I think that the time it takes to sleep is not very much related to the position one assumes before sleeping, but I think that the time required to sleep decreases by a lot if one stops moving, and I think that time increases every time one moves to change position even if it is a small move. So perhaps at first it is easier to not move when lying on the back because this is a new position for many people and it is easy to see if one has moved, and thus it is relatively easy to avoid moving. So I think that when one is able stay still in any position, then one can sleep in any position.
Running at night when I felt very tired was a very good way to become awake. But I had a stress fracture in my left shin for the first half of last fall, i.e. autumn, (as far as I could diagnose myself, but I did not get x-rays). Now I ran many times per day for a couple days, yesterday morning it felt as though I had stress fractures in both left and right shins. I hope that it was only temporary pain, and that I will be able to run without pain in about a week. I will stop running for the upcoming week to give my body some time to heal. I guess the problem was not so much the running but more the fact that my body is not used to healing fast enough with very little sleep. In total I probably did not run for more than one and a half hour in 4 days, and did not walk for more than 16 hours in 4 days. (16 hours is probably an overestimate, but I probably walked at least 8 to 10 hours in 4 days.)
Walking at night to become awake can be quite dangerous. Yesterday morning I walked from home, all the way across downtown ( I sort of live downtown) to the old port between about 4:30 and 5:30. I had many microsleep episodes. For the largest part of my trajectory I cannot remember on which street I was walking, so I would not be able to know the route I took. At some point I did not even know where I was downtown, but I knew that if I continued walking in straight line I would be able to figure out where I was. After a while I indeed figured out where I was. At some point while I was still "lost" the buildings looked like some other building I saw before, so I thought I had done a full circle, but when I looked at my tracks in the snow, I knew I had not been there earlier because there was only one set of tracks. In any case I did not like the experience of walking alone at night downtown while I was not fully aware of what I was doing. Running would have woke me up, but I did not want to run because of the likelihood of getting stress fractures. But definitely walking even for 30 minutes did not wake me up. I was out there for about 2 hours or more. The rest of the time I spent at the port looking at boats and thinking, and obviously some of the time was spent walking back home. At some point maybe after 45 to 60 minutes I did finally wake up (that is stop having microsleep), but this is much longer than I would have expected, and I would not have gone out to take a walk if I knew it would take that long to wake up.
My perception of time seems to have changed. I very often put timers when I work or study. When the time is over either I take a break or I start another episode of work / study. Most of the time I set my timer to 30 minutes. These 3o minutes seem to take a lot longer to go by. Sometimes when I work / study I estimate how long it has taken me to do a certain task, but when I look at my timer, I now see a quite different number. If I think that I spent 20 minutes on something very often looking at my timer convinces me that I in fact did it in 5 or 10 minutes. To a certain extent this could mean that I get stuff done quicker than normal but I think that this is not true, because I do not feel that I work / study faster or more efficiently than normal. In fact most of the time when I noticed this kind of discrepancy I had the feeling that I was working a bit slower than normal and /or less efficiently than normal. So perhaps I just perceive time differently.
Normally I cannot do tasks that require a lot of mental concentration while listening to music because I can't help but hear the voice, and even if there is no voice I find it very distracting. But for the past couple of days I did put some music sometimes to stay awake, and at some point I was working with the music, and I realized that the music was not bothering me. Somehow I was able to filter it out and work just as though there were no music. If I could do this reliably then I would probably be able to do productive work even when there are people talking near me. It would be very useful if I could learn how to filter out their voice at will. Time will tell if I can do this at will.
I think, and hope, that the hardest part of the adaptation is over. It seems to be easier to wake up for every nap. The 04:00 nap is really the hardest one to wake up after. For that nap I always feel that I would be much happier / comfortable if I went back to sleep, but I don't go back to sleep because I am pretty sure that this would cause the experiment to fail. Moreover I know that it does not feel that much better because I purposefully stopped another attempt a few weeks ago. I think that the "feel good" feeling only last until one starts sleeping which is not going to be a long time probably less than 5 minutes because one is very sleepy right after this kind of nap. After that it just feels like bad monophasic sleep because the body is not used to sleeping monophasically anymore. There is really no good reason for going back to sleep unless one thinks that the experiment is not worth doing.
I think that we all have some nap that is harder to wake up from. But I think that this does not mean that we are missing sleep because we function well for the other naps. And the nap that gives us problem is always the same one (or two). I think that the body is just not used to being awake at this time of the day. Perhaps some sleep inducing chemicals are produced during these hours and the trigger to produce these chemicals would be our "internal clock". So I guess as long as the internal clock does not adapt it will not be easy to wake up from this nap. This is very speculative and I have no evidence that the body indeed works this way. But if the body works along those lines then it is better to avoid adding additional nap to deal with the extra sleepiness. If this hypothesis is true then it would take more time to adapt if we add additional naps because the discrepancy between the internal clock and our sleep cycle would get smaller thus there would be less of a need for the internal clock to change. I read a similar argument on the google polyphasic group. So this idea is not new to me.
Since the beginning of this experiment I took each scheduled nap, I did not add any other naps, and I did not oversleep. I did quite a bit of microsleep, but as far as I can tell this was always less than 30 seconds if I was sitting and less than 5 seconds if I was standing. I think that these last two numbers are overestimates. Apart from 3 naps which I took between 1/2 hour and 1 1/2 hour after the scheduled time, all my naps were started within +/- 5 minutes, and most of them were actually started within +/- 2 minutes of the scheduled time.
