Ahh, about 60 hours. Alternating with night shift at the jail where I worked and raking & baling hay on the farm during the day. Probably could have stayed awake a little longer, but the ‘wide-eyed stares’ were beginning to bother me somewhat.
**
Yes, this does sound somewhat familiar…though I was under the impression that it was handled more as a rigorous scientific experiment, rather than as “Joe Spelunker got boozed up one night and decided to see how long he could stay underground.” But OTOH, this was probably 10+ years ago that I recall hearing about this in passing, so I could well be mistaken.
Just over 40 hours my junior year of high school, while working on my endcap paper that covered the evolution of the King Arthur legend through societal changes. Fun paper, but hell to write. 7 AM on Sunday - 10 PM on Monday night (which was also my birthday).
72 hours is my longest, and that was starting from the night before NYE, just a few days ago. The only side-effects I had were not being able to go to sleep properly by the end of it. If I tried to sleep, I’d wake up. When I woke up, I’d be tired again and want to sleep. Finally I got to sleep.
Five days. Five English lit term papers. Started losing it about halfway through – felt like I was trapped in the present (I mean no ability to remember the previous couple of minutes). The inability to know if my thoughts were rational or not was hugely frustrating. Tried coffee and tea for the caffine. That turned me off coffee and tea for life. The really odd part was that as the time went on, my papers improved. When the grades came back, I was pleasantly surprised. Since then I have an aversion to going without sleep, and heaven help the person who keeps me up. Now when I get tired, I cat nap for a few minutes regardless of where I am, which has caused a few amusing incidents where folks think I am in distress or dead.
I work graveyard. 36 hours without sleep is a very common occurance. I hate it. I’m cranky all the time.
Spooje, I do the same thing, working from 10 pm to 7 am I frequently don’t get around to sleeping when I get off work in the morning. I also usually stay up the first day of my weekend, so I can sleep with my wife that night.
My longest was 67 hours.
Nothing impressive that I remember. I think I’ll start a streak right now. (Pshaw, I say that to myself a lot, but often just end up going to sleep. Mostly because during the times that I have that option, i.e. during breaks from school, I’m at home which is hideously boring, and being dead tired just makes it suck.) Although, I did stay up for a comparatively long time and wrote a paper near the end of it. I was literally falling asleep on the keyboard between sentences, and expending a massive amount of brain power just to form sentences, but I still cranked out a decent paper. Hell, I’m getting pretty tired now, I think I will go to sleep.
I’ve managed to only sleep6 hours over the course of a week.
I was round a mates house and we did it for a kinda bet… you know, who can stay awake the longest?
We allowed ourselves an hours sleep a night though, 'cos we heard people went properly mental if they didn’t sleep for a week. we no fools 
The secret of success is Final Fantasy 7, start playing it and you won’t WANT to go to sleep.
Wow, they are some real record breakers in this thread.
Don’t they have studies that say that sleep deprivation lead to brain damage? That would explain a lot 
I never counted how long I stayed awake, but I surely pushed in the 40s a few times. It is a killer for your memory. What I like is that after a while, you become disconnected from reality and get on autopilot. Really weird feeling.
More of that fraternity bullshit I should have walked out on when I was in college… We had to go thru Hell Week (use your imagination) in order to join up. I was awake from Sunday morning thru Thursday night, approx 110 hours. Instead of falling asleep in class, I was hallucinating. Not pleasant. It was Accounting class, my major. I ended up with a low grade and had to switch majors.
And it was. There was an extensive article in National Geographic I remember reading. You don’t just decide to spend 200+ days in a cave. He was wired from head to toe. They had a generator providing power to a small canvas house on a platform down there (no TV though, naturally). At one point, an lightning bolt actually hit some of the equipment, and gave him a considerable jolt through the sensors.
39 hours when I was in labor with the young’un. Actually, it was about 60 hours except I think I managed a catnap of an hour about 20 hours into it, which is why 39 is a little more accurate. Just keep it mind it wasn’t preceded by a good night’s sleep.
By the time they’d given up and decided to cut the little nipper out, I was pretty far gone into deliriousness. I’d hate to hear a tape of myself in the operating room, blabbering on like the village idiot.
Mine was about 5 days, but was chemically enhanced with much coke. Towards the end I was dreaming while awake, having very strange hallucinations, coupled with major paranoia. Very unsettling. Thank God I ran out of money! (I’ve been clean now for over 12 years.)
My longest no-sleep stretch is almost three days. I had my high school graduation ceremony, followed by a couple of all-day parties. The most impressive part of this is that I spent most of the last day climbing Mt. St. Helens. The combination of sleep deprivation and thin oxygen does really interesting things to your brain.
But my real no-sleep accomplishment is similar to this:
My first year at arts college, in the last week of class, I wrote three papers, took four tests, typed ten or fifteen other papers for people (it’s how I made extra cash; I had the best computer and the fastest fingers), and rehearsed for the big end-of-year play. This run of frantic work started on Friday morning at 6am, which is when I had to get up to clean the college’s gymnasium for my six-day-a-week work-study job, and lasted until the following Saturday, more than a week later, at midnight, after the show’s second performance. That’s… let’s see… 209 hours, during which time I was able to sneak in a few half-hour catnaps and the occasional full hour of sleep, totalling 9 hours in the whole period. (I added them up shortly after.) Performance-wise, I aced all the tests, got two A’s and a B on the three papers I wrote, and did both performances of the play (Friday and Saturday) without a hitch. Oh, and I also had frequent sex with my girlfriend at the time, who was on the same schedule as me and was attempting to match my stamina.
I went to bed at midnight on Saturday, and woke up for dinner on Sunday.
If I tried to do that today, I’d be dead by Wednesday. 
Whoops, 210 hours. (Friday 6am to Saturday 6am = 24 x 8, Saturday 6am to midnight = 18.) Damn math…
My longest stint was about only about 34 hours, but that was plenty. I was working third shift, year-end. Got up for work Friday night about 9, got to work at 11, got OFF work at about 4:30 the next afternoon (only one trained to do the year-end processing and we had major problems). Went home, showered, dressed, laid down on the couch for about 20 minutes, went to Orlando with friends and spent New Year’s Eve at Epcot center. Got home about 7 a.m. Sunday morning. Crashed until time to go to work Monday night. Worst problem wasn’t the lack of sleep. It was the physical exhaustion from being on my feet most of that 34 hours. Feet hurt, back hurt, head hurt…I am not crazy enough to do that again. This is one chickie that needs her sleep.
Tallinn, Estonia---->
–>Helsinki, Finland---->
–>Paris, France---->
–>Pittsburg, PA---->
–>Charlotte, NC…
That doesn’t seem too impressive until you add up the 5 hours i was up before leaving Tallinn, then the hour in Helsinki, the TWENTY THREE HOURS in Paris (I missed the last flight of the morning by an hour and my airline only flies Paris to US in the early morning) then the 2 hours in Pittsburg, an hour drive home from the Charlotte airport, and another 2 or 3 hours to finally crash. All together it was about 52 hours. Also i was by myself and no one around me spoke English until i got to Pittsburg.
INTERESTING ASIDE
While wandering around the Charles DeGualle (sp) Airport by myself for 23 hours i asked about 10 or 12 airport employees about the guy who had been “stuck” in the aiport since 1988 (see Cecil’s column here) and even the ones that spoke fairly good english had no idea what i was talking about. Then i got drunk. French beer sucks.
I started a job working the graveyard shift, and I’m going to be going to college at the same time, so I’m hoping I can top all of you with two weeks or so. My friend John and I actually pulled ALOT of all nighters last semester, but he always crapped out. I’d say about 48 hours was my best. If I had someone who had my stamina and would stay up with me the entire time, I’m sure I could do a week.
I write my songs the best when I haven’t slept in a day and a half.
–Tim
I’d like to echo what I’ve heard some others say about the effects of deprivation (with no naps). What I’ve found: your short-term memory is almost nonexistent. Reading even the simplest sentences takes intense concentration, and then you immediately forget what you just read. It’s one way you can discover what a learning disability might feel like.
My own record is somewhere in the range of 50-52 hours back in college. I don’t know the exact duration (two back-to-back all-nighters) because toward the end, I was delirious and (apparently) said some bizarre things that my one-time roommates still like to tease me about. I don’t remember much about it now.
A few things I do remember:
- My body’s heat regulation was totally off. I was freezing one minute, boiling the next.
- My vision was blurry and unstable. My eyes even periodically vibrated.
- No appetite. Just a bloated feeling and painfully sore legs & feet.
Overall, very unpleasant. Never again, I hope.