Wouldn’t it be nice to be awake 22 hours of your day, alert and refreshed?

For me, there’s a lot of Dungeons and Dragons Online to play, but perhaps you’d stay up for a more noble pursuit. Either way, with our current sleep schedules, we spend about a third of our lives unconscious, drooling on our pillows.

The majority of us sleep by a mono- or biphasic sleep schedule, that is, one in which we have a core “sleep episode” at night, the former requiring no additional sleep and the latter including an afternoon nap.

But to be a powerhouse of productivity (and who couldn’t use the extra time in college?), one has to adapt to a polyphasic sleep schedule, in which the time spent sleeping is broken up and shortened to anywhere from 2 to 4 hours. People that sleep through all their classes need read no further; they are already successful polyphasers. In fact, they’re following in the steps of famous sleepers through the centuries.

Leonardo da Vinci is one of the first noted “polyphasers.” Legend has it that he slept for only two hours per day, napping for a half an hour at three-and-a-half-hour intervals.

In the mid-20th century, Buckminster Fuller, an American futurist, experimented with the same sleep schedule as da Vinci. He rebranded it “Dymaxion,” and claimed that if American’s leaders adopted it, they would shorten WWII.

Dr. Claudio Stampi, founder, director and proprietor of the Chronobiology Research Institute near Boston, wrote about polyphasic sleeping in his 1992 book “Why We Nap.” The book chronicles one of the few formal attempts at researching polyphasic sleep. A decade later in 2001, Dr. Stampi worked with Ellen MacArthur, that year’s second-place winner of the Vendee Globe, a solo non-stop yacht race around the world, to develop a sleep system that allowed her to pilot her yacht as efficiently as possible.

Flash forward to the present day, where the betta fish in my room is constantly catnapping. Anyone who’s watched a cat sleeping pleasantly on a couch knows that polyphasic sleeping is common in the animal kingdom. That makes sense; small animals become small snacks if they sleep too long.

Internet user Puredoxyk is perhaps the most experienced person with regard to polyphasic sleep, having been on both the Uberman sleep schedule (6 20-minute-long naps spread equally throughout the day) and the Everyman schedule (a 3-hour sleep episode at night and 3 20-minute-long naps through the day) for extended periods.

In her 2008 book “Ubersleep,” Puredoxyk explains that someone following the Uberman schedule for 20 years gains about 5 years of time spent awake. Apply that over a lifetime and adherence to the Uberman nets you a little over a decade of “extra” time.

But where Puredoxyk supports a strict schedule to maximize effectiveness and minimize sleep, psychologist Piotr Wozniak argues the very opposite.

Dr. Wozniak’s theory is that the body consolidates sleep into a single main episode regardless of adapted schedule. By the reasoning of “Your body knows best,” he believes free running sleep, that is, sleeping whenever you feel like it, is the most efficient way to snooze.

I can see one clear benefit of polyphasic sleep over free running sleep; I can have a life outside of sleeping. How Dr. Wozniak expects anyone to have a job or any responsibilities while following a free running sleep schedule is anyone’s guess.

To be clear, there are no case studies tracking the health of long-term polyphasic sleepers. Fuller only managed a Dymaxion sleep schedule for a short while. Puredoxyk pulled off the Uberman in college; beyond that she seems to have switched to the Everyman, and even so, she’s only slept polyphasically since 1999.

Sleep deprivation is a bad thing, filled with memory loss and cloudy cognition, which is to say nothing of the depression and occasional hallucinations. In my research I’ve not yet found an explanation as to why polyphasers are supposedly unaffected by sleep deprivation while getting at most 4 hours of sleep a night. 

This makes me unsure of the health factors of Puredoxyk’s experience. While she does point out that polyphasic schedules aren’t for everyone, I think the long-term health concerns about the Uberman or Everyman schedule make them better suited for situations where sleep deprivation is bound to occur, i.e. college. Adapting it as a lifestyle doesn’t seem wise to me, for one core reason.

Would I really want it?

Like the man who finds immortality, damned to watch those he loves die around them, my sleeping friends would surround me, and through the lonely nights, my sole consolation would be the Internet.

I guess it wouldn’t be so bad after all.