Around 48 hours. I had a headache so bad that it made me cry, and it went on and on. Now I know it was from taking Claritin-D (which also spikes my blood pressure, turns out. I don’t ever take it now), but I didn’t then.
60 hours, give or take. Army maneuvers - platoon signalmen don’t get much sleep even by infantry standards, and on this specific exercise, I just never got a chance to hand off the radio to someone else for a few hours until well into the third day.
While I did respond to signals never made, I believe those were the only hallucinations.
63 hours, ending about ten hours before I graduated from college. To put that in perspective, I’d been there (or thereabouts) for six years, had only been enrolled for five by dropping out of two semesters in different years, had long ago exhausted any sources of money to pay for tuition (and had spent three months homeless during the first semester of that year). I had no choices left, was (and still am) estranged from my alleged parents, and no resources of any kind. If I didn’t finish, I had no real idea wtf I’d do next. In my mind it was, graduate or die. So I had to finish all the damned incompletes, give a presentation (at hour 40!), take two take-home finals, get them graded and hand-delivered to my dean, and then go through the math with him to prove that, down to a hundredth of a GPA point, they were, in fact, required to give me a degree.
My college used its own weird units for class credit, and I needed 416 of them. I rolled in with 418 units and a GPA 0.01 higher than the stated minimum. To my credit, I looked at him and said, “Well, I guess I overshot the mark,” which got a chuckle.
The summer I was 16, by way of an experiment, I stayed awake as long as I could, from about noon on July 1 until the early morning hours of July 5. That’s at least 82 hours.
I spent most of the 4th in a semi-halicinatory state without the aid of any chemicals stronger than tea. Objects glimpsed out of the corner of my eye seemed to move, but stopped when I turned to look at them fully. Patterns emerged from the wallpaper in my bedroom I had never noticed before. I remember lying on the pinic table in our back yard for awhile that afternoon; a light rain was falling and to this day I am not certain if there was a rabbit underneath the table or if I only imagined it.