Ask Lemmy

I think the longest was 4 days when I was 12/13 as kind of a "I wonder if I can?" I was pretty much neglected as a kid, so I was left up to my own creative paths, and there was a time when I was trying out all kinds of new age stuff of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I think one of the things I read about was something experimental called "Delta sleep," where you could get a night's worth of sleep for just 2 hours only. I am sure it was new age bullshit, but "the army is experimenting with this" and so I decided to give it a try, using a biofeedback machine home kit that I had. This led to, among other things, parasomnias, but my record was 4 days with no sleep (roughly 80 hours, so less than 4 days technically).

For lack of a better term, things became "crispy." Like too in-focus, too real, too stark. Colors were too bright, sounds were too loud, edges of thing were too defined. We all have a mask that we present to the world where there is a buffer of self versus your environment, and that was gone. My short term memory became horribly degraded, and I started seeing moving shadows where there were none, and certain things had "vibrations" and others did not. I can't tell you which had what, because I couldn't figure it out, and I suspected towards the end I was hallucinating, anyway. So what I am saying in all this was that's what I remember, and I am not sure if my memories are 100% accurate. I wrote stuff down, but toward the third 24 hour period, it was indecipherable afterwards.

"Okay, the trees are like lungs of the earth... how exactly? And why is the letter X written everywhere?"

So my end opinion after all those experiments was "if you don't sleep on the regular, your brain starts to malfunction, and not in a fun way."

Since that time, the longest as an adult was 46 hours, when I worked a 12 hour swing shift at a vastly understaffed International; help desk, and my second called in sick for two days. So I did my 12, she called in sick so I did her 12, and then I did my 12, and after another 10 hours my boss found someone to let me go home. I was in poor shape. I never want to do that again. The desk record was 54 hours, when a snowstorm prevented anyone from getting to or leaving the building, but that was someone else, and I believe the company set up cots for everyone trapped.