Where's your shounen spirit, man?

Not that I'm going to call this realistic, but I recall hearing of studies where people would force themselves to take 15 minute power naps every four hours on the dot and actually went for months without proper sleep. The idea, as I remember, was that by only sleeping for a super short interval, you could 'train' your brain to immediately enter REM4 level sleep- the best quality sleep where your body rejuvenates the most, almost instantly and for the duration of the power nap, whereas normal sleep fluctuates between levels 1-4 and our individual sleep quality varies thusly day to day. It was a fragile system, whereby if a participant missed even one of these naps by a few minutes, they would immediately 'crash' and sleep for hours and have to reset the pattern slowly... Can't cite the study, and maybe it was all an urban myth, but I thought it was interesting and could slightly rationalize this scenario.