Does anyone know if it is possible to ‘sleep’ with your eyes open?
Also, what is the longest anyone has gone without sleep and what were the effects?
I used to work with a woman who said she slept with her eyes open. She said it disturbed her husband greatly.
“I must leave this planet, if only for an hour.” – Antoine de St. Exupéry
Are you a turtle?
I think I can. But of course, I’m asleep and can’t tell. 
I’ve gone 50 hours w/o sleep, and was acting just plain weird. I was very uncoordinated, and tended to babble. Kinda like being drunk.
I think at around 100 hours hallucinations are common, as well as paranoia.
People with constant hiccups are said to never sleep, but I disagree. They’d be insane otherwise.
Wrong thinking is punished, right thinking is just as swiftly rewarded. You’ll find it an effective combination.
I’ve done it. Just once though. My sister said it freaked her out when she saw it.
As to time without sleep, I’ve gone 63 hours once. I’ll probably do 40+ next weekend (big trivia contest here in WI, don’t ask). You certainly do start to lose it, both physically and mentally.
“In this life you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant. For years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.” -Elwood P. Dowd in “Harvey”
It seems reasonable to assume that the eyes are normally closed to keep ‘visual data’ from keeping the brain awake, but if it’s dark, it shouldn’t matter. We need to ask a blind person.
The longest documented time of sleeplessness that I have seen was for one Randy Gardner, a 17 year old who stayed awake for 264 consecutive hours in 1965 for a high school science project. He suffered no ill effects and only slept 15 hours after the ordeal.
Sig! Sig a Sog! Sig it loud! Sig it Strog! – Karen Carpenter with a head cold
When I was in the Navy at Nuclear Power School, I had a roommate who would fall asleep with his eyes open. It was a little unsettling to look at at first. After a while I could tell if he was asleep by the glassey (sp?) look in his eyes. It was convienient for him because they made you stand up if you drifted off in class. He could happily snooze away with none the wiser. It did finally bite him in the ass when he fell asleep on the way to New York and rolled his truck.
I would think that your eyes close during sleep to keep them from drying out. This suggests that in a state of slumber, normal persons do not blink.
Once after a particularly extreme bender, I woke with one eye so bloodshot that it looked like it had been yanked out, bounced around the room, stepped on few times, and then put back. My WAG was that in my state of stupor, one eye did not close, and did not blink. (It was not pinkeye or anything, I checked that out)
Ergo, people who can successfully sleep with open eyes must be blinking, hmmmm?
Your brain-in-a-jar,
Myron
Imbibo, ergo sum.
Apparently I sleep with my eyes half open, with most of the pupils visible. People have woken me up fearing I was dead! My eyes aren’t dry when I wake up though, so I presume they aren’t open all the time I’m asleep.
I once stayed awake for 96 hours printing photographs for a thesis. I don’t recommend it at all! No hallucinations, just a major inability to function properly.
I’ll never forget a houseboat trip back in the Summer of 1995 where this buddy of ours got drunk and passed out. That’s when we found out he sleeps with his eyes open. Some woman screamed and woke him up though because she thought he was dead!
He told us that happens to him sometimes when he drinks to much, but that his eyelids seem to fluctuate between being closed and half opened for minutes at a time (so the occasional blinking theory sort of holds here). Of course, how the hell does he really know since he’s asleep at the time?
Add me to the list of people who sleep with their eyes open.
I’ve had several S.O.'s witness it, although I’ve gotten conflicting reports on what happens: one said that my pupils roll back into my head and my eyes are all white (spooky!); one said that my pupils were normal, but my eyelids are droopy and half-closed; and one said that my eyelids are wide open and that my eyes actually follow motion to a limited degree.
I don’t think that I sleep this way all the time, and the times I’ve been told it occured were usually when I was napping or in a fairly light stage of sleep, not when I was in a sound sleep in the middle of the night. I am totally unconscious when it’s going on, and have no recollection of any visual perception while I’m asleep. In fact, at least one person pretended to poke me in the eyes while I was sleeping like that and I apparently didn’t flinch or wake up or anything. So much for it being an evolutionary advantage.
My step-mom sleeps with her eyes open. Her doctor has given her eye drops so that her eyes stay moist through the night.
I think she was having problems with her tear ducts, which is how they determined she sleeps with her eyes open. Now with the drops her tear ducts are back to normal.
I never thought it possible until she told me about it…kind of freaky!
My nephew sleeps with both eyes open, my friend with only one, and neither suffer dry or sore eyes. I’ve seen my nephew in what appears to be REM sleep, his eyes rolling about in an apparent dream-state, so I would suspect the presence of REM eye movement would help keep the eyes moist.
It ain’t a pretty sight.
I’m finished having kids. The next diaper I want in my life is to be my own!
The longest i ever went without sleep was a little over 4 days (around 100 hours or so). After 2 days i was tired, on day 3, i wasn’t tired anymore for some reason. On day 4, i was borderline psycho. It was like being high or something, because i had mild halucinations and everything anyone said sounded so damn funny. I pretty much walked around all day laughing like a mental patient. In fact i had no desire to sleep at all, it was so strange. I feel compelled to add though that i very regularly stay awake for over 24 hours (once or twice a week usually, sometimes more). Today is one of those days. 
“Through twilight, darkness and moonrise
My scarlet tears will run
As stolen blood and whispered love
Of fantasies undone”
Yes, I sleep with my eyes open. And, yes, my eyes do get dried out and painful sometimes. Coincidentally, I mentioned this to my eye doctor earlier this week and he prescribed a couple different lubricants, one to put in my eyes before bed to keep them from getting dried out and one to put in my eyes in the morning in case they are dried out.
In my case, it’s a side-effect of the facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy. “Facio” means face, and it affects my ability to close my eyes tightly or keep them closed when I’m asleep. My father had and my sister has the same condition and the same problem. And, yes, my sister and I often dream about things in our bedrooms only to wake up and find ourselves staring right at them.
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
Are we kin? Visit me at The Kat House and find out!
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I am much like Shagrath Borgir above, I once went approx. 110 hours without sleep. I remember difficulty concentrating on ANYTHING, and doing mental arithmatic was almost impossible. (That was one of the things we were ‘testing’. The only halucinations I remember seemed to show up in the ‘corner of my eyes’. When I would turn my head to look at them, they would disappear. I also didn’t feel tired and babbled a lot. We stayed awake through the first 2 days by always holding a metal bar in one hand or the other. If you started to drift off, your hand would relax and you’d drop the bar, Clang!, sometimes on your foot, but the noise alone would snap you back to full wakefulness. Then after about 2 days, the bar wasn’t necessary. Also, like someone else said, once I did sleep, I woke up again, on my own, after about 12 hours. I’m also told I sleep with my eyes partway open. I never really believed this until I noticed that both my daughters do also. You’re welcome, girls.
What do you want for Christmas, Crow? I want to decide who lives and who dies!
It seems resonable to assume people can sleep with their eyes open. I mean I’ve known people who sleepwalk. They are clearly not only sleeping but active.
I know if I go near 24 hours w/o sleep my heart pounds and I feel like I am really ill.
I’m thinking that the record for going without sleep has to be held by Dr. John Lilly (sp?).
I heard about this clown when I was an undergraduate. He was working for the military trying to communicate with dolphins. I believe it was called Project Janus.
Anyway, this space case got his hands on an experimental drug that allows people to remain awake for extended periods of time. If memory serves me, we’re talking months here.
The drug had a nickname of “Vitamin K,” and was initially developed for soldiers so that they could remain awake for extended periods to increase survivability on patrols/missions.
Vitamin K would keep you awake, but it seemed to cause the user to disconnect with reality and enter a dream-state while walking around after prolonged (?) use. Not a good thing if you are out shagging the bush for Charlie.
So Lilly (sp?) got wide on vitamin K, climbed in a sensory deprivation chamber, and had the dolphin noises played through stereo speakers in the tank.
He claimed that his altered mental state allowed him to understand how dolphins communicate.
(I think he discoverd that they had six hundred different sounds for “fish” and one sound that meant “Christ, I think I’m swimming through the same spot that Charlie just defecated in.” Just because they can talk doesn’t mean they have anything interesting to say, after all.)
The government eventually gave him the boot when they found out how warped this character was; he survived only because military research into drug effects during the Vietnam era was not really scrutinized before scientific funding boards often.
It seems all of the money came out of the military and intelligence services Black Budgets, so the so-called researchers got away with all sorts of shit.
My favorite was an experiment on the effects of LSD on elephants. This research was actually written up in one of the psychology journals and was published after peer review.
It seems that the researchers calculated LSD dosages based on body weight, and not cerebro-spinal fluid volumes. An elephant is a hell of a lot bigger than we are, but his neurological system isn’t eqully larger than ours. So the researchers gave the poor critter a huge dose.
The report states the elephant “trumpeted, fell over, deficated, died.”
I always here that there is no lethal dose of LSD, but tell that to old Jumbo.
Anyway, this Lilly character supposedly went for sleep for nearly a year, I think, before they sent him in for detox and a quick tightening of his cranial bolts.
If anybody knows any specific facts of this bizzare loon, I’d appreciate hearing some of them.
I’m sorry.
John Lilly went without sleep, not for sleep, for nearly a year, I think.
I really should learnt to proofread so I can catch the half-dozen errors or so that crept into my last post.
I saw a show a while back about a music teacher who had some kind of a rare neurological disorder, who couldn’t sleep for almost a year and died.