Well, figure that A) my circadian rhythm is slightly longer than 30 hours (around 30 or so) and B) sometimes I’ll stay up because there’s nothing better to do. I’ve gone 40 hours several times (and without caffeine or any other stimulant). Really, as long as there’s something to do, I’m set.
94 hours, including 53 hours on watch. I went from alert to tired, to pissed, to clumsy, to hostile and wired, to zombie, to too tired to sleep.
Somewhere around hour 80, I got into a zone where my body was on auto-pilot, and I would do things in a clumsy, disinterested, automatic fashion. If I dropped something, I’d continue to behave as if it was still in my hands. Imagine the looks I got when I went through the motions of eating my lunch, even though I’d dropped my fork. It took three cycles of biting down on air before it occured to me to pick up my fork. When we finally got to the point where we could safely stand-down, the Doc had to give half the crew (myself included) a Valium to get us to sleep, because we were lying awake in bed, too tired to fall asleep.
Probably 30-something hours, but I start getting really disoriented at around 26 hours - my head feels funny, my hearing seems out of tune and I’m edgy. I’m that rare breed, an insomniac who can’t go without sleep too long.
Actually, my sleep patterns tend to shift out of wack by a couple of hours a night until I’m sleeping all day and awake all night (at the moment, I’m awake until 6am, and asleep until 1pm, have been for a week now). The only way to shift it back is to pull an all nighter, and go to bed at a “normal” time, say 9pm - so to do that now, I’d be awake from 1pm today until 9pm tomorrow. It’s not something I can do often.
The summer I was 16, I stayed awake from around noon on July 1st to the early-morning hours of July 5th. About 85 hours.
After I stayed up through the second night, it became a kind of test of my limits, to see how far I could go. I had no appetite by that point and lived on tea. I hallucinated: I would catch things moving out of the corner of my eye, and later on I saw faces in the patterns of the wood paneling on my bedroom walls.
On the afternoon of July 4th, when the rest of my family had gone out and I was alone in the house, I went out into the back yard and lay down on the picnic table; it was raining lightly. To this day, I am not certain if there really was a cottontail rabbit taking shelter under the table, or if I just imagined it.
That same summer, I also stayed up through a few 36- to 48-hour stretches.
I was in Tennessee, flying back to London on an overnight flight. Being a bit of an insomniac, I decided to stay up the night before so that I’d sleep on the flight. I didn’t sleep on the plane. Then I drove up to North Wales to see a girl I’d recently hooked up with. Things went very well with the girl :D, and we stayed awake until 9am. So that would be:
Day 1, 9am (EST)
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4 9am (BST)
Which I make 67 hours. Then I had 2 hours sleep and got up again, and stayed awake till 6am the next day, and had 3 hours sleep. So in 6 days, I’d had 5 hours sleep. It was fun, though.
Had a few marathon sessions when I was working at oil and gas drilling locations. Longest would have been 5 days with only 1 or 2 one-hour naps; 2-3 day stretches were not uncommon. This of course would always be associated with an unexpected drilling event that could result in loss of the well or destruction of the rig; IOW just when one would most want the personnel on site to be rested and thinking clearly.
It really gets up my snout when I hear corporate types in this industry spouting off about safety being their number one priority while at the same time demanding that supervisory staff work absurdly long periods without relief.
You sure about that, Novocaine? The world record is only 11 days.
Me personally, I’ve gone probably 40 hours. I have gone long stretches with very little sleep, but I have relatively little experience with absolutely no sleep.
My God! Y’all are insane!!! My personal best, without nary a wink of sleep, was 50 hours, back when I was 13 (incidentally, also my non-stop Greyhound bus record. But I snuck in at least a couple hours of sleep on that one.) I was flying back from a vacation in Poland to Chicago and with all the excitement, goodbyes and my inability to sleep on most modes of transportation, I somehow managed to miss sleep for a couple of days. By the time I got home, it felt as if the house was pulsating, or “breathing,” for lack of better description.
Even during my college days, where sleep deprivation seems to be a norm, I rarely went over 24-hours. At about the 18-20 hour sleepless point, I beging to get vague hallucinations in the corners of my eyes…as if something is moving just outside my field of vision. If coupled with stress (as in college), I occasionally develop auditory “hallucinations” in which I hear original music spontaneously composed just as I would hear the radio. (I used to be a very musical person.) It’s the weirdest freaking experience I’ve ever had. It’s only happened maybe a dozen times, but when it does, it’s beautiful.
God knows what would happen if I had the stamina of you guys.
I’d probably completely lose my mind.
I’m another one who went four days and three nights. We were working like busy, little bees in the studio. We ended up eating constantly – and weird combinations too. I was eating Frosted Flakes out of the box and a colleague was eating Doritos – I thought his Doritos looked great and he thought my Fosted Flakes looked great, so we ended up eating both at once.
Somewhere around 3a.m. on day two I was getting slight hallucinations. I kept seeing what looked like a small flock of birds swooping around in my peripheral vision. I also kept getting the sense that someone was standing right behind me.
By day three, we’d all “hit the wall.” Once we past that point, we felt as if we could continue indefinitely without sleep. Motor skills however, start to seriously suffer and I ended up with band-aids on every finger of my left hand. (Note to self: Don’t use sharp tools while sleep-deprived.)
2 hours, yawn… And I’m now tired agian.
about 42 hours.
It was 2 years ago.
I took the Greyhound back from Utah to Ohio.
I can’t sleep unless I am horizontal. Two seats isn’t enough for me to lie down.
I didn’t sleep the whole time, unless you count 5 minutes at one point.
I once went 8 days without sleep, give or take some brief dozing offs that only amounted to a couple of hours or so. I had a cold and I hate sleeping with a cold. that feeling of not being able to breathe with your nose clogged up with mucus…the way that you are totally stuffed with mucus when you wake up and you have to blow huge yellow vile blobs into your hankey so that it makes your head reel. I hate that! So I used to not try to sleep when I had a cold.
Well this episode cured me of trying to do that. I felt very odd by the end of it. Disconnected from reality, I wasn’t exactly hallucinating but I wasn’t far off it I think, I was believing that I had magical powers and that I could make the cold disappear through sheer will power. I couldn’t.
Eventually I went to sleep (couldn’t stop myself!) and I slept something like 14 hours. Now I always try to sleep with a cold, though it is uncomfortable.
I think the longest was something like 26 hours. I was up the morning of Dec. 31st, and stayed up the whole thing of New Year’s Eve, was up that whole day, and went to bed like 10:00 that night. I can’t stay up long, I am not productive and then I get all stressy. When I’m crammed for time, I can do a week’s worth of having six hours of sleep a night, but then on Friday afternoon I have to nap for a while to make up for it.
Lets see, I think my longest was… woke up on day one at 8:00 AST, left the house for the US at 11:00AST, pulled into the airport at BGR at Day 2 3:30 EST, flight left at 5:15 EST, pulled into VLD around 15:00 EST (i think) I may have slept around 16:30? for an hour or so? That comes out to 33.5 hours.
Then the time that I got up at 6:00AM on day one for school, then worked until 6:00AM the next day on a temp job, then went back to school… slept around 5:00PM that night? That’s 35 hours, must have been the longest. I can’t do ANYTHING when I’m tired. Around the 20 hour mark I start feeling nauseous and cranky.
I recently pulled a 50 hour non-sleep fest. I took a two-day bus trip from MI to DC in January…and sleeping on a bus full of college students is an impossibility. I spent the day walking around DC, then hopped back on the bus and repeated.
Oddly, I only took a 6-hour nap afterward, and felt completely refreshed by it.
Election Day 2000. I was editor of my college paper, and was planning on sleeping in that morning, intentionally skipping my classes, etc., because I had a feeling we were in for a very long night. This plan was upended, however, when the paper’s board of directors called an emergency 9 a.m. meeting. This has me waking up at about 7 or 7:30 a.m.
I was planning on getting some sleep after the meeting, but they announced that the general manager of the paper was resigning that day. So now I was positively wired and had to organize an emergency staff meeting. So, that day goes on and on. We closed shop at about 3:30 a.m. and then our production manager took all of us out for breakfast at a 24-hour greasy spoon. Then I went back to the office, cleaned up the myriad pizza boxes, and went back home.
But I’m a political dork. I wasn’t about to go to sleep with the presidency, a Senate race and the local U.S. House race still undecided. (Michigan was a crazy place that day). So I stayed up until about 9 a.m. That brings us to 26 hours.
I slept for about 6 hours and went back into work. However, that night we had to leave for a convention in Washington DC. I can’t sleep on vans, so I stayed up for the whole overnight trip, and then went through the rest of the day, pretty much, finally going to bed at 10 p.m. or so. So we have…
Nov. 7: Awake at 7:30
Nov. 8: To bed at 9 a.m., awake at 3 p.m.
Nov. 9: To bed at 10 p.m. 31 hours. Wow, I had never realized I had gone that long.
I’m never doing it again. Past 20 hours, my body starts shutting down internal organs.
40 hours. i ain’t no meth-head, either! only real side-effect was being too tired to fall asleep and had to drink a bunch of beer to get to sleep. get end up doing alot of stuff that weekend…
It was about 3 and a half days.
Back in '71 when I was stationed overseas, we worked a very odd schedule. 4 days from 3pm to 11pm, then 4 days from 11pm to 7am, then 4 days from 7am to 3pm, then you had 4 days off. Usually, we’d just stay drunk for our 4 days off because we didn’t want to be hungover on our days off, save that for work.
One time we decided to just stay up our whole break. It was easy to do because with round the clock shifts working, everything was pretty much open, including the bars downtown. The guys you worked and hung out with were all on the same schedule.
I remember after about 24 hours we got very giddy, where everything cracked us up. After this passed, we hit a stretch where we didn’t really know what we were doing. We’d end up just staring into space, unaware that we had originally intended to so something like eat or go out. We had to keep being prodded into action. After about 36 hours we got a second wind, everything seemed normal and we weren’t tired at all. That lasted a few hours then we got very spacy again, becoming very zombie-like.
We seemed to be going through the same cycles, only much quicker until we finally decided this was stupid and crashed for about 8 hours.
[hijack?]
The world record is 11 days? I was pretty sure I’ve heard of total insomniacs going years without sleep.
[/hijack?]
P.S. 24 hours is my (unimpressive) record. It was a celebration after high school graduation.
64 hours. I don’t remember how the math worked out, but I remember figuring it up at the time and bragging to my friends. Let’s see…
Up on Thursday morning, procrastinated in writing my final paper for History of Asoan Civ (taught by Father Witek, who looks kind of like a short, smooshy Ronald Regan in a prienst’s collar), so that I had to pull an all-nighter to finish it. Turn the paper in the next day and then go on an all-night roadtrip to New York with some pals. Come. Get back the following night and og out to parties…
Maybe it was only 54 hours? Anyway, same side effects as always…hot spells, cold spells, upset stomach, diarrhea (possibly more due to the beer and the coffee than the lack of sleep…I have a sensetive tummy), and general stupidity.
These days I get at least 6 hours a night, but around 2 p.m. I get an hour of narcolepsy, and I do have slight hallucinations until 3, when my sanity returns. I fear I may have some kind of sleep disorder…