There’s been a lot of enthusiasm over the last few years about shortening how much time you spend asleep each day by changing your sleep patterns. The original idea, suggested in 2000, was the “Uberman” sleep schedule — six short naps of 30 minutes each, spread carefully across 24 hours. Other patterns have also arisen: Everyman, Dymaxion and others, all with various amounts of sleep at various specific points.
The tempting idea behind Uberman was that it would allow you to reduce your sleep to just 3 hours a day, freeing up five or six hours of waking time. There are stories of all sorts of geniuses and major leaders who slept just three or four hours a day, from Leonardo da Vinci to Nicola Tesla and Winston Churchill.
Unfortunately, it seems pretty clear that the concept of polyphasic sleep is substantially mythological. People need different amounts of sleep, and a certain percentage of the population is perfect happy on just three or four hours. Others may need ten or eleven. The article at the link above is a detailed and interesting analysis of polyphasic sleep by an open-minded life-long sleep scientist. It seems redundant to just repeat everything he says, so if you want the full details, have a look there.
The short version though is that spreading sleep around doesn’t change your requirements. If anything, it is likely to leave you needing a bit more sleep, because of the time it takes between falling asleep and actually starting to get benefits from it. The most natural sleep schedule appears to be the siesta — having a longer sleep during the night, and a shorter one in the middle of the day to bring the total up to the eight hours or so that we require.
J G Ballard explores the idea of sleep elimination in a number of his short stories, and never with good results for those unfortunate enough to try it.
The factuality of your opinion here is best indicated by your characterization of Piotr Wozniak as a “life-long sleep scientist”. That’s funny — where did you get that idea? He’s not a sleep scientist at all. I’d call him a software entrepreneur except that, well, the CEO of Supermemo sometimes doesn’t hear from Wozniak for months at a time.
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all
Real entrepreneurs show up for work.
He has an MS in molecular biology, and an MS in computer science. His “economics” PhD is actually about the value of spaced repetition in rote learning — from the above article, you’ll find that he largely (unwittingly) reproduced the results of ed psych research done about one century before. He has no peer-reviewed publications in sleep science. The essay here
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm
is little more than the kind of compendium of sleep science results (plus some opinion of his own) that anyody could assemble in a few months (at most) of studying sleep science literature. The “paper” here
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleepchart.htm
amounts to little more than a promotional piece for another piece of software Wozniak wants to sell (SleepChart), and probably couldn’t have been credible without attaching the name of a “neuropsychologist” (who is not necessarily a sleep researcher.)
Real polyphasic sleepers exist, and they don’t have much use for Wozniak’s amateur efforts to debunk what they are clearly capable of doing.
http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on-polyphasic-sleep/
I suggest you give the topic another try — and look *closely* this time. In particular, look at the work of Claudio Stampi, an actual sleep researcher, who conducted some experiments indicating the possibility that a human being can be kept healthy and functional even with only six 15-minute naps per day. (Most uberman sleepers settle into something closer to six 20-minute naps per day, however, and the difficulties experienced by Stampi’s subject, Francesco Jost, might have owed largely to trying to restrict his nap lengths by too much.)