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by wuwuno 2166 days ago
I was born not to sleep. Newborns typically sleep 22-23 hours a day. I was sleeping for 1-2 hours. I almost destroyed my family. If you have children imagine your child only sleeping 1-2 hours day.

From birth until I was about 12 I lived on 1-3 hours sleep a day, but I slept every day.

When I hit puberty I started having days and days of no sleep, my record is 11 days without sleeping I was 15. From 14 until my mid 50's my routine was get 2-3 hours of sleep, then be awake for a 3-8 days, then get 2-3 hours of sleep, then be awake for 3-8 days, wash rinse repeat, over and over again.

I once was working a trade show setup in my late 40's, round the clock prep, my company had 3 shifts of people doing all the prep work, I was there for all 5 days every shift. That's when my co-workers realized that I was actually awake, most people think that I was sleeping and didn't know it, or get cat naps, lied etc. Because nobody can even consider being awake that long but the thing is that when I get sleepy I actually fall asleep, it just rarely happens and when it does happen, it doesn't last very long. Usually I'm just awake.

Yes I went in for sleep studies but I needed to be wired up at all times, and it's a real drag being wired up and then trying to sit in a room for 6 days until I get sleepy. I did it twice, once for 5 days another time it was 4 days and both times I didn't fall asleep what they learned is that the normal cycles that people go through to fall asleep didn't happen for me. When I die they can try examining my body to see if they can figure it out.

When I was in my mid fifties I found a iphone app called BrainWave is a Binaural beats program that will actually allow me to sleep on nearly a daily basis. It's been a godsend, because being awake all the time really can wear you out intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.

2 comments

Wow, that's insane.

There's a program called SuperMemo which has a feature called sleepchart. In sleepchart, you plot sleep episodes which gives you some neat data that can help figure out things like subjective night [1].

But since SuperMemo is a spaced repetition system, sleepchart can also do some very unique analysis. The main graph it can make with repetition data + sleep data is alertness over time: how grades change the longer you've been awake. I would be very curious if you were to try it to see how your alertness/grades reported for repetitions change the longer you're awake.

[1] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Subjective_night

What settings do you use for binaural beats? I have trouble sleeping sometimes and have tried binaural beats but they are maybe 20% effective. Seems to have worked a lot better for you, and I wonder if it's a frequency thing.