Polyphasic sleep is a sleep pattern specification intended to compress sleep time to 2–5 hours daily. This is achieved by spreading out sleep into short naps of around 20–45 minutes throughout the day. This is supposed to allow for more waking hours with relatively high alertness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep
Anybody ever tried this? It's a fascinating notion.
It seems that most people who try to adjust to a polyphasic sleeping pattern with any kind of determination seem to reach an acceptable state of being after a couple of weeks - many even report higher states of alertness than with monophasic sleep. The long-term effects are totally undocumented though, which obvious entails caution.
Imagine how many posts you could make in those extra few hours...