Almost one year of sleep
This graph illustrates my sleeping habits from September 4th, 2007 to August 16th, 2008. Days of the year run from left to right and hours of each day run bottom-up.
The blue stripe represents from 1 am to 9 am every day, eight nice normal hours of sleep. The chaotic oscillation rendered in black represents reality. I guess this black area is approximately equal to the area outlined by the blue stripe, which must mean I’m not doing so bad. Or am I?
When I look at measured data I have a fascination for the singular occurences rather than the trends. The things that only happen once, like that day I woke up really late or that day I went to bed really early. I can’t claim to remember what was going on back then -after all, I can only manage to retain the last 10 minutes in my head these days- but I’m certain those must have been real highlights of my MIT grad life.
August 22nd, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Hi there,
I am curious about copying your project next academic year. I was wondering though, how did you record your data? What did you consider “going to sleep”, and “waking up”? Also, did you directly input everything into the computer on a day by day basis, or did you keep a running nondigital record as well?
I think the optimal method for me would be to keep a small diary of times, then input them into my computer at the end of every week, since I usually am away from the computer for about a half hour before going to sleep and after waking up.
Similar questions for this entry : http://blacklog.mitplw.com/2007/12/06/sleep-mit-style/
August 22nd, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Hey Parker, the data I’ve collected is pretty simplistic, but I’ve tried to keep it as accurate as possible. I have a LED clock by the side of my bed, so I can look at the time as I’m falling asleep, and memorize the last one before I finally lose consciousness. Then I look at it as I wake up. I write it down somewhere until I can input it.
The simplicity of my design discards important aspects of my sleep pattern like naps or waking gaps in the middle of the night, but I didn’t care about that because I usually don’t take naps (I should) and I usually sleep very deeply, in one long interval from when I fall asleep to when I’m finally awake.
What I would love is to bring a sort of camera into my dreams, and then be able to play them back, in a Bis ans Ende der Welt kind of style, but that itself is just another dream =).