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 Men’s Health UK 
August 2006
Men’s Health Germany
October 2007
Live the Dream
By Dylan YoungNaturally, everyone thought I was mad. Who could blame them? Give up sleep? Every second news item trumpeting more evidence of a pan-global sleep epidemic and this madbugger wants to leave off what few nods he has left? Cracked or not, on 7 January 2006, Igave up sleep. Fourteen weeks later, two hours rest a day, and I’m almost convinced Imade the right choice.Surprisingly, as mad as they thought I was, very few questioned my desire to adopt theso-called Da Vinci Sleep pattern, to forgo the traditional eight-hour monophasic model infavour of a 20-minute-every-four-hours polyphasic system. It was an extremeproposition, inconceivable, but the implications were understood immediately.People are forever complaining about the lack of time. Of course they don’t really mean
time
. They mean
 free time
, those rare periods that can be spent guiltlessly on any endeavour, from the lowly pursuit of completing that last mission on
Brothers in Arms
™to the grandiose goal of writing that blockbuster screenplay. Chronic lateness (not aproblem of mine) also seems high on the list of time-related ills. Lewis Carroll’s rabbitwould have been a much happier fellow with a few extra hours dangling at the end of hiswatch chain. The thing is, whoever you are, whatever you do, having too much time onyour hands is likely an unknown luxury. All too often, what you
want 
to do comes at theexpense of what you
have
to do, and the only solution to that equation is more time.
 
 The primary benefits of my plan were obvious. The sheer amount of time I’d recoverwould be astounding, clocking in at six hours a day, 42 hours a week, one week a month,and three months a year. Foolhardy or not, it could not be denied. It was a heroic pursuitand everyone appreciated that.My relationship to sleep probably isn’t very different from that of most people. I likesleeping. At times, I might say, I even love it. But frequently I view it as a lengthy andunfortunate interruption of my pursuits. It’s a typically polar attitude to sleep. When I’mawake, the last thing I want to do is sleep and when I’m in bed, the last thing I want to dois get up. The possibility that I could both improve the quality of my sleep and reduce theamount was extremely appealing. Still, re-routing the way you sleep, essentially the way you live, is not something to do lightly.It’s hard to say what the eureka point was. I’d read about a failed polyphasic attempt inNeil Strauss’
The Game
, a screed on the strangely nerdy subculture of internationalpickup artists. That had led me to the Internet, the lazy researcher’s first resort. There, Itripped into a bonafide microculture. Polyphasic sleep was everywhere, in Wikipediaentries, in Myspace profiles, on bulletin boards, among the Yahoo groups, in thechatrooms ... And the bloggers? Here was an ever-expanding roster of dedicatedpolynappers, faithfully logging every detail. Nearly all of them had begun in the fewmonths preceding my own interest and new ones seemed to pop up daily. More alarming,several of them were actually pulling it off.But polyphasic sleep is not something you can be convinced to do. If the seed isn’tthere, no amount of cajoling or anecdotal evidence is going lure you in. The benefits of polynapping, particularly in the beginning, have to be taken as articles of faith. Evenclinical research won’t tip the balance. And there is compelling medical proof.Polyphasic sleep, like most sleep-related studies, is frontier science. There’s still a greatdeal we don’t know and there are relatively few people trying to open our eyes to whathappens when they’re closed. Dr. Claudio Stampi, author of 
Why We Nap: Evolution,Chronobiology, and Functions of Polyphasic and Ultrashort Sleep
and Director of TheChronobiological Research Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, is the world’s foremostauthority on polyphasic sleep strategies. For the Internet enthusiasts, Stampi is somethingof a patron saint, though precious few seem to have studied his findings.Stampi discovered polyphasic sleep as a codicil to his passion for solo round-the-worldsailing. For the upstart neurological specialist, the unusual demands for wakefulness and
 
alertness required by solo sailors touched on some of sleep science’s most persistentquestions. Why do we sleep? What are the benefits of sleep? How little sleep do we needto achieve these benefits? And what is the most efficient way to reduce it? Using theavailable community of solo sailors as subjects and his sea-racing laboratory, La BarcaLaboratorio, as a base of operations, Stampi steered into these unexplored waters.Nearly two decades later, Stampi is still fathoming the limits of our sleep-defyingabilities. He’s competed in two round-the-world races, done studies for NASA and various military organizations, used his polyphasic strategies to train astronauts, elitefighting men and emergency response personnel, and generally proven to the scientificcommunity that high levels of functionality are attainable with a minimum amount of sleep.Stampi spent eight months working with Britain’s Ellen MacArthur, one of competitivesailing’s shining stars. The polyphasic strategies that Stampi devised for MacArthurhelped her place 2
nd
in the 2000 Vendée Globe solo race, canonizing her as the fastestfemale and youngest sailor to solo race around the world non-stop. Since then,MacArthur, sleeping only two to three hours a day during competitions, has wonnumerous races, is consistently in the top ten, and has broken an impressive list of worldrecords. In February 2005, she set the new solo non-stop round-the-world record of 71days, 14 hours, 18 minutes, 33 seconds.This wasn’t my first introduction to polyphasic sleep, mind you. There had been aLadybird ‘Easy Reading’ book when I was five, in it a passage about Leonardo Da Vinci’shabit of sleeping in 20-minutes stabs. That detail had stayed with me as a mark of genius,inspired eccentricity and (what I’m able to articulate now as) straight-up punk rock stardom. Through my teens and into my twenties, I’d fallen on attributions of so-called“genius sleep” to the likes of Winston Churchill, Buckminster Fuller, Napoleon, ThomasJefferson, George Bernard Shaw, Edison, Einstein, Salvador Dali, Huxley and NicolaTesla. Polyphasic sleep had a daunting fellowship.Until now, I’d never seriously considered testing the theory. But as a freelance writerfaced with a January of nothing but snowstorms and downloaded episodes of 
Shameless
 to look forward to, a little Da Vinci Sleep seemed like just the thing to liven things up.Maybe it was boredom, or carpe diem, maybe some of that punk vim I’d always aspiredto, mostly it was just curiosity and a little hope. Was it even possible? Would it changeme? Could celebrated genius be just a nap away?
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