Ok so this 17 year old kid stayed up for 11 days in 1964. C’mon that was so long ago, I would think that someone else could break that. The wiki article on him does mention though that
I’ve read that insomniacs can go without “definable” sleep for years. I guess it depends how you strictly define what constitutes sleep.
I bet someone on this board could break that record.
My old Book of Lists or something similar listed a guy in Cuba ‘Tomas who doesn’t sleep’ as someone who never sleeps, at all, ever.
Is he a Breatharian, too? :rolleyes:
Joe
It’s just been broken this month, by a man in the UK.
Tony Wright, 42, broke the record by staying awake 11 days and nights at the Studio Bar in Penzance, Cornwall, monitored by a webcam and CCTV, on a “diet of raw food”.
What kind of tricks does your mind start to play on you after being awake for that long?
This strikes me as a dangerous (and therefore silly) record.
Why do people want to risk hallucinations etc?
Risk? We are a species wherein some folks will pay good money to have hallucinations!
While reading various first-person accounts from tyrannical 20th-century regimes in college, I learned of the Stalinist technique called “The Conveyor.” Basically, a rotating team of guards and interrogators kept a prisoner awake. After years of experience, they knew that no one could withstand the Conveyor for more than 17 days. At that point, the victim would say or do (or sign–they mostly did this to get people to sign confessions and implicate more victims for Stalin’s purges) anything the guards wanted.
Edit: I just checked on-line and saw that the Conveyor was not entirely without sleep–a prisoner might catch 10 or 15 minutes of sleep before the guards banged on the door and woke him again. So not quite Guinness-worthy.
During finals my junior year of college, I stayed up for over three days and aced all of them. That night I went to party and disappeared. I was convinced I was in Vietnam and went to the back of the house to dig a foxhole which I stayed in for a while. From there, I became paranoid and started marching with camouflage dirt completely covering me. The next day, I woke up about 5 miles away in a place I had never been and had to figure out how to get home looking like the worst version of a homeless, deranged person. There were no drugs involved although some alcohol probably helped to trigger it. I can’t even imagine 11 days.
A couple years back I met two tweaker roommates from Seattle down on the beach who claimed to have been awake for two weeks at the time. Apparently they got sick of cleaning shit and checking windows and decided to drive down to San Diego.
I’ve tried to stay awake that long but I can’t do it. I can pull a couple of all-nighters for two weeks but I feel like shit each time.
glee, I also call BS on “risk hallucinations”. Hallucinations are the main reason I’ve tried (and failed) so valiantly to break the record myself. Hallucinations are not necessarily an unpleasant experience and are certainly not a disease or disorder, although they can be a symptom of other problems (like, gee, sleep deprivation!). Anyway, the minor sleep-deprivation hallucinations I have experienced were trippy in a fun way if a little dizzying; basically they amounted to, if I stared at a pattern in the floor, cieling, the pavement, etc., it started swirling or crawling. Similar to how people describe the first hallucination on an acid trip.
I just heard the story of the guy who tried to break the record on this morning’s radio show! They finished up with an ironic endnote - too bad for Tony; it turns out that Guiness no longer recognizes or publishes this record because they feel it’s too dangerous for people to attempt (and I agree with them).
11 days? That’s incredible!
A few years ago, I had a deadline for a short film I was working on that was pretty strict. I was editing the audio and got the project quite late. I got it on monday and it needed to be done by friday morning. I made it all four nights, finished the project (it turned out rather well all things considered) and then barely made it home.
When I got home, I fell asleep, it was noon friday, and woke up at 3 Saturday afternoon. I managed to stay awake until about 8pm then fell asleep until Sunday morning. I felt terrible for about a week so I don’t know how on earth someone could make it for 11 days.
My diet consisted of mostly juices and I stayed completely away from caffeine.