Polyphasic Sleep

So I'm seriously enjoying my classes here in Tokyo and love being a student again, but doing a double major while working part time to pay the bills leaves me with no free time. In fact if I were to numerate the free hours I had I think it would have to be a negative number.

It got to the point where I began to considering dropping one of my majors, but after talking to a teacher it sounds like it's actually too late to drop classes for this semester so that option went out the window.

So what option did I have left? What I came up with was an alternative life style (sleeping pattern) that I had been considering trying before but lacked the push to actually put it into practice.

It's called the Uberman sleep cycle. It's a form of polyphasic sleep in which you throw out your nightly 7-8 hr block of sleep in exchange for six 20min naps spread out in about 4 hr increments throughout the 24 hour day.

It's rumored that people like Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and other great minds had implemented this sleep schedule. And now I'm giving it a go.

It's been about 5 days and I haven't experienced any adverse effects, which is surprising since other people who tried it tended to be hit really hard in the first week or so since the body needs to adjust to the new sleeping pattern.

Most people feel like a zombie in the first week, but I've only experienced this state on a few very rare occasions usually in the middle of the night when I couldn't think of anything to busy myself with.

I think the reason I haven't experienced any real drowsiness apart from that is that I chose to begin this transition during my regular busy schedule instead of during a break. Most people chose a break since they may have risks with driving to work and so forth, but I don't have any particularly strenuous or risky (like driving a car) activities in my regular schedule so for me keeping the regular schedule has allowed me to keep regular functionality almost as if seeing my normal surroundings somehow allows my brain to forget that it's not sleeping properly.

I should probably explain that the first week really isn't proper sleep, since you don't get REM sleep regularly from 20 minute naps, but after the adjustment period is over your body acually adapts to the new schedule and you receive your REM even in 20 min naps.

I've been dreaming in my naps lately (a result of REM sleep) which shows me that I may already be adapting.

I've recently decided to make a bit of a change in the traditional uberman schedule however, because I have one class once a week that's 7 hours long and doesn't give me a chance to get a nap. To fix this I'm going to attempt to allow for a 7 hour awake period during the day by condensing my nightly naps to every 3 hours instead of every 4.
As far as I can see this hasn't been done by anyone before, so I'm not sure how effective it will be, and if it doesn't pan out, I may switch back to the tradition schedule and just do my best to make up for missing the nap during my 7 hour class once a week.

I don't plan on doing this long term. From what I've read no ones ever done it for more than about 6 months (with the possible exception of historical figures like Davinci, but that's not easily verified), so I don't think I'd be comfortable doing it for any longer than that.