March Experiment: Hacking My Unconscious

For March, I’m going to see what I can do to improve my sleep patterns. I typically only need about 6.5 hours sleep per night (usually from 2am to 8:30am) and somehow still feel perfectly normal in the morning, but I figure my unconscious is there to be messed with. Here’s what I shall do, probably trying each for a week and continuing with them if they work:

• March 11th: Hypnagogic sleep. Defined as the experiences you get when falling asleep, there are a couple of techniques to experiment with this outside of regular sleeping. This ebook suggests these two approaches, which I’ll try in order (the first for a couple of days, then the second):

The Arm Approach

• Lie on your back in bed or sit in a comfortable armchair.
• Rest your elbow on the surface of the bed or the arm of the chair so that your forearm is pointing straight up. Let your wrist go limp if that is more comfortable for you.
• Focus your mind on a problem you wish to solve.
• Allow yourself to drift toward sleep, while continuing to focus on the problem as long as you can.
• Wait for your arm to relax and fall, waking you up. This will happen naturally when you begin to fall more deeply asleep.
• Record any creative thoughts you had while dozing.
• Repeat.

The Spoon Approach

Dali was famous for his spoon method. He rested his chin on a spoon held up by his hands. As Dali drifted off, his muscles would relax and the spoon would fall on the table and wake him up from a hypnagogic dream. He then proceeded to paint what he saw.

• March 19th: Lucid dreaming. There’s a handy guide to this which looks intriguingly doable. Plus it ties in to the previous step (the ‘recording’ stage) quite neatly!
• March 26th: Waking. I’m going to get one of these for this (and hopefully for future, given its price/good reviews/geekery!). It’s designed to wake you at your optimal ‘almost awake’ moment which is near when you want to wake up, through some cunning use of movement sensors (I believe), and it even keeps sleep data which you can download via USB. I’m also going to try replacing my traditional beepy alarm clock with various music genres to see which work well, and which don’t.

Other things: I’ve (finally) put a section of my table aside as a ‘breakfast space’ (I’m incredibly bad at having breakfast) to see if having everything ready and waiting makes me more likely to actually have it!