I worked the night shift in a 24-hour diner in college. Motor skills are seriously impaired after the third or fourth night. Insanity, I’m not sure. I always collapsed before making it there. The one thing I noticed is that after the second night, I felt crazy-hyper. Like I was so tired, I was beyond giddy. Which fueled me for a while, but eventually you crash. It’s pretty inevitable.
One night without sleep made for an interesting drive back home once. It was the afternoon and I felt almost as if I was drunk even though I hadn’t drank alcohol in weeks.
Another time, driving back from my friends house in Oxnard around 2:00AM, I could have sworn I saw a glowing stick figure cross the freeway. We even made eye contact.
In 2004 I was put on Prednisone and pretty much my brain never shut off for two weeks. If I did lose consciousness, it was for possibly an hour or so. No more than that.
I would lay in bed whimpering and wishing for All Shirley-All-The Time to GO AWAY.
To give you an idea how farking strong prednisone is, I took two benedryl tablets and then another two an hour later and never fell asleep at all.
It was hell and took me weeks to get back to a normal sleep pattern after that.
I will never go on that stuff again. Ever.
A couple of years ago I was under a lot of stress and my mania/anxiety/insomnia kicked in at a record high.
It was a 10 day stretch with a few short “cat naps” the first couple of days followed by no sleep several days after. I was sooooo tired by that 9th day that I fell through a time-warp (so I was told), living in another city/state from my past. I was admitted to the hospital on the 10th by my former s/o.
I dont remember much about the event - I just remember it wasnt fun and don’t EVER say “I’m so exhausted I want to fall asleep and never wake up” !!!
It was bad. Really bad. But hey, the first few days were no different except being grumpy/sluggish.
I get insomnia from time to time (like right now, it’s 4am) and if it lasts for more that a day or two I start getting weird visual disturbances which make me see bright lights every time I blink. Or sometimes I’ll think I see something out of the corner of my eye, but I turn to look and there is nothing there. I usually resort to drugs at this point and take an Ambien or something. If I didn’t I’m not sure how long it would take before I went completely mad, but I really don’t want to test that out.
Back in the 80’s I did a lot of coke. I would go for days without sleep. My body was tired, and I would lie down but not sleep. I started dreaming while awake - quite bizarre. It was like hallucinations but I would come out of it and know I was wake-dreaming.
House said on one episode that ten days is the max, I think. But I know that after a month of chemo with prednisone or its evil cousin, dextromethasone (I think – summthin like that) I start dragging around like a zombie, blinking and staring at people who are talking to me.
I’ve personally witnessed people who were awake for well more than a week thanks to an unexpected windfall and access to frightening amounts of high quality methamphetamine. By day 6 or so they’re completely round the bend with visual and auditory hallucinations that they’ve gone pretty much completely dissociative at that point, but luckily most of the time that includes severe paranoia so they don’t leave the house.
That experiance answered a question I’d wondered: Is it possible to get so high that you’ll never come all the way back down again. The answer is yes and it’s truly frightening. I’m sure that the people I knew are most likely dead at this point.
I have gone five solid days without sleeping or periods of inactivity at all. Constant, high-output exercise. I started to see colors on the fifth day.
I have gone several weeks without much sleep, thanks to a medicine I was taking, that’s basically synthetic adrenaline. One hour of blackness a night. It wasn’t good. I went zombie, but I could function.
I went a week with two fifteen minute naps a day. No real issues.
I live on four hours a night, plus some twelve hour weekends. It’s natural for me.