polyphasic.info

Sleep Repartitioning & Alignment

After successfully adapting to a polyphasic schedule, sleep stage repartition and alignment are complete. Repartition means the rearrangement of vital sleep stages into each sleep (core/nap) in your schedule. This results in situations where a sleeper may have a nap full of SWS in the evening, and a nap full of REM around dawn. Alignment is a subset of repartition where the sleep is not just repartitioned within each sleep phase, but also within the circadian day. This alignment is necessary for adaptation to reducing schedules, and why flexing counts as oversleep.

In nap-based schedules, sleep internally repartitions to have SO-vitals by default. In all schedules, sleep additionally repartitions within the circadian day (which is known as alignment), going from a single block on mono to multiple sleeps at specific (or nonspecific for flexible schedules) times.

Before Repartitioning:

When one first begins polyphasic sleep, sleep stages have not been repartitioned. The process of falling asleep (for both polyphasic and monophasic sleepers) is somewhat as follows:
  1. Sleeper enters NREM1 (Non-REM; light-sleep), with a wakeful state for some time.
  2. Sleeper enters NREM2 (Also light-sleep), starting to fall asleep and reality of surrounding fades and awareness gradually becomes null.
  3. Sleeper enters NREM3 (or SWS: Slow-Wave Sleep), the deepest sleep stage.
  4. Sleeper enters REM (Rapid Eye Movement), where most dreams occur.

After Repartitioning:

Once adaptation is complete, your sleep schedule is stabilized in most sleeps.
It's common to expect a very dreamy nap around dawn, suggesting that the nap is REM dominant. You will obviously go through the light-sleep stages NREM1 and NREM2 (takes some time to fall asleep), but you bypass SWS to enter REM. Since adaptation is successful, you wake up easily and after around 15m of REM (for example), you will likely enter NREM1 and wake up comfortably.
If you nap late in the day, results vary - you might enter REM very quickly after lying down, or it could be an SWS dominant nap, in which you won't recall dreams and you'll sleep very deeply. You may also get both SWS and REM in just a 20m nap. NREM1 and NREM2 are reduced in your sleeps (ls-compression), saving space for SWS and REM which are more important for physical and mental functions.