Just in case you missed yesterday’s post, I am currently in the midst of a little experiment — an experiment that involves me surviving on a total of two hours sleep a day. This gives me an extra six hours in each day to play with — ‘play’ being the operative word, as I fully intend to use the extra time to help reduce my massive pile of shame.
Yesterday, for the first time, I tried to use my new found hours to play video games. Considering that July is Shameless Gaming month, a period where we find the time to reduce our pile of shame, I expect I’ll be spending many a sleep deprived hour trying finish off the games that time forgot.
Last night I started with Max Payne 3. At the worst possible time.
Just for some background, my sleep schedule is divided into four-hour blocks, meaning that each day I have six 20-minute naps and that’s it. Nothing else. I’ve taken to calling these four-hour period “cycles”. It was during the 2am-6am cycle that I tried to play Max Payne, minutes before embarking on the heaviest crash I’ve experienced so far in the last three days.
The above video was taken at 3am this morning. Despite the rings around my eyes and red eyelids, I felt pretty good for being awake in the middle of the morning. Thirty minutes later, I was doing jumping jacks in an attempt to simply stay awake…
I really have no idea why. My body clock is an unpredictable beast at the moment. At times I feel fresh, as though I’m getting eight hours a night. Others I literally feel like my body is crying out for sleep — my brain throbs, I lunge into multiple micro sleeps and have to fight tooth and nail to stay awake.
This is what it came to — in order to keep playing Max Payne 3 without falling asleep, I had to play the game standing up. Standing up. In order to stay awake whilst playing the most frantic action shooter released this year, I had to play standing up.
But even that wasn’t enough. The need to sleep was just so strong that, at 5.15am — with 45 minutes until my next scheduled nap — I had to rug up and head outside for a brisk walk.
So that’s Polyphasic Gaming — a constant struggle against an overwhelming urge to simply sleep. It’s the precise opposite of what usually happens when I game late at night. Usually the incredible amount of stimuli in modern games pulls you through, but last night it didn’t even come close.
Hopefully, I’ll be a bit more successful tonight.
Leave a Reply