Wednesday, February 11, 2026

Less sleep, more productivity?

Sleep 2 hours in 24, and be a genius? 

R. Buckminster Fuller did it. Others have tried it.

Would you?
Would I?

I'm pretty sure a few political leaders have also tried this.

Blog friend AC in Canada is often talking of short nights' sleep. Not sure he's getting to be a genius that way, but perhaps ...

Editors Note: I am pretty sure this photo is not the one at Black Mountain College, because of the materials displayed. He used venetian blinds first to build his first dome at BMC. No plastic sheeting was available at that time.

Here is a post from 2019 about Dr. Fuller:


Just look at all those triangles! This is one of the designs in the gallery that was an extension of the presentation at the Black Mountain Center for the Arts.

A friend and I attended the Sunday night performance, and it was a really wonderful experience. - Another talented one-man show! And David Novak had the Buckminster Fuller persona down pat.

 And then he even had memorized a whole 2-1/2 hour show(with 15 min. intermission)!  I loved it, and wondered that he is going to be performing it in Poland this next week. I can't imagine being able to discuss these concepts in another language...but apparently he can! The author of the play was D. W. Jacobs, and it's been performed more than 1,000 times since he wrote in in 2000.





My first experience with R. Buckminster Fuller was reading his book "Operating Manuel for Spaceship Earth" back in the 60s-70s...as well as many iterations of the Whole Earth Catalog. He was very popular with the counter-culture, and I was thrilled in 1971 to join a UU Church in Tampa FL that was housed in a geodesic dome.  I also saw the domes in the New York Worlds Fair and Expo 67 in Montreal. Then Disney World had opened in Orlando with Epcot.

David Novak as R. Buckminster Fuller giving a lecture/performance at BMCA


Anyway, I also remember driving my camper van with some friends from Tallahassee to Altanta GA to hear Bucky Fuller speak in person, probably in 1977-78.  We camped in the van after the lecture, which might have been in the Fox Theatre. It was amazing to hear him talk quickly in much the same long drawn-out sentences, with no words less than 3 syllables, and often modifying something that had been mentioned in several sentences prior, but it mostly made sense. When did he catch a breath?



I just looked quickly at his biography, because I was pretty sure he was related to an early UU/transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller.  Yes, she was his great aunt but they never met, because she died about 50 years before his birth. And I learned in the bio that Bucky Fuller was the world president of MENSA from 74-83.

But back to the performance...and the great exhibit in the gallery at BMCA .  We quickly looked at the exhibit during the intermission.  It included some panels and artifacts from the Museum of Black Mountain College (Asheville, NC). The college is where Bucky first put his idea of the geodesic dome into models...and finally a working one.



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Today's Goddess:
Red haired goddess, terracotta, Starčevo culture, around 6300 - 5500 BC, excavated at Donja Branjevina archaeological site in Deronje village, Bačka region, northern Serbia.

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I had such a great year in 2019. I just read through my We'Moon calendar, where I kept track of the things I was doing, as well as progress on various pottery pieces. Then about June, I stopped journaling. So I've tossed it out, and know that the rest of my events were covered by blogs. Wedding of my son, trip to Colorado with a friend, trip to OH for Thanksgiving and then back to FL for Christmas. And then a few months later in 2020 I had my heart attack. Oh well. I'm glad as always to have had adventures while I could!

Today I just canceled the cardio-stress test. I was too anxious, giving myself nausea just  considering getting there. I'll look into some anti-anxiety drugs for the rescheduled one.

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20 comments:

  1. Maybe I should sleep less. I actually had two consecutive good nights of 7+ but was back down to 5 last night. That’s fine. I don’t like getting <5 for a couple of consecutive nights, but that hasn’t been happening lately, so I’m good. I did hear BF speak to a small group of us at uni. He lost me a bit.

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    1. Well last night i definitely joined the club. But i figure yesterday’s nap helped anyway. I actually tried counting sheep several times when I lay awake. I made sure to see them too. I can continue the count and forget the sheep often. I’m eating a banana in one hand so i isn’t capitalized. You may know an answer as a fellow iPad user…my sound has quit on this one, and I like to listen to my books on it. I can’t figure out what happened. Last update was not doing it, because I listened to my YouTube music just before trying to listen to the halftime show of the Super Bowl…and never heard a thing again.

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  2. There are several geodesic dome houses around here, and I've been at parties in a couple of them. Complete with buckets here and there for the chronic leaking! They're very difficult to maintain in a damp climate with cold winters stressing out all the joints. And furnishing a circular house.. I think it's a good theoretical idea which doesn't take human daily life into consideration. See also van der Rohe..

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    1. In Tampa the UU Church has been in a geodesic dome for over 50 years...they built a second bigger one many years ago and used the first as the Sunday School area. Yes, not particularly practical. But such a lovely structure.

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  3. ...I'm a Buckminster Fuller fan!

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  4. Re your question, in case you don’t get back to me.

    Of course, you’ve tried the volume buttons, so …
    Try Settings>Sounds and make sure you haven’t checked SIlent Mode. Maybe there’s something else in that menu too, but I don’t know what.
    Other than that, I dunno.

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    1. Thanks AC, I haven't been able to get sound to work after doing all of that. Can't figure out where it went, except something mechanical perhaps. I'll check with Apple next.

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  5. Before we moved to the mountains, we taught in a private school and in a dome. It was an amazing space but not ideal for for different classes being held at once, despite dividers. We also were privileged to hear Fuller speak--he was mesmerizing.

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    1. That’s true…all our forms for buildings are based on squares, so they don’t work that well even as dividers in a circle. Glad you got to see the genius…though his talk left me out of breath trying to figure out where each sentence connected to the last.

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  6. Not sure I ever heard of him before! I'm sure I could not function on just 2 hours sleep - but on the other hand I'm also not sure how many hours of the night I actually sleep (vs just being kind of half-asleep, but resting...)

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    1. I sure am not a 2 hour wonder. But like you I usually have about an hour toward dawn, or maybe 11:00 when I’m wide awake.

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  7. I don't think I've heard of Buckminster Fuller. I love today's goddess. So ancient but could also be very modern, I think.

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  8. I've never heard of Buckminister Fuller. I definitely need more than 2 hours sleep, right now I get 5-7hrs and can still function.

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    1. Im napping frequently if my coughing wears me down. Good for you getting 7 hours.

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  9. Yes. Today's goddess is a good one!
    My first husband and I tried to build a geodesic dome but we didn't try hard enough, I guess. Never happened.

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    1. Glad to know you were interested in a dome. I may have to start sharing goddesses again, since there are so many of them!

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  10. I can stay up for three days at a time. But then I crash. I sleep for hours and hours and I am overtired for a week.

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    1. Wow! You have a body which can stretch for you to stay awake that long!

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There is today, more than ever, the need for a compassionate regenerative world civilization.