That said I was thusly looking at Pavlina's blog. And at the entry where he looks back on it, one year later (http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/03/polyphasic-sleep-on...) and talks about how it's transformed his sleeping, even when he's gone back to "normal" sleep. And I think my month or so doing polyphasic left me with a little something, too: I now have a very well-tuned alarm clock in my brain. I don't have to get up for a day job any more, so I don't have to use it very often - but as I'm going to sleep, I can tell myself "I'm getting up at 7:00" or whatever, and I will be awake when the alarm goes off.

(I still set alarms, though, because they give me that extra boost of HEY YOU HAVE A REASON TO GET UP!)

In fact, I'm taking a plane trip tomorrow. Flight's at 7:40 so I basically need to be up and moving by 5:40 or so. I did those calculations and told myself when I was going to be getting up, and I could FEEL my body going through... something. Some adjustment of my cycles to get me to be tired in time to be up and moving then, these weird little waves of... levels of awakeness kind of cycling in me for a few minutes.

As to people saying that "we evolved for the eight hours sleep and trying anything else is fighting against evolution" - no, no we didn't. Babies basically do polyphasic. It was considered completely normal in the pre-industrialized days to go to bed around sundown, then wake up for an hour or two in the middle of the night and do some stuff by candlelight. It's only since the adaption of massive industrialized society that we've been expected to be up ALL DAY, EVERY DAY.

(And hell, right now I'm visiting my mom. She basically does the Everyman schedule since she's retired - it's not formalized, her throughout-the-day naps are kind of randomized - but she's got one biggish core sleep at night, and several midday naps.)