Four Hours of Sleep

For the month of July, I’ll be attempting an amended sleep schedule of only four hours of sleep per night with an afternoon nap as needed. I’m not 100% sure I’ll be able to do it, and as of now, the plan is only to use the schedule during the week and possibly sleep more on the weekends.

Apparently the idea that we need a full eight hours of sleep to be healthy is not true. I don’t know how ideas like these become so widely circulated that they become common “knowledge”, but society gives us a lot of beliefs that simply aren’t true in themselves.

What prompted this experiment was Seth’s ideas in The Nature of Personal Reality. He discusses some benefits of the proposed abbreviated sleep schedule:
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“Many will find that a five-hour steady sleeping period is quite sufficient, with a nap as required. A four-hour block is ideal, however, reinforced by whatever nap feels natural.

“In such circumstances, there are not the great artificial divisions created between the two states of consciousness. The conscious mind is better able to remember and assimilate its dreaming experience, and in dreams the self can use its waking experience more efficiently. ”
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“Generally speaking, eight-hour sleep periods, or longer ones, are not beneficial, nor in larger terms are they natural for the race.

“There is a give-and-take chemical reaction, or rather chemical rhythms of reactions, that are far more effective in the shorter sleep periods. Many of you sleep through periods that should be those of your greatest creativity and alertness, in which the conscious and unconscious are most beautifully focused and at one. The conscious mind is often drugged with sleep just when it could be deriving its greatest benefits from the unconscious, and be able to poise most meaningfully in the reality that you know.”
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“The body itself can be physically refreshed and rested in much less than eight hours, and after five hours the muscles themselves yearn for activity. This need is also a signal to awaken so that unconscious material and dream information can be consciously assimilated.”
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Basically, the idea is that humans don’t need more than four or five hours of sleep, and by sleeping longer, we miss out on several hours that should be our most creative and alert waking hours. When we sleep, our conscious focus on the physical world is removed and redirected to the non-physical reality of our subconscious selves. This is the expansive world from which all physical creations originate.

By sleeping no more than four or five hours, we are better able to assimilate our unconscious selves with our conscious selves, we become more creative, more productive, more mentally stable, and physically healthier.

Some of the most productive and impressive people throughout history only slept four or five hours each night, including Thomas Edison, Margaret Thatcher, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and the list goes on. Obviously, part of their impressive productivity is due in part to the extra waking time they had to be productive, but perhaps it was also the case that such an abbreviated sleeping schedule enabled them to be more focused and creative in waking life. It’s worth a shot anyway, even though conventional wisdom says we need a full eight hours to be healthy.

Over the next month I’ll post an update each week with my findings and impressions. I hope to:
– be more creative
– be more productive
– have increased lucid dreaming activity
– have an expanded general sense of well-being
– see what else happens

The plan is to sleep from midnight to four in the morning with a one-hour afternoon nap as needed, during the week. I’m not sure I’ll be able to sleep thus on the weekends given my lifestyle.

I’m excited. Stay tuned…

1st Update
2nd Update
3rd Update
4th Update