Uberman On-Ramp Day 3: Interim Report

As I reported in my "Building up to uberman" entry on the Google Group for Polyphasic sleep, I'm going to take 4-5 weeks for Michael Turner's Total Lifestyle Overhaul before attempting uberman.

We've got 11 French guests -- all of them here for a Japanese archery competition -- arriving at the ryokan, so it's busy-busy-busy, gotta go get some laundry out of the dryer in 20 minutes, then get my head amputated so that I can run around like a chicken with my head cut off. After tomorrow, things settle down a lot -- for 9 whole days, perfect for de-stressing and getting my life more in shape. Here's how things stand right now, early afternoon JST.

My to-do list for the transition prep:

Quit caffeine
Quit smoking
Start meditating
Start dream journal
Start self-Focusing
Start Everyman
Breakfast every morning
CRON-ish diet
Exercise
Establish wake-up call network

Caffeine -- I've been a bad boy. But it was an accident, I swear! I had the one can of vending machine coffee, then a little later, plunked in 120 yen for what I thought, in my muzzied state, would be a can of cocoa. The first sip disabused me of the notion that my Japanese vending machine button-pushing accuracy rivals that of Kyudo archers. It was that drecky, over-sweetened coffee crap, probably with that non-dairy creamer that lays down several more nanometers of porcelain on your coronary arteries with each dose. I drank half of it anyway, then threw out the rest.

Quit smoking? It is to laugh. Probably six ciggies this morning alone. But I was planning to put that off until caffeine withdrawal was helping me sleeping through a lot of the nicotine withdrawal.

Start meditating? Does thinking about it count?

Start dream journal: OK, here I score. I wrote a couple pages from memory. Something about some job I might or might not have gotten, meeting some young woman in the workplace who was a little like Chloe O'Brien on 24, only much nicer, with frizzy hair, and somehow even nerdier (if that's possible without requiring hospitalization). My goal is lucid dreams, which I used to be sorta good at. Beyond lucidity, see below.

Start self-Focusing? Um ... does thinking about it -- oh, never mind. I count it as progress that I thought about how to interpret the above dream. Eventually I want to try using Eugene Gendlin's dream-interpretation technique (from Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams) while actually in a lucid dream.

Start Everyman: today I woke up around 9:15. And about 3.5 hours later, I felt drowsy. I really want to start lying down every 4 hours, sleep mask on, earplugs in, alarm set, just to get into the habit. In this case -- well, not having had breakfast, I was too hungry to nap, and things are too busy here at the ryokan anyway. So I went to Soup Stock Tokyo for lunch.

Breakfast every morning -- oops, see above. Maybe a missed nap opportunity because of this.

CRON-ish diet. Lunch at Soup Stock Tokyo counts, sort of. They are big on nourishment (but not on portion sizes.) Going without breakfast is way too much calore restriction, though, and not exactly optimal nutrition either.

Exercise -- does carrying a lot of futons to the roof of the ryokan to air out count as exercise? I got a little out of breath. What I'd like to do is go swimming every day, just to set the habit, then start doing more other kinds of exercise. I used to be a rock-climber, a trail-runner. Geez, I was even a champion gymnast as a kid. In my late 30s, I thought nothing of popping out of bed as 6:30 AM so I could do laps in the pool for half an hour before work. How far I have fallen.

Establish wakeup call network -- hey, I got a couple offers, one from PD herself!

OK, from now on, I won't be quite so blow-by-blow.