This is my 3rd day sleeping in an environment which is 100% pitch black with no interruptions (no sound).
My bike rides have seen a marked improvement in their subjective ride quality. I also feel a bit more rested in the afternoons.
What’s more amazing are that my dreams are now amazingly vivid!
For the last three nights I’ve had very profound dreams. These really were inspiring and I found myself thinking about them well into the afternoon.
I haven’t dreamt like this in years!
If this continues, I’m going to restart the habit of keeping a dream journal (perhaps via audio).
Additionally, my rides have been improving. My subjective ride quality on my morning 15 mile ride was about an 8 out of 10 … which is really good as lately I’ve felt I’ve been overtraining.
I hypothesize that the quality of REM is significantly improving which explains the vibrant dreams and also explains the aided recovery in my fitness.
I was able to experiment with this by not replacing my blinds but instead just taping black trash bags over the window. It’s not pretty and only temporary. I’ll buy more expensive blinds in the future but this was a cheap $20 experiment.
I also found that I wasn’t able to fully black out the whole room and there are some spots which let in some mild light in the morning. Interestingly, the last 2 days I woke up just after sunrise so I think if I make sure no light is let in EVEN during sunrise then I can further optimize my sleep experience.
So far this has been full of WIN. Very excited to see what happens over the next few weeks.
My initial goals were to sleep less total hours but I’ll settle for this as it will also have a significant impact on my quality of life.
Another quick thought. The Zeo has turned out to be of no help. My ZQ scores are the same if not lower. On Sunday night I woke up 5 times. The Zeo says I only woke up once. My current thinking about the Zeo is that it’s an expensive pseudoscientific toy… Even gradual wake up function hasn’t helped me.