I don't really consider that a problem.

I wear contact lenses, and keeping my eyes closed for more than 5 minutes will really dry up and irritate my eyes (beyond relief with lens solution). The problem is that when I take them out before taking a nap, beside the effort that that takes, my eyes will not take kindly to putting them in so quickly again. In the morning it's not usually a problem. Does anyone have anything to share about that?

You won't like the answer, but when I had our first child, I switched back to glasses, precisely because of the ability to quickly transition from awake to napping when the baby slept. They're old enough now that I could probably switch back, but I don't think contacts are viable for the quick napping.

If it's just the protein buildup on the lens, you might try taking out set A, napping quickly, and inserting a fresh set B of lenses while set A continues to clean in the solution. They're cheap enough to try anyway.

I've only lucid dreamed once - that was one interesting experience. Usually, I don't remember my dreams at all, and when I do it's some weird stuff :-D.

I also have dreams when taking a 20-30 minutes nap during the day, and I can remember them more often. But I still can't go more than a few days sleeping a total of 6 or less hours, I'm just too tired. I need 7 hours at least.

What a waste of time... :-)

> Since REM is the part of the cycle where your body rests the most, I feel that if I fall into the cycle sooner rather than later, I can safely shave a few hours off my sleeping time.

That's a pretty big leap to make. If the natural sleep cycle has several stages, it's likely that the other stages are also important.

Yes, other stages are important. But during polyphasic sleeping, which is when you sleep more than once in a day, your sleep stages can get split too. We even have some scientific evidence for it. Though we still don't understand it well. More within links here: http://qz.com/430415.

Sounds interesting.

I'm curious about your experiment. What worked, what didn't, and what changes you notice (including potential placebo effects).

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