Back in the early 80’s, I was working 3rd shift in a factory and was really having trouble adjusting to working all night long. Plus, I had come down with a cold and had taken some sort of over the counter cold medicine that made me sleepy.
That particular night, a group of us were inspecting some scale margins, sitting around in a circle, some in chairs, some on the floor. I was sitting cross legged on the floor. The next thing I knew my manager was shaking me, calling my name… I had fallen asleep, sitting straight up, with a scale margin in my hands. She sent me home sick that night. ;-D
I was recently up for 36 hours straight, and in the preceding 20 hours only got 3 hours of sleep. I don’t really ever have narcolepsy-like moments like falling asleep while upright, but once I hit the bed I was out. I slept from 6:30 PM to 10:30 AM.
I woke up one morning around 9 am or so when I was 16 or 17 wet.
Dripping wet. Absolutely drenched.
I had decided to sleep in the back yard. It was summer and I liked to sleep outside. When I woke up I was soaking wet. The sleeping bag had pools of water on it.
I got up and wandered inside rather confused. My Mom was sitting at the kitchen table which had a view of the back yard and where I was sleeping. When I came in Mom said ‘Hi’.
I was a bit baffled still and said Hi back. Then I asked if it rained.
My mom smiled a bit and said ‘Well, no. I woke up around 6 am and came down for coffee. The sprinklers were going off. I thought about waking you up but since you didn’t seem to mind…’.
I was so tired that on an old, rattling train from Fez to Tangiers, on a metal bench seat, packed in between two young Moroccan guys, sitting ramrod straight up so I wouldn’t offend anybody by touching them, I still managed to fall asleep for several hours.
Hiked into a wilderness shelter in Banff National Park. To be honest I was young and foolishly thought that’d be enough to get me there - bah on training for it!
When we reached the shelter, late afternoon, we were so tired we threw off our packs and plunked down on a bunk. We awoke 6 hrs later, in utter silent darkness! Man was I tired!
I remember going to bed with a nasty cold one Friday night, and waking up incredibly dehydrated. It wasn’t until I turned on the TV that I realized it was Monday morning, and I’d literally slept all weekend.
I have the standard mother to a newborn stories. Fell asleep feeding baby, etc. Then there was the time I was pregnant and it was 2pm and I needed to drive somewhere. Really, really bad idea. Woke up flying over the ditch at the side of the road. I didn’t drive in the afternoon for months after that and I still (11 years later) get a bit nervous about it.
Then there were all the times I fell asleep on my paper route as a kid. It was an early morning paper. I’d find myself at a point on my route and not remember delivering the previous mile of my route . . . on my bike. When I walked the route there were a few times that I arrived home and didn’t remember any of the route for that day. I had drowsed through the whole thing.
About 20-odd years ago I had the wisdom tooth extraction from hell. The dentist sent over new pain medication when the originals did nothing to help. I don’t remember what it was but I took one and thought, “I just want to go to bed”. I woke up hours later on the stairs, halfway up. I’d fallen asleep walking up the stairs. I obviously didn’t fall and I wasn’t hurt so I must have known I needed to sit or lay down although I don’t remember it.
Me too, and I was on top. Also I once spent three weeks working 8am to after midnight shifts and one morning towards the end of the run I actually fell asleep sitting on the toilet.
When our children were younger I remember walking along a long corridor at work (with not many side doors opening into it) and realising I could shut my eyes for perhaps 3 or 4 seconds and get some rest, while continuing to walk. I don’t suppose it actually helped, but it felt good.
There are the standard mother of newborn ones, of course, plus two from college: the day before winter classes started, Athens GA had a pretty good snowstorm - sure, in Minnesota, you’d laugh and call it summertime, but in Georgia, we’re just not equipped for snow. At the time, I was waitressing third shift at a 24-hour diner a couple of blocks from my apartment. Most of my co-workers lived several miles away, and the roads were impassable. So Steve the cook and I worked until someone else could come in. Between us, we covered the store for about 60 hours straight. When one of us was too tired to stand, we’d go nap in the stockroom while the other cooked and waited tables. (Fortunately, Steve had a bit of a cocaine habit, so I didn’t have to cover the grill too many hours.) By the end, we had no stock - we were within walking distance of lots of student housing and the Greek houses, so we were slammed, with no deliveries for 2.5 days. Customers would come in, and I’d tell them which items they could have. If you didn’t want grits, a waffle, coffee, soda, or chili, you better be there to play the jukebox. Finally, the district manager was able to pick up the manager, her son (who could cook a little,) and another waitress. I put on my coat to walk home, and the DM insisted on driving me for fear that I’d fall asleep midway and die of hypothermia. I slept about 30 hours after that.
The next winter, I had mono. I have never been so exhausted in my life. I was sleeping 23.5 hours a day. My roommate carried me to and from the bathroom a couple of times after spotting me crawling those dozen feet. I was too tired to stand. He would also wake me up to force me to drink juice or feed me soup, and a whole bowl of soup might take 2 hours, counting all of the naps. (He likely saved my life. Left to my own devices, I’d have probably died of dehydration.)
I’ve always had a horrible time getting to sleep but throughout highschool was the worst. Once when I’d been awake probably 50ish hours and fell asleep while walking down the stairs to my science class. Didn’t injure myself seriously but it hurt to sit for the rest of the day. On the bright side it jolted me into wakefulness.
Frequently if I’d been awake more than 60-70 hours, or had less than a couple hours all week, I’d start hallucinating. Mostly just everything would look like it was moving even when it wasn’t, brick walls would look like the bricks were shifting around like puzzle blocks or something. Or if I was reading I’d start seeing things, character, events, etc from the book out of the corner of my eye.
In high school, i attended an agricultural boarding school in Sydney, and lots of my friends lived on large farms in central-west New South Wales. Sometimes i went out to stay with them, and we would do farm-type things like helping with sheep-shearing and with the grain harvest. We would also go shooting, usually with kangaroos or rabbits as the intended targets.
One day a friend and i went rabbit shooting at dusk, which essentially involved lying in a field with a rifle and waiting for the rabbits to show themselves. Well, we had taken the overnight train to his place the night before, and hadn’t got much sleep, so i was pretty tired. We lay down in the field, and i promptly fell asleep.
I woke up a little while later, and my friend was still lying next to me looking through the telescopic sight on the rifle. Assuming that no rabbits had showed themselves, i said to him, “Maybe they’re not coming out tonight.”
He then told me that he had, in the last 15 minutes, shot and killed three rabbits, and that i had remained fast asleep while lying within ten feet of the rifle muzzle for all three shots. I didn’t believe him at first, but he took me out into the field, and they they were–three dead rabbits.
Nothing too fancy, but I pulled a few all-nighters in college (and went through a period where I was unable to sleep until the sun came up). Usually corner-of-the-eye hallucinations showed up around the 30-hour mark. But I’ve never been so tired that I was unable to function or fell asleep while driving, thankfully.
I once took a physics final in my sleep. Apparently.
It was my freshman year at college, and the final exam schedule was misery itself. The physics class was 8am MWF; my roommate was in the same section, and we’d already gotten down to the point where we were taking turns getting up Friday morning, slogging down to the lecture hall, throwing the weekly homework on the lectern, and slogging back to the dorm to sleep before the professor even showed up. By the end of reading week, my sleep schedule had been turned entirely on its head, and I was conking out after my classes were done in the late afternoon and getting back up at midnight to do work. Over the weekend between reading and finals week, even that plan failed me. I think I’d been up for something like 36 hours straight, and made the mistake of laying down for about two hours of napping before the test, which was at 7am Monday morning.
At about 2pm, I sat bolt upright and turned to my roommate in a panic, babbling that I’d missed the final.
My roommate eyeballed me, confused, and said, “Nnnnnoooooo, you went with me…”
I remember nothing at all, but judging from my grade I actually did fine.
Several years later, on a road trip, I fell asleep at a run-down desert gas station in Yuma, Arizona, and woke back up at a run-down desert gas station somewhere in southern California. I was very confused. I thought we hadn’t moved.
I don’t usually fall asleep on or around other people. If I need to be out of my own house like that, caffeine is my friend. I expect it’ll catch up with me someday, and I’ll manage to fall asleep on the train and end up somewhere in Salem before I notice.
Similar to the OP, at a sleepover when I was a kid, I wound up in a spot on the floor near the heat vent. I was just getting over a cold, and all that hot air blowing directly at me apparently dried me out and I was coughing in my sleep. Right into the vent, which handily carried the sound through out the rest of the house.
So my friends mom decided to dose me with cough syrup, apparently. I slept through it entirely, but when I woke up and saw red stains all down my pajamas leapt to the logical conclusion that it was blood and started screaming. Which made every other girl at the sleepover look at me, see the bloodstains and start screaming too.
Her mom never let us have another sleepover there, hmm.
I have a penchant for driving myself to exhaustion, but two occasions stand out.
The first was in college. A couple of friends and I were teamed up or projects from multiple classes, each of which counted for a big chunk of its class grade, and each of which the profs decided were due the same week…despite two of them not having given their students the correct information on the project until the previous Friday, requiring everyone to start their work over. We hit the 70-hour mark for continuous work while doing the presentation on the last project. Fortunately, a less-exhausted friend took pity on us and drove us home. I staggered into my bedroom, shut the door…and suddenly, I was lying on the floor. Eighteen hours had vanished, leaving no impression save the carpet imprint on my face.
Fast forward [mumble] years. I was on a business trip to Europe (completely unnecessary, and driven by interdepartmental politics, of course). Without going into too many details–and there are plenty of details, this trip would be the centerpiece of my routine if I did stand-up–the trip home was horrendous. I was recovering from the flu and nursing an injury from a snow-inflicted fall that made sitting painful, and I’m a bit phobic about flying in the first place. On top of that, stack an endless series of buses, trains, planes, and taxis, all of which seemed plagued by a comedy of errors, and I ended up spending over 30 hours traveling without even being able to nap. My apartment was on the second floor, but my front door was on the ground floor and opened directly onto my staircase, which looked like the south face of the Matterhorn when I finally got there. I abandoned my luggage in the entryway and dragged myself up the stairs and then…you guessed it, it was suddenly 18 hours later, and I had carpet marks on my face again.
It seems that when I reach that level of exhaustion, whatever primitive part of my brain keeps me going shuts down completely as soon as it realizes I’ve reached my “lair”, and I zonk out right on the spot.
After a couple of times of waking up in an idling car alongside the road in the middle of nowhere I decided driving late at night and long distances alone in the middle of nowhere after a long day was probably not something I should do anymore.
