Be aware that sleep deprivation can have some serious side effects. In extreme cases, a rare form of aphasia in which ordinary words begin to seem like snergdoodle, swiftly followed by synesthesia–in which certain words or letters become associated with sounds or colors or even majainba–will set in. Once you have ziddled this phase, permanent neurological damage has gampana; madness, joojooflop, and then death are inevita[color=#8800FF]ble[/color] within glorble bloorble unless keplana zeldarlana immediately. Diftak jatlak noordoo!
I regularly do 24-36 hours awake, damned insomnia. I would actually love to be able to sleep an entire night without being either drugged or ill and running a serious fever that basically knocks me out.
I am seriously jealous of mrAru, his hits the pillow and about 5 minutes later the snoring starts. I can wake him up for some emergency, after it is finished his head hits the pillow and the snoring starts again 
This is an extraordinarily bad idea. It’s not “interesting”. Sleep deprivation “special effects” are annoying and twitchy and you feel utterly miserable. It’s just really unhealthy.
It’s like ignorant kids that want to get a “nutmeg high” and then discover the high involves huge amounts of mucus and is akin to being eaten by a wolf and shit over a cliff.
More power to ya, but I really can’t understand why anyone would do this on purpose.
College finals and projects made me very much aware of how fucked-up your brain gets after no sleep.
I’m with **Taomist **on the effects - no interesting stuff, just very delayed reactions and emotionless paranoia. It’s like my emotions all burned out, and there was just this apathetic notice of freaky and non-sequential events. Very listless, but sometimes hyper-aware, and sometimes totally blanked out.
Typical thought sequence:
“Oh, hey.”
“Lookit that.”
“An evil soul-killing monster just appeared on the other side of my desk.”
“Huh.”
(insert even longer pause where I stare at the wall blankly.)
“Oh.”
“Strange.”
“That’s a shadow.”
“Guess that means it’s not an evil soul-killing monster.”
“Oh well.”
Not anything I’d make a special attempt to experience again, honestly.
You still with us hon?
I can’t even go 24 hours without sleep. I’ve never succeeded in pulling an all-nighter, even. I completely fall apart if I get, say three hours in a night.
I’m glad you’re smart enough not to drive, at least.
I guess he fell asleep sometime in the last 25 hours. Good effort for a noob though.
ugh, yeah, this is another vote for “don’t do this, for Christ’s sake.”
Back in college I regularly did 36 and 48 hour stretches once a week (damn ChE degree.) And it’s not pleasant, healthy, efficient or even productive. After the first 24 hours without sleep my cognitive powers dropped dramatically. Simple calculations that would take me 20 seconds would jump to requiring 10 minutes - I’d start the problem, just kind of zone, snap out of it, restart the work, etc.
What really scares me (in retrospect) was that the cause of of these long stretches was a lab class. This was a 40-hour / wk class, and the reports were typically 40 hours on top of that. As a grown adult now, I think I could manage that without failure. But as a college student I’d have 2-3 nights a week blocked off for drinking, then the next day would be wasted as I was hungover.
So I’d typically be up all night finishing the latest lab report, then head into the lab, filled with chemicals and industrial equipment, on no sleep for days. Yes, this was stupid.
The biggest effects for me (other than severely diminished cognitive capacity) were “microsleeps” - my mind would wander a bit, things would get all surreal and dreamlike, then I’d snap back briefly to reality realizing I’d been half-asleep. The other major effect was a feeling of overall shittiness - it really does feel lousy to be seriously sleep deprived, for me it got to like bad flu-like symptoms.
…so don’t do it, mmmkay?
I’ve never gone past the 48 hour mark (44 is probably my record), but I’ve never witnessed anything especially odd. Despite being a college student, I’ve long since abandoned true all-nighters in favor of sleep. I’ve found that there’s little practical difference in terms of a project I’ve stayed up 40 hours to do vs a project that I’ve stayed up 30 or so to do. In fact, 22-23 hours of work, followed by 8 of sleep followed by 3-4 more of work is orders of magnitude better than working straight for 38-39 hours. Your judgment is impaired, things seem logical when they aren’t.
Even recreationally it’s… meh. I mean, I can stay up 24 hours without even noticing, I do it all the time. There IS a point at about the 25-26 hour mark where you hit a really big high, and sometimes I do really genius problem solving there (not sarcastic) – but it’s not a “good” high, it’s closer to “manic” where all your inhibitions disappear and you start doing thing you’ve never really considered doing before.
Then about 30 minutes later everything sucks forever. You still get little peaks where you’re not tired, but nothing grad. From the 24-30 mark you also tend to be really emotional. After that, the world sort of just… detaches. The hallucinations really are boring, “is that light on or off?” “Wait, is that my coffee mug or a vase?” Joy. Sometimes, very rarely you’ll get some House of Leaves shit, where hallways seem longer than they are, but it’s not nearly as frightening in real life, more just mildly annoying. Also, you get normal tiredness stuff, like text shifting colors slightly (it’s common for me to see text being slightly orange tinted when I’m very tired).
Also general boring things start to happen like extreme aphasia (inability to form words or sentences), and absent mindedness.
I’ve heard from others that the “good stuff” in terms of hallucinations happen after the 72 hour mark, but unfortunately the “good stuff” is not exactly good for your brain. That’s about the time you start calling the cops because the frog people have invaded your house. I’ve also heard that after 65 or so hours a degree of insomnia sets in where it becomes almost impossible to fall asleep unmedicated no matter how hard you try despite being really tired. It’s considered dangerous to go on after 3 days, because there’s often no telling what will happen (some people just get weird hallucinations and then fall asleep, others start forming suicide cults with their new imaginary friends, bit of a crapshoot really).
I used to do this sort of thing over the summers when I was a teenager, just to see how long I could stay up. I managed over 70 hours once.
I didn’t have vivid hallucinations, but remember the sensation of things moving just out of the corner of my eye, and seeing images–faces and so on–emerge from the patterns of the wood paneling on my bedroom walls. The funny thing was that the images could still be seen in the pattern afterwards; I just never noticed them before, but they really jumped out at me after I’d been awake a couple of days.
I also remember lying on the picnic table in our back yard during a light rainfall. I am still not certain whether or not there was really a rabbit taking shelter under the table, or I imagined it.
That’s about as weird as it got.
This is so monumentally stupid! I mean, you’ll feel kind of shitty for a bit. THINK OF YOUR FUTURE!
Well, he hasn’t been seen since he began this experiment, so for all we know it proved fatal.
I’ll have to post what happens if/when I finally stop taking tylenol pm to sleep. I honestly have no clue how long it will take before I actually sleep, unaided. I’m guessing at least a couple of days.
I suspect I’ll be trying this sometime in the next month or so, when our baby is born.
Naw. You’ll easily pick up an hour of sleep every day or two. 
Hey, sleep deprivation can knock years off your life.
I can attest that no, it does not, at least not for me. I’ve been there a couple of times (though certainly not on a lark). The bad stuff gets worse, and new bad stuff begins. My bones felt like they were hollow, with an icy wind blowing through them, and flickering shadows made me hear nausea-inducing thrumming sounds. Printed text looked like it was illuminated by oozing, blood-red light. I found it almost impossible to keep both eyes focused on the same target. Everything smelled burnt. At random intervals, I found myself out of breath for no apparent reason. I had intervals of paranoia, and set a mirror on the desk so I could watch behind me; I saw shadows moving in it that weren’t there. My everything hurt.
I was still doing Fourier analysis.
No, there was nothing about it that could plausibly be described as “good”.
Again, not for me. From about the 48-hour mark to the point at which I was finally free to collapse, any time I was not actively forcing myself to do something, I started to shut down. I had to wait 5 minutes for one of my teammates (who had gotten a few hours of sleep when he slid down the wall and fell over) to drive us to class, and I didn’t dare sit down. I don’t think they could have awakened me. I paced instead, once I realized that I was falling asleep on my feet and about to tip over. On the mercifully brief commute, I sang…something to keep myself awake. I don’t remember what, and the driver said he didn’t understand it–he thought it might have been French. (He also said that it gave him the creeps, but that could have been him messing with me, or his own sleep deprivation. It was probably just Frère Jacques.)
Hey, if you’re doing it as a challenge. More power to you. If you go to a bar, you will just pass out though. 48 hours is pretty easy., anything more than that and you starting passing out sitting up in a chair.
What HAPPENED to the OP??? I’m very concerned! (not really)
No kidding. In college, if it got to 3 am, I called it quits and set the alarm for early enough to get some work done before class. Anything I wrote after 3 was going to be useless nonsense.