http://www.highexistence.com/alternate-sleep-cycles/
Apparently Leonardi Da Vinci followed the uberman cycle; he could get a heck of a lot more work done.
Personally, I wouldn't rely on sources for the internet for scientific claims. There's a lot of crap out there.
so REM is basically when we sleep yes?
Lol whut? We sleep and enter NREM (non rapid eye movement) and we stay in that via 4 stages than switch to REM sleep. Overall we have 80% NREM sleep and 20% REM sleep.
Well, to be precise, it's actually 6 stages really, because once you reach NREM Stage 4, you go back to Stage 3, then Stage 2, and you skip Stage 1 to get into REM sleep.
The uberman sleep cycle has been known to be beneficial to the sleeper for about 5 months, and then they crash and sleep for 3 days.
Of course, getting INTO the uberman psychle is hard enough as it is.
Then you can do it all over again. Several stories all over the internet. Do not quote Psychological theory if you do not look at the research to accompany it...
Incidentally, I did attempt to make a search of the scientific literature for any mention of this uberman cycle (having never heard of it before). I looked up the phrase uberman sleep cycle and just simply the phrase uberman on PsychINFO, which the major database which indexes all the major psychological journals together, as well as MEDLINE, which is the major database for medical journals. Couldn't find an article at all about it. When I google the uberman cycle, it turns out that there is an alternative name - polyphasic sleep. But none of the 11 journals which popped up had anything to do with the uberman cycle as described on the those sites. Certainly no study has ever been conducted to the safety and efficacy on short sleeps throughout the day on any sort of performance or cognitive metric.
Another internet myth I say.