Funny how the mind works when you haven’t slept in over 30 hours…So, dopers, what your longest stint at staying awake? I’ll be pushing 36 hours by the time I (hopefully) nod off into that blissful abandonment called sleep.
while completing a project once, i managed to stay awake for 57 hours, largely without caffeine. got to see vapor trails and pulsating patterns in the tiled floor. it’s an amazing, all-natural drug.
Back in the college days I once woke up at 7:00 am on a Wednesday morning to study for a test at 11:00 am. That night, I had terrible insomnia and wound up staying up all night studying for a stupid Chemistry quiz on Amino Acids (how tough is it to memorize the names and structures of all of them). Thanks to Lisa 
who “helped” me study, I didn’t do too well. Then, Thursday night I remembered that I had a paper due for Art History on Friday. I stayed up all night w/ no-doze, English Breakfast Tea and a pack of Salem Lights comparing and contrasting St. George and the Dragon by two different artists, painted over 50 years apart. Friday night I partied until 3:00 am Saturday morning.
Add it up, that’s a whopping 68 hours!
I never added up the hours awake when Spritle Jr. was born. Hmmm… lessee… 25 hours of labor from 5:00 am to the following 6:00 am, no sleep that day or night, Nah, I don’t wanna know.
** as an aside **
I went to pick up my Art History paper later in the week and was disgusted with my grade (C-). I was also disgusted in myself for apparently not putting my name on the cover. The words looked familiar, the points made were true. Then I seemed to remember putting my name on the cover page. I also remembered putting my paper in a yellow report cover; this one was blue. I put it back in the box and continued looking. Finally found my paper, same title, name on front, in yellow cover, A-. Life is goooooood.
Pfeh…amateurs. 
When I was returning from a trip overseas:
14 hours (normal day) +
8 hours (failed to sleep a wink - insomnia) +
33 hours various planes/airports (can’t sleep on em) +
12 hours (all night bus ride - see above) +
14 hours (forced myself to stay up until it was the ‘normal’ time to sleep back home, to avoid jetlag)
grand total: 81 hours.
Oddly, after the first 48 hours or so, I didn’t really seem tired any more…just really, really drained. Stuff started to take longer to sink in, and what was once ordinary became difficult and confusing. Once I finally hit a bed, I crashed for about 16 hours, though. I used to regularly stay up for 36 or 48 hours during finals week in college though, so maybe that ‘training’ helped my endurance.
In college, I frequently went 36 or more hours w/o sleep (full day of classes, followed by an all-night session in the computer room to write a paper, followed by another full day of classes, and finally to bed sometime shortly after dinner). The summer after my first year of graduate school, I had no classes, no job, no girlfriend, no nothing to impose any external order on my schedule. I fell into a circadian rhythm of about 30-32 hours awake and 14-16 asleep – I was subletting an apartement from one of my professors, and had his library at my disposal, so I’d often read substantial novels in one 20+ hour session, or sometimes two or three lighter books in a “day”.
I know I’ve pushed it as far as 50 hours a couple of times, and when my family’s out of town I tend to stay up most of the night reading and still get up in time to be a work the next day, often for several days at a stretch – once recently I logged about 10 hours of sleep over the course of a four full days and nights.
My record is around 48 hrs.
When I was 17 I took the train from Halifax to Ottawa with one of my friends. We decided that since it was essentailly a 24 hour trip we would stay up all night and sleep on the train to make the time pass. Everything was cool until we showed up at the station and couldn’t get a ticket (no train on mondays or some such thing). We parted ways, agreeing to stay up again and try the next day. Besides nodding off for a couple of minutes at Batman: The Movie that evening I managed to pull it off. It actually got easier as time went on and my metabolism began to shut down various parts of my brain… mostly the bits that control making wise decisions.
The next day I showed up at the train station only to meet a suspiciously rested looking friend. He, of course, had not only slept the night before but had done so in the luxurious and fulfilling manner befitting someone who had just stayed up 24 hours… the full Lazarus treatment. I spent the entire trip drifting in and out of sleep as he entertained himself poking me, complaining how bored he was and sticking his crackers with peanut butter to my face. I only really got any decent sleep when he got tired about 18 hours later.
Somewhere around Sackville New Brunswick I remember deciding that this would probably be my last shot at any personal endurance marks…
Interesting…I remember reading a story some years ago about a woman in (IIRC) Italy who had volunteered to live in a domicile built deep in a cave for 6 months or a year, with no clocks and no human contact other than via a dumb terminal. After a few months, with no sense of time, she settled into a pattern almost identical to the one you describe, and was quite surprised when they told she could come out, since as a result she’d understimated by several weeks how much time had elapsed.
60 hours without any sleep at all - in the Army. I was a signalman (i.e., a rifleman who carries 20 pounds of radio and isn’t supposed to sleep) and events kept prolonging my watch on the radio until I started replying to signals that were never sent. I won’t recommend it.
S. Norman
From Friday morning (0800 class) to 0200 Sunday morning, when we first began playing Magic: The Gathering, so 42 hours.
A less accurately measured but longer period of sleeplessness was when getting some last minute code in for my Java class (back when it was still fairly new, spring 1997). A bunch of us spent the last week in the computer lab, with a great deal of Jolt. Code quality degraded though. Eventually even all of us looking over one person’s code wasn’t enough for debugging. Thankfully there was a sofa to sleep on. I woke up that Friday on the floor with my arms around a hub, the couch had two people on it, one person was sleeping on the lab bench.
A couple of years ago, I drove from Washington, DC to Toronto, ON and back in one day (to drop off my brother). Not as long a period of sleeplessness, but boredom made it rough.
About 105 straight hours when ill.
Then 1 hour of sleep.
Another 60 hours awake.
Last holiday season, I caught a bug that nailed me good (the slackjawed ER doctor started showing me off to the other docs, which I didn’t take as a good sign). Among many other symptoms, I was so congested and my breathing so labored that I couldn’t sleep. I’d nod off and in a couple of seconds I’d awaken in a hypoxic panic. (And little did I know that the ER docs misdiagnosed and misprescribed–and refused to authorize supplemental O2. The medicine they gave me actually made things worse. Made me dopier and sleepier without making it possible for me to sleep.)
Hours twenty through forty-eight were sheer torture. But the last half of the first stint was interesting in that I started going a dyslexic; my brain converted various letters into other characters like asterisks, exclamation points and pound signs. But the scrambling was completely consistent, as if the brain were simply rewired.
Couldn’t read. Music didn’t even sound right. My speech was, according to friends, very disjointed. But the spoken word heard still made some sense, and thank GOD the SciFi Channel had a two-day Twilight Zone marathon going!
After four and a half days awake, I finally fell asleep–and an hour later the damned office called to see how I was doing! I ended up awake for another two and a half days, and though I still couldn’t breath well, I felt fantastic. No dyslexia and no tiredness.
During that time I saw a different doctor who prescribed the correct medicine, and I finally breathed clearly enough to catch some sleep. For the next week or so, sleep was ragged and unpredictable.
I’d NEVER want to undergo that experience again.
I’d note that my sleepless stint involved almost no physical activity. Most of you other folks were pretty active during your stints.
I’m sure that staring at an idiot box is less exhausting than walking the DMZ.
I think you are referring to Michael Siffre, who spent 205 days in a cave in Texas. Along with the extended sleep/wake cycle, he experienced halucinations and paranoia.
About 40 hours, back when I was 18. I stayed up all night reading (what else?), and then I was invited to go along to a post-Chrismas shopping the next morning. Then we went to see a movie. When we got home, my brother invited me to play his new game. After that, it was almost suppertime, so I stayed up to eat. Then I wasn’t sleepy, so I watched TV for a while, until I finally went to bed.
Sleepiness came in waves. While shopping after being awake 24 hours, I thought I was going to fall asleep standing up, but a half hour later I was wide awake again. While playing the game I thought I would fall asleep, but I perked up again shortly after. I didn’t consume any caffeine after the first few hours of being awake.
Left to my own devices, with no deadlines and no place to be, I usually follow a cycle of 27 hours: 18 hours awake and 9 hours of sleep.
I did a fairly long traveling stint once. Went from vancouver to seattle to san fran to new york to abu dabi (there was one stop in between ny and ad) and finally on to johannesburgh… Total time awake: 72 hours. I arrived in the early morning so after a brief (45 minute) nap I stayed up for another 12 hours in order to thwart jet lag.
Surprisingly the only thing that went weird was I had a tendancy to simply stop listening to people who were talking to me about half way through whatever sentance they were saying.
-nigel
My longest stretch is about 74 hours. It was when I was 22, and a Junior in LSU’s EE department. I (and a couple of friends) had the worst schedule imaginable–a series of major exams, followed by final projects in three EE courses due on 3 sequential days. That’s: Monday-2 exams, Tuesday-1 exam, Wednesday-Power Systems project (50% of grade), Thursday-Filter Design project (45% of grade), Friday-Discrete Control Systems project (60% of grade). So, it was entirely possible for all of us to flunk the entire semester’s worth of classes in one week. The projects were all assigned late, allowing slightly less than 2 weeks to complete them, counting Hell Week. I was awake and doing engineer stuff (calculus, Z-transforms, circuit design) continuously from 8:00 AM Tuesday (an hour before the exam) to 10:00AM Friday (an hour after turning in the last project–I walked home, since I didn’t dare try driving).
I got through it on caffeine, Domino’s subs, breathing exercises, and never sitting still for long after the 48-hour mark (my partners made that mistake and collapsed, the wimps). The first day was easy–I often went that long without sleep. I didn’t feel sleepy during the middle day, just kind of achy. The last 20 hours or so, though, I felt like I was scraping the marrow out of my bones. I felt hollow, and my senses played tricks on me. Probably the weirdest mind-trick was the feeling that I was leaving a trail of fading, time-lagged Balance-images behind, kind of like visual echoes–I even saw one when I turned around suddenly. Disturbing.
But I passed my classes.
Just over 100 hours. I got up early one Monday and didn’t go to sleep til very late that Friday. This was summer vacation, and I did several long stints but this was my longest.
That was a couple of years ago, though. I must be getting tired in my old age.
Over these holidays I’ve averaged 40 hour days. I’ll stay up for that long, then have a long sleep, then stay up for that long again. I don’t do it on purpose, it just works out that way.
During one of my psychology classes in collage I conducted a sleep depravation experiment on myself. I had no unnecessary caffeine and no chemical stimulants. I did have 3 friends who stayed with me for the entire time, sleeping in shifts and helping to keep me awake. I took mental acuity tests every 6 hours that included 2 puzzles, one with 30 pieces and one with 10. I recorded my test scores and my thoughts and moods. My friends also recorded my activities and their thoughts. I had video cameras and tape recorders. The results… 6 days 5 nights of non-sleep…a grand total of about 132 hours. By the end of the fifth day I was hallucinating so badly that I had to be restrained. I pulled a kitchen knife on my friends because I thought they were trying to poison me. I ran away twice because I was confused as to what was going on. My short-term memory was shot to the point I couldn’t remember from one second to the next. I was in a state of conscious dreaming. Needless to say I do not recommend sleep depravation!
I’ve only managed 40. 2 summers ago, It was my last night at a summer program and to keep as much time with my friends as possible stayed up, but I never laid down or anything. Didn’t sleep on the plane home. and I probably would’ve been up for alot more hours but then my parents made me go to bed
Wow, the most I’ve ever managed is about 27 hours, while travelling from Wales to Ireland. I didn’t get any sleep on the ferry, and when I arrived at my hostel in Dublin at 8 am, they wouldn’t let me check in until noon. So I wandered around downtown Dublin in a haze for four hours. Then I napped for a few hours before going out on the town. Just a little over a day, and I felt hideous. I can’t believe you guys who stayed awake for three or more straight days.
I won’t bore you with my story (term papers) since most of you can top my 44 hours.