I am spending most of my time now watching the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” on Youtube in Mandarin Chinese with subtitles in simplified Chinese and in English. LordMaChou176 cut up and uploaded the entire TV series!
I find that I am recognizing more and more Chinese because of this activity, which is vaguely reminiscant of Listening-Reading. Often I stop the video, read the characters and find that I recognize most of them, even if I didn’t recognize the words as they were said. A problem is also that some of the characters speak in dialect or use other words than written, but not too often, so it’s still a good exercise. I am up to episode 20 now, though I’ve watched some key scenes beforehand (that’s how I got sucked into it).

I also religiously do my Anki several times a day for my Chinese. I am not too good at memorizing because of the brain being somewhat foggy, but I do know 1754 unique Hanzi now and am about to enter in some fresh characters. So it looks like I learned 254 characters since writing my Attack Plan 18 days ago, an average of 14 a day… if I can keep up that speed, I could learn 1890 more characters until the end of the year. However, keeping up the speed is not going to happen, because I will be on a 4-week vacation in the USA in September/October and I don’t see myself doing much studying around Christmas and New Year’s either. I will keep aiming for a grand total of 3000 characters known by the end of the year.

I also took some Greek classes on Myngle, from the package I still had. However, now my Greek teacher is on holiday and my package is about to expire with two lessons not taken – sometimes I want to curse Myngle for not giving students a reasonable amount of time in which to take those package lessons; leading to a lot of prepaid lessons simply expiring. On the other hand, it probably also succeeds in motivating some people to take some extra lessons just before the package expires; if they and their teachers can fit it into their schedule.

On the down side, I seriously overslept this morning. After going to bed for my 4am nap, I only woke up at 8:30am!. I blame my alarm clock, because I switched to a different one to prevent my boyfriend from getting sleep-deprived as I do this, and that alarm clock is apparently default set not to operate on Sundays, only work days. So it never went off and I slept all that time. Since normally I would have taken another nap from 8am to 8:30am, I decided not to do anything special but just to go ahead with my naps as before and hope for the best. Just now I was suitably tired for my 12pm nap and woke up from deep sleep before the alarm even went off.

BREAKTHROUGH! I had a dream in today’s 8am nap and then again (a different dream) in the 4pm nap! This means that my body has adapted and is ready to grant me some REM time even if I don’t sleep 90 minutes or more in one go. Its refusal to do so during the initial days is the main reason for being sleep-deprived. Now I am hoping for a swift recovery as I get more and more of the kind of sleep that I need.

Today however I have been feeling tired and out of sorts throughout the day. Not the zombie kind of tired like yesterday, but I also haven’t had any more lucid spells during which I could work or study. The naps leave me almost as tired as I am when starting them, when otherwise most of them would be refreshing. From what I understood, I don’t have another breakthrough target, what’s left to do is simply to let the Überman schedule become an ingrained habit, so I’m a bit worried about this strange state.

Monday August 10th, 2009: For over a week I haven’t been able to sleep normally, either falling asleep past 2am or waking up around 4:30am or both. I don’t know when I last felt completely rested; of course the stress at work contributes to that. I have dark rings under the eyes and in the past few days I often decided to take a nap during the day just to be able to keep on functioning. So even though it’s not generally recommended, I shall start my Uberman sleep experiment while tired. My naps shall be at 4, 8 and 12, both am and pm, as that’s easy to remember and fits my schedule decently well. I started today with the 8am nap after another night of waking up too early. I went to nap very punctually, even giving myself an extra five minutes to find a better frame of mind for one of the naps, but wasn’t able to sleep. I meditated and I think I reached that in-between stage, but I’m pretty sure I was not asleep and I did not feel particularly rested after the naps. On the bright side, I did not have to drag myself out of bed either, though I wouldn’t have minded staying.

Tuesday August 11th, 2009: Staying up all night with just the naps has been moderately difficult. The worst time was around 5:55am to 6:15am, because I had sat down comfortably on the couch in order to give my eyes some rest as I’d listen to some Greek Assimil dialogs. Not going to make that mistake again; the couch is too comfortable. Later, for the 8am nap, I actually managed to oversleep until 10:30 and apparently I switched off the alarm and fell right back asleep. I don’t remember any of it. For the rest of the day I’ve been feeling rather good, almost at a normal tiredness level. I managed to doze lightly in the 12pm and 4pm nap, but not in the 8pm and 12am ones, strangely enough. Oh well. Napping is strange in that it feels like a lot of time has passed, even though it’s just 20 minutes. Coming back from a nap, I always expect lots of new activity around my Cantr characters and my forums and I’m always astonished that nothing has changed.

Wednesday August 12th, 2009: I could not sleep in the 4am nap either, but I still don’t feel nearly as tired as I should be after going this long without much sleep; in fact I was even able to do mental tasks (preparing lessons and reading Chinese texts) for a large part of the night. I totally did not think it would be that easy; I had prepared easier things to do (making brownies, cleaning, watching Romance of the Three Kingdoms, playing games) and only wound up making those brownies in the morning because I felt like eating some. The worst time today was between 7:10am and 7:30am, plus immediately after the 8am nap. So it’s later than yesterday, but also possibly not as pronounced. I had breakfast, took a shower and felt a lot better.
BREAKTHROUGH no. 1: I slept soundly in the 12pm, 4pm and 8pm naps and when going out for lunch today I was 100% awake and in an inexplicably good mood. Now it’s back to somewhat-tired, approximately like what I’d experience staying up till midnight surfing the internet.