Another sleeping experiment

I’d like to discard time for a week.

This year I’ve decide to embark more on a quest to explore sleep, and the way I experience it personally. It’s something I’ve struggled with as long as I remember, and I figure that by gathering more data points I can at least start to unwind this puzzle.

A few days ago I was considering an experiment, and this post serves as a braindump to flesh out the idea, as well as hopefully a place to gather feedback and ideally hear from someone who’s tried something like this before.

The basic premise is that for a week I’d like to lose the circadian rhythm, sleep when I feel like it and until I wake up naturally, and only afterwards inspect the data.

This has some immediately obvious flaws, the first being that if I’m to lose all perception of time I’d have to black out my house and not go outside. I suspect that by not deliberately structuring my life anything specific this can be overcome.

In more detail, I plan to pull the clock off the devices I own and the interface for the software I’m likely to use in that time (my system taskbar, irssi and tmux all show my timestamps), and use my cli twitter client twat to tweet like a madman, giving my timestamped data points to look at afterwards.

There’s some planning to be done and some preliminary research to be done, but I’m hoping that at the very least it’ll be interesting, even if it serves only as a cautionary tale to others.