Polyphasic Sleep for Parents - Part 1

I've always been interested in sleep and a recent series on Steve Pavlina's blog hooked me even more. There are many different ways of sleeping. Monophasic is the 'norm' for most people ... 6-9 hours per night of sleep and then awake (or at least mostly awake) for the rest of the day. Polyphasic sleep involves taking short 20 - 30 minute 'naps' at 6 intervals per day. For example, you would take this nap at 5am, 9am, 1pm, 5pm, 9pm, and 1am. The thought process is that REM sleep is the most important sleep for rejuvenating your mind (and usually one of the last phases in a normal sleep cycle). If you deprive yourself of enough sleep, your body will skip the NREM sleep (the first couple phases in a normal sleep cycle), and will adapt by allowing you to fall into REM sleep within a couple of minutes. There are no major scientific studies that I can find on polyphasic sleeping ... just a good amount of blogs chronicly attempts, failures, and successes with a polyphasic sleep schedule.
The reason I bring this up is I believe a polyphasic sleep schedule would be something that could revolutionize those first couple months of parenting. The #1 complaint I always hear from parents of newborns and infants is the lack of sleep and constant zombie-like state they are in. What if you could condition yourself to only need these short 20-30 minute 'naps' and still be awake, and most importantly, alert throughout the rest of the day (and night). I'm going to spend a good amount of today doing some research on this topic. In my next post, I'll link to some blogs and other sites that describe polyphasic sleep as well as some that document people's attempts at sleeping polyphasically (I may have made that last word up ).