How tired were you?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Moved out of state in one day, and was exhausted beyond all fuck.

I wasn’t completely packed the night before the move because I’m a procrastinator and a terrible person, so I stayed up most of the night finishing up, was up 3 hours later to star the move, packed my shit into a truck, drove for 7 hours without stopping to eat, then moved my things into my new apartment. I was exhausted, in physical pain, my hands were tender and throbbing, plus I was starving. I opened up the phone book to order from the first pizza place I could find, and fell asleep on it.

Started work the next day feeling like the hunger was clawing its way out of my stomach, but I at least was well rested.

42

  1. Senior year of college. Turned in my senior thesis. Went to a midnight party at the college president’s house with a champagne toast. Went home, crashed out for a couple hours, went to my part-time job from 10 to 12, ate lunch in the cafeteria, went back home around 12:30. Realized I was quite tired and decided to take a nap - something I rarely did. I recall hitting snooze when my alarm went off at 8 on Monday morning, then I finally woke up around noon Monday.

  2. Basic training. We’re at a firing range playing with machine guns. I was standing behind the firing line waiting for my turn on one of the weapons. I dozed off and only woke up when the guy behind me grabbed me to stop me from face-planting. On top of the normal fatigue, we’d spent about two of our normal sleeping hours sitting in the hallway of the first floor of our barracks playing chicken with a tornado. It was not the best day ever.

43

I was trapping fish in the Everglades with a partner. We finished up a site and had fifteen minutes till the helicopter was due to pick us up.

We were so tired. I got down on my knees in the knee-deep water and fell asleep with my chin tucked into my chest, balancing myself precariously so that I didn’t fall over. My partner did likewise. There were alligators grunting nearby and no doubt pythons and mocassins contradancing all around us. But that was the best cat nap I’ve ever had in my life.

44

My first trip to Ireland. I stayed at work all night before I left, since I was too excited to sleep anyway. There was a storm somewhere that disrupted my connecting flight, so after umpteen hours of waiting at BWI they bussed me to Dulles and then put me on a flight that connected through Paris, after about a 6 hour layover there. By the time I got to Dublin, I’d been awake for about 56 hours, and . . .

I couldn’t read. I looked up at the schedule to find the next bus to Newry, and although I recognized it on the map, and could physically see the numebrs and letters just fine, I was compeltely unable to read the words or figure out what the times were. It was about ten hours after that when I finally got to sleep. and I have no memory at all after knocking on the front door of the B&B.

45

I have several things that happened due to tiredness, include mild sleep-dep hallucinations <for the record, I have never hallucinated on lsd or mushrooms or anything else, but sleep dep? Yep!> and slicing my fingers with a knife while cutting tomatoes…and carrying on like nothing happened 'cause I couldn’t feel it. And, you know, blood, tomato juice…looks the same when you’re bleary-eyed.

The biggest thing that happens to me when I’m exhausted-tired is that I have no emotions whatsoever and will point blank tell anyone bugging me EXACTLY what I think, without rancor or feeling. I’ve ‘broken-up’ more than one relationship that should have ended already because I was so tired I just didn’t care anymore, lol.

46

I once worked a 10 hour day and then went out with my friends until 1 a.m. I was driving towards an intersection when the light turned green, so I stopped. I waited until the light turned red and proceeded. The cop who pulled me over thought I must be drunk, but I passed everyone of his sobriety tests. Finally I just broke down and moaned, “I’m two blocks from my house and I just want to go to bed.” The cop let me go.

47

I once worked a 10 hour day and then went out with my friends until 1 a.m. I was driving towards an intersection when the light turned green, so I stopped. I waited until the light turned red and proceeded. The cop who pulled me over thought I must be drunk, but I passed everyone of his sobriety tests. Finally I just broke down and moaned, “I’m two blocks from my house and I just want to go to bed.” The cop let me go.

48

When I was a child I remember my mother giving me some medicine. Dimetapp maybe? Something like that. Anyway I had a Brooke Shields head, and I was doing her hair and decided we were both sleepy and needed a nap. The medicine was doing its work on me. So I laid her down, and lay myself down, and we both “went” to sleep.

My mom found me some time later, fast asleep on the floor.

49

As a very light sleeper who has a tendency toward insomnia (seriously, my newborn slept better than I did), this thread fascinates me. I’ve never been close to sleeping like that. The closest thing was after my breast reduction surgery. I’d just gotten home, and rather than climb the stairs to my bed, I told my husband I just wanted to sit in a chair for a few minutes before attempting them.

Two minutes later, I was snoring, so he made me go upstairs. The crazy thing is that I remember the whole thing–I was snoring while still awake. I fell asleep about thirty seconds after hitting the sack. But I had a lot of drugs in me.

50

The highlight of my year as a kid used to be the week my grandparents would rent a place at the beach. I would freak out for 6 straight days.

I slept in a little cot; not the sturdiest thing in the world but I remember it fondly. Nobody’s quite sure how, unless it’s my brother, and he isn’t talking, but the combination of the heat and the freaking out exhausted me enough one year that I spent the night like this.

51

This is nothing on any of the other stories in this thread, but on Friday in my first year of high school I went to take a nap as soon as I got home from school around 4PM. I remember my parents waking me at about 10PM, terrified that I had mono, and then slept through the entire night, probably until 10 or so the next morning. One year later, the same thing happened again, complete with mono scare(I should be so lucky :p). By grade 11 my parents stopped freaking out over it, although I’m pretty sure that by then it had become a monthly occurrence outside of summer holidays.

In retrospect, I was really, really sleep deprived in high school.

52

I just remembered another one; fell asleep in the mosh pit at a Blink 182 concert.

Long work day, lots of heat, giant over-priced stadium margarita and bad performance and the next thing I knew, my friends were waking me up and pulling me up off the floor.

53

Not me, but another guy… One day when I was in the Navy on a long shift, one of my friends mentioned how exhausted he was and asked me if I knew of some secret hiding place somewhere in the plant where he could sack out for the shift. As a goof, I told him about a little access hole I had once found in the bilge under the main engines, it led to a small space about the size of a closet.

The next time I saw him I asked how the rest had been. He had actually followed my advice and curled up in that tiny cubby hole, with a thirty-thousand horsepower turbine screaming a few feet over his head, with ear protectors on, and he slept for the whole shift.

54

In college I drove north 200 miles to a friend’s house after school. Partied half the night, maybe 3 hours sleep.
Worked with my friend the next day, and that night partied with his next door neighbor till 5 AM (horizontal cha-cha)
My buddy’s father shows up at 7AM
Work all day at buddy’s father’s place.
At 4PM start driving back home. (550 miles)
About midnight or so I am on the Grapevine between the Central Valley and LA. All of a sudden I see all the clearance lights of a semi about 50 feet in front of me (we are going 85, semis maybe 65) I slam on the brakes and the semi disappears.
OK
About 10 minutes later I see the reflective lane markers (I am using aircraft landing lights as driving lights which will light up reflector for almost 2 miles) on both sides of the road lift up off the road and in the sky above me twist into a braid.
I pulled over and got out of the car.
5 hours sleep in 72 wasn’t good.
I walked around for 20 minutes or so and then I could complete the drive (0ne more hour) and I slept the sleep of the dead when I got home.

55

I typically sleep lightly, if at all, before major road trips; partially, this is because I want to sleep on the way, and partially because they’re so boring unless my mind is somewhat gone from being drowsy.

I don’t think I slept at all the time a friend and I went from southern New Mexico to Carlsbad. I also didn’t sleep much on the way there. And by the time we got there, of course I wasn’t going to get much rest: We had a cavern to walk down!

I walked down pretty much the whole cavern with no issues; I even got quite a bit out of it, in terms of appreciating natural beauty and our ability to build walkways deep within the Earth’s crust. I love Carlsbad Caverns and I would go back in a heartbeat.

Then we ate. I have to say, it’s easy to eat a lot of Mexican food, even if it isn’t especially good. I’d probably have a hard time losing weight in New Mexico.

After that, the sun had nearly set (we were in the last group allowed to walk down that day) and it was time to see the bats coming out of the caverns. It’s a wonderful example of how summing over a large enough number of chaotic samples can produce fairly deterministic behavior: Each individual bat is pretty much in business for itself, but overall they fly out in a pretty tight counter-clockwise corkscrew.

It was on the way back to Carlsbad from the caverns that I noticed parts of my mind were falling asleep. Mainly, it was my language centers: I’d start to think of a sentence (I usually think in paragraphs) and then I’d just … kind of … … …

[pause]

It’s not discomforting if you know what’s going on; it is, at worst, mildly annoying. I suddenly remembered the mechanism of action for caffeine, as if a part of my brain that didn’t quite understand reality was trying to be helpful, but mainly I was unable to come up with witty rejoinders for my conversation.

That night, as I was trying to fall asleep, all I could think about was inductive proofs, following an infinite staircase because they can get to the first step and, if they can reach a step, they can always reach the next step. Easiest. Dream interpretation. Ever.