Flew home from Sigonella, Sicily (near Catania) via Naples, via some airport in Ireland, via Philly, via Atlanta to Jacksonville FL. I think I spent more time changing aircraft and getting from concourse to concourse and changing aircraft (4 different birds for the trip) than I did in the air.
Slept for about 16 hours after I finally walked in the front door at home (I recall feeling like a dead-man-walkin’ when I arrived in Jax). East to west adjustment seems to suck the life out of me.
78 hours is the longest I know I have been up consecutively without any breaks in conciousness like dozing off. The first two days I don’t remember being bad really at all. Then the shit hit the fan so to speak. Visual halucinations, tachycardia, being really zoned and not making much sense at all when I spoke. It wasn’t too bad, but it was voluntary. I rember when I actually went to bed that It just felt wwwwooooonnnndddeeeerrrfffuuull.
Besides that I have been up for nearly a week and a half with only brief periods of dozing lasting maybe 30 minutes to an hour per day. Though that wasn’t through any choice of my own, that was the consequence of a nasty head injury that caused swelling in my brain that gave me panic attacks and paranoia for that length of time. After being awake that long and not having slept after the first five days they had to use physical restraints and medicate me heavily so I didn’t hurt myself. That was the wildest trip I have ever had and I have no intention of ever repeating it. I remeber halucinating wildly and thinking that the hospital was exploding and the nurses were demons. It was literally hell.
But then I got better
I don’t plan on getting whacked in the head again soon so I should be safe.
Mine was under the influence of drugs (crystal meth) and the first 55 hours or so I didn’t have any of the symptoms of being up too long, I was perfectly alert, no hallucinations or drowsiness. After the drugs wore off I would have gone to sleep but I had to work, and things got really weird…I felt like my computer monitor was huge and very far away, my cube walls were quivering, and the building seemed to be breathing.
One time I stayed up a long time (not sure how long, at least 48 hours) without any drugs, and I experienced stranger hallucinations, what I call ‘doubling’ - things would seem to happen twice. Somebody would come into the room, and I’d look up at them and then I’d see them come into the room again, it was like part of my consciousness was about 3-5 seconds ahead of the rest, probably has something to do with the caching of short term memories the brain does.
Around 60 hours, maybe more. This happened several times in the Army. I was a tank driver and we were “on screenline” (in training) That means hiding out waiting for the enemy to show up.
The “enemy” was of course other US soldiers, in US vehicles. I once reported seeing Fox 6x6 (wasn’t there). Another time I saw a King Tiger (German WWII tank).
All sorts of weird hallucinations and thoughts. Afterward, it seemes that the wall between imagination and reality was just not there. At one point I believed I was at a formal dinner and for some reason, my forearms were transparent. There were plenty of other strange things that happened. the worst was that when my Tank Commander told me to back up (we were being fired upon by an enemy tank), the words just seemed to float by me. It got us “killed”.
Pammipoo- I’ll be at least the third person to say PLEASE take the bus.
Without any sleep and without chemical assistance: ~70 hours, give or take a few. But I was, shall we say, seriously impaired at the end. There is a reason that I don’t know exactly how long it was; I barely remember the last few hours.
With chemical assistance: About four days. I started out merely shaky, progressed rapidly to paranoid, and finished up as a true raving lunatic. Not recommended.
With at least one nap (.5 - 2 hours) every 24 hours: A while. My last bout with serious sleep deprivation (I always have insomnia, but sometimes it’s worse than others), I was sleeping in half hour increments and averaging an hour and a half of sleep out of every 24. I was fine for about a week; by the time I saw my doctor, 12 days in, I wasn’t doing so well - noticeably acting weird, though I was still lucid.
Please, Pammipoo, don’t drive sleep deprived (it even rhymes!). You could kill yourself or someone else. Can you get a driving buddy, so you can get some sleep on the way? Or take a bus? Or even a plane? Can your friend meet you half way?
If you absolutely have to do this, take naps whenever you can. And don’t use any chemicals; they will provide at best temporary or even illusory help and at worst will really screw you up. And bear in mind that your time with your friend may not be of the highest quality; it’s hard to have fun when you’re dead on your feet.
For me, 24 hours isn’t a problem - I feel fine. The achiness sets in at about 36 hours and I go rapidly downhill from there.
I don’t know how many hours it was, but it was several days.
SCA weekend. My local group was hosting an event and I was the feast-o-crat and running a tavern.
Thursday: get to the site about 1:00PM to set up kitchen and camp. Spend the evening in the kitchen baking bread and doing prep work for tavern. Stay up all night schmoozing with the rest of the early arrivals.
Friday: Run tavern for breakfast and lunch, volunteer to man the gate for a few hours. More schmoozing. Do prep work and then run dinner tavern. Stay up all night baking bread for feast and tavern and doing prep work for feast. Starting to get a little silly. Jokes and puns abound in the kitchen among the volunteers. We sing dirty folk songs. Somewhat niave Autocrat scandalized I even knew some of those songs.
Saturday: Definately feeling giddy and now have the shakes. Living on caffeine, diet pills, and cigarettes. Tavern for breakfast and lunch. Do a couple of hours as field herald on the list just to get out of the kitchen. Spend the rest of the day putting feast for 350 together. Afterwards I was on that ‘damn I’m good’ high after a successful feast. Stayed up all night partying, because that’s what you do on Saturday night at an SCA event and then go hang out in the kitchen getting Sunday’s tavern prep work done. Take another diet pill, even though I was only prescribed one a day. Complete breakdown of inhibitions.
Sunday: Run tavern for breakfast. Go to a heraldic symposium. Run lunch tavern and then spend the rest of the day packing and cleaning. Get home about 7:00PM. Unload everything and put it away. Go to bed about 11:00PM. Don’t remember specific deatils of the day. “What do you mean I documented and registered a name for your teddy bear?”
Been there. Got up on a Friday morning and played euchre at my kitchen table until Monday morning. I went to work on Monday, still not having slept, where the drugs wore off and I realized I was really, really, tired. It was an interesting bus ride home. Every muscle in my face decided it could not wait to get home and proceeded to relax and have a nap. I felt like my face was sliding off. I spent the entire 30 minute bus ride trying to sort of moosh it back into place. It was, I am fairly certain, not one of my best moments. However, if anyone would like to learn all the solutions to the planets greatest problems I do believe we solved each and every one of them that weekend. Drugs, no sleep and a game of euchre make for exceptionally intelligent conversation. :rolleyes:
Non-chemically induced I am regularly awake for extended periods of time. Right now I have been awake since yesterday morning, around 22 hours at the moment. I am an insomniac and 24 to 36 hours is fairly common. Three days was the longest I’ve been awake with no sleep at all. It was not good. I notice effects around the 26 to 30 hour mark. Headaches, getting the shakes and blurry vision seem to be the most common for me.
I’m going to chime in here and repeat what has been said many times already. Do Not drive after long periods of no sleep.
This site gives the following as a list of effects of sleep deprivation.
Physical effects:
[ul]
[li]increased appetite[/li][li]body temperature drops[/li][li]some decrease in immune system responsiveness[/li][li]shakiness[/li][li]visual problems[/li][li]headaches[/li][li]increased pain sensitivity[/li][/ul]
**
Psychological effects: **
[list]
[li]irritability[/li][li]poor concentration[/li][li]aggression[/li][li]apathy[/li][li]time and place disorientation[/li][li]loss of emotional control[/li][li]paranoia[/li][li]perceptual disturbances (e.g., “the floor is rolling”)[/li][li]SLEEPINESS[/li][li]after 4 days: delusions, depersonalization[/li]Please don’t drive if you really are planning to be awake that long.
I just finished college two months ago and spent the majority of the time there sleep deprived. Long story but I spent most of last year running off an hour of sleep a night on a good night (not because I couldn’t sleep…oh how I would have loved to have slept, but just because I didn’t have time). Having the opportunity to get 4 hours of sleep was like Christmas to me, but a lot of nights I’d get around 15 minutes of “dozing” (I’d fall asleep a few minutes before the alarm would go off). On the weekends I’d crash and basically sleep through them (16+ hours of sleep).
Thankfully I had someone who could drive for me because I spent most of the time hallucinating and having conversations with my shoes. For the first while it’s not too bad, and if you can push through that first “man my bed would be comfy right now” bit that hits you, there’s a second wind for a bit…but when the floors start sparkling and spinning in patterns and you SWEAR the sign you’re looking at is bending back and forth to the thumping in your head, it’s all downhill from there…
Like everyone else says, PLEASE don’t drive when you’re lacking sleep…Even if you can keep yourself awake so you don’t run off the road, you’ll eventually start hallucinating and it’s just freaking weird.
On a side note, I remember reading somewhere (even in a thread here, maybe) about sleep deprivation being used as a form of torture to kill someone because there’s some point where your body goes nuts and you just drop…but I have no idea where I read it or what the whole story behind it was so I may very well be pulling that out of my butt.
Tsugumo (now on summer vacation and sleeping any time I damn well please, muwahahaha)
I regularly stay up for more than 30 hours, usually from noon or 1PM Thursday until 10 PM or so Friday night - I work nights and sleep mornings (from 8 until noon or so), when I get off work Friday morning I stay up until that night because I don’t have to work Friday night and it gets me used to sleeping at night again for the weekend. Last Thursday I did it running on 2 hours of sleep - I slept from 8:30 AM until 10:30 AM (had to run some errands), went to work that night, stayed up the entire next day.
I’m getting used to it and now I have trouble sleeping more than 4 hours on the weekends when I can sleep 12 if I want.
I went without sleep for five days once, about 110 hours. I didn’t have any bad effects except that I was really tired and moody. I started crying over everything. It was at a camp. I don’t know why we did it, but me and this other guy just didn’t sleep. It was for varoius reason, 1st night, we hadn’t seen eachother in a year so we were catching up, second night, we just felt like it, third night was the camping trip where you are supposed to stay up all night, fourth night was the last night and it was tradition to stay up all night that night too, then I had to drive home, so didn’t get to sleep until about eight o’clock that night. It was my birthday too. A bunch of other people were doing it too, but we were the only ones that made it all the way through. Of course I was sixteen then, so I had a little more energy plus we had the assistance of Jolt Cola which is a highly caffinated soda.
I did around 50 hours recently, and spent 9 hours of that driving from Baltimore MD to Charleston SC. Throw in a lot of beer and a couple-few joints, and suddenly everything’s getting all radical. I hope to do it again soon.
Well, all this talk about sleep deprivation makes it sound interesting. I can’t drive yet, so im not worried about that.
And you can drive perfectly fine while high, just depends how high you are.
A couple times i’ve stayed up all night. The first time, me and my friends tried playing basketball in the moring to cure our boredom. 2 of my friends fell flat of their faces, and ended up laughing. Another time i did it, my sense of time was all distorted.
I probably would stay up all night if i didn’t have to work the next day.
So where are those medical guys to put us to shame?
Just an update, but it’s now Wednesday morning, about 6:30. I’ve been up since noon on sunday, with the exception of 4 hours last night. But that wasn’t really quality sleep, because Sean kept poking me, and because his grandmother’s dog was whining to get inside for most of it. Grr…
I believe I’ve entered the delirious stage. Look at all the pretty birdies…
