This was very hard to summarize in the topic title - what I mean is this:
Let’s say you normally need 8 hours of sleep each night, and one night you sleep for too long just because it’s so pleasant to remain in bed, let’s say 10 hours - how long should you sleep the next night?
Should you still sleep 8 hours or should you sleep 6 hours instead in order to compensate for last night’s excess sleep?
Why the compensation? Are you trying to stick to a specific daily schedule? If so you should just sleep 8. Whenever you change your sleep habits it starts to effect your circadian rhythm; that’s how people start and stick to certain schedules, such as working a night shift. If you switch the hours rapidly over a few days it really confuses your biological clock, you’ll wake up even more exhausted than anything else.
Ever hear the general rule for jet lag? that it takes 1 day per hour of time zone difference for your body to get used to it? That’s generally how it works with altering your sleep schedule, as a somewhat vague guideline for how your internal clock works.
I don’t think the body works the way you are referring to (catching up on sleep). Also, people vary widely as to how much sleep they need, it all depends on your age. Required amount of sleep even is widely variable in people in the same age group. So my advice would be to sleep as long as you want to, because the older you get, the less sleep you will want to get–for most people, that is.
I lost my source on this, but I did read somewhere that you can’t really “catch up” on sleep. If you stayed up all weekend, call sick Monday and plan to do nothing but sleep, after 8-10 hours your body will just naturally say, “Okay, enough” even if you planned to sleep for 16-20 hours to catch up.
So, if you overslept one day, only napping the next day won’t help to balance it out and might even leave you sleep deprived. Because, you can’t just move around the hours. (Unless you’re trying out some dymaxion sleep cycle or something, maybe.)
Stick to eight hours or your usual. If you plan to have a wake-initiated lucid dream on a particular day, then a recommended way is to have a good sleep for six hours, wake up and be active for a determined period and then go back down to consciously enter REM sleep. It’s not sleep deprivation, it is only a useful interruption.
I don’t think it’s that you can’t catch up on sleep, but that you can’t catch up on a large amount of sleep in one go. If you could never catch up any sleep, then after missing a couple of hours sleep one night you would feel terrible for ages!
If you miss out on 2 hours sleep every week night (10 hours total) and then try to sleep in an extra 5 hours on Saturday and Sunday it won’t work, because you can’t catch up on 5 hours in one go, but if you only missed out on 3 hours in total throughout the week you could probably catch it up by sleeping in on the weekend.