So I kinda just realized I didn’t sleep for the past 24 hours. Noy sure if it’s the longest I’ve been awake, but probably of the top 5 longest. I’m dealing with depression so my sleep cycle have been fucked up. Got coffee I think around the 12th hour mark.
I’ve basically just been watching youtube videos, browsing lemmy. Googled random things.
Idk why, I guess I just wanted some dopamine boost from coffee and now I can’t sleep lmao. Maybe a bit of anxiety around certain recent political events.
I honestly am not sure if I’m actually awake or dreaming.
Anyways, what is the longest time you’ve been awake without sleep? When did it happen and why?
Hmmm, I think mine was 96 hours? I worked nights, and was taking classes during the day time. I had set the schedule so my classes directly matched the work, which was Monday night starting, and the class ended at 1600 hours on Wednesday. Some weeks I would have to work Thursday nights, some I wouldn’t. I would usually grab 1 hour of sleep between work and school, and 1 hour between school and work.
That week though, I agreed to help someone out on the Sunday shift at work, and the Thursday day rotation at the hospital, and I just couldn’t get any sleep. So Sunday starting at 1800 hours, up until Thurday ~1700 hours. I drove home, and thanks to an agreement with my boss, I didn’t have to come into work until 2200 hours, so I crashed. Lo and behold, I woke up to a cop in my bedroom, because it was 0200 hours and I was late for work. My boss didn’t know exactly what I was doing, so they had no way to know that it was for lack of sleep. I hadn’t been late to work ever and only called in sick once during the 10 years I’d been working there. They panicked, thinking I was dead, and sent that damn cop, lol. Oh well, boss agreed I didn’t have to come into work and I wasn’t complaining.
Like another poster said, things just got weird as the sleep deprivation kicked in. Shadows sometimes wouldn’t line up with where they were attached, background objects would fade in and out of focus while looking at someone in front of me, and my recollection of what had happened five minutes ago blended with what had happened five days ago. What was reality and what was just in my head couldn’t be distinguished. Then, sitting on top of all of that, is just this weird ache where you’re craving sleep but you’re doing things like standing up or walking around to prevent any random lean from turning into a collapse as you nod off.
Anyway, two weeks later I hit a pothole on the side of the highway as I drove home, because I was drifting off the road with the lack of sleep. The pothole broke my oil pan in half, and I quickly realized how stupid I was being. I took time off in the middle of the stretch of classes/work, so I only ever was up for 36 hours at a time for the month after that.
40 hours. Mix between working to pay for college and overdue assignments. Then drive 2 hours to Thanksgiving and had Thanksgiving lunch. Then went into a food coma for 14 hours straight
I sometimes get bouts of insomnia. Usually when it happens, I’m just awake for about 30 hours or so. That’ll happen once or twice a month for me, and I’m pretty sure is just stress-related.
The longest I’ve gone was 75 hours when I was in my early 20s, which was due to a really bad allergic reaction to cedar pollen which kept me from breathing while laying my head down in any position, so I couldn’t fall asleep no matter how hard I tried. I was also running a pretty high fever while this happened. I probably drifted into microsleeps while sitting up a few times during that, but it was absolutely miserable.
I started having really bizarre auditory hallucinations after about the 40-hour mark. I’d hear a crowd of people laughing from behind the walls. Not like a malicious laugh, but like there was a stand-up routine happening in the next room over. Nobody else was home, no TVs were on, and it was like 3am so I knew what I was hearing wasn’t real, but convincing myself of that didn’t make the laughter stop.
I think I slept for about 13 hours straight after that.
There were a few times I was staying up late to play WoW and the computer fan would start talking. Not saying any words, but like listening to the Sims talk.
Approximately 36 hours. Got on a serious roll with some friends to beat Super Mario World 3, realized when we finished that it was about 4:30am, just went with it. I ended the day after throwing up a shrimp burrito from Taco Del Mar when the guy behind the counter misheard “shredded beef” and I had already got home (I don’t eat seafood, so it was already tough to get down). Never again.
About 20 hours. Half it was on a 10 hour flight and no matter how much booze I poured down my throat I just couldn’t fall asleep
I did a little over 4 days when I was a teenager just to see how long I could go. Really kinda sucked after the first 2 days. But I was just playing video games.
I did many 2-3 day stints in the Army. That sucked way, way more because yeah, I was definitely not playing video games.
I stayed up for over 2 nights but I was on some heavy drugs. Near the end I was hearing voices and there was shadow people in my peripheral vision. I also couldn’t put together a sentence , the words would come out in the wrong order .
5 days in 1994, and for no particular reason, just for funsies. Now I get cranky if I get denied my sleep schedule for more than 4 hours.
36? 38 hours? Something like that… I kind of lost track around 30.
Gaming. Ultima IV.
The hallucinations were interesting. Hard flat surfaces like table tops and counters started rippling like water.
A couple of months ago I didn’t sleep all weekend. Got up Friday and didn’t go to bed until about 10:00 p.m. the following Monday.
No drugs, no caffeine just didn’t feel like sleeping. It was kind of refreshing.
But that’s not the worst one for me. There was a time period where I didn’t actually sleep for about a week maybe two. However, I can’t be certain of how long it was because towards the end I started taking micronaps where I would be in the middle of a conversation and pause for like 20 seconds and it was obvious to other people that I had fallen asleep mid-sentence but then I would invariably wake back up again.
When that spell finally broke, I had just finished work and I got that little signal that says I’m about to fall asleep and I was so excited.
However, I was catching a ride with friends and I had to wait for them to bring me home and they had to go to the grocery store and I have vague staticky memories of fondling chicken breasts in an inappropriate manner and following behind other people way too close like the kind of close that would get me maced, and then running through the store telling every single person that I met that this bottle of beary bear brand syrup was my friend and he would protect us.
Entertaining after the fact, not fun to go through, 1/10 do not recommend.
I used to stay up all night when having fun on occasion. The longest was two nights and then I went to bed at around 8pm on the third day. It’s been awhile since I lived that life but I used to wake up feeling great and generally be in a great mood, and it helped me reset my sleep cycle so my insomnia would get less disruptive for awhile afterwards. That said, not sleeping is bad for you. If you’re doing it regularly you will have negative health effects, and if you stay up for more than a day you will start hallucinating and probably make bad decisions.
67 hours. After a full day of work, my wife and I hopped an international flight to Europe. There were two layovers, including a 6-hour one in Dubai. I tried to sleep on the longest leg of the flight, but with my restless wife on one side and a restless stranger on the other, I couldn’t. Once we landed and reached our AirBnB, I announced I was going to take a desperately needed nap. My wife stood at the bedside staring at me until I gave up and we went for a walk to see Prague.
Dreamed of seeing that city for half my life, but it was a couple of days before I was capable of enjoying it.
25h for doing a 100% “speedrun” of Paper Mario: The Origami King 5 years ago.
I was the first one to ever do it so I can say I’m a former world record holder :p
50+ hours, when a loved one went into septic shock several years ago (they eventually got better). When they were stabilized and I was finally able to sleep, I just basically said “okay, now is fine” to the darkness creeping in from my peripheral vision every time I closed my eyes and let it finish doing so. I was asleep within a few seconds.
72 hours, uni final exams