Haven't slept in two and a half days, starting to haluncinate. Everything looks like it's bleeding and I can hear my hair grow. Soooo you crazy cats, tell me about your experiences without any shuteye...
Omigosh! I missed a night's sleep a few nights ago, and everything got kind of swirly, like I was looking through water... or like it was melting or something. It was fucked up.
Yeah, sleep deprivation can be pretty tricky. 36-40 hours without sleep is pretty easy for me. Then I start getting really exhausted. Usually hit the wall around 50-60 hours. Thats when stimulants are your friends Past 60 hours or so, shit changes. It becomes easier to stay awake. Your mind functions differently. And yeah, you hallucinate. I've only done this a few time and not in around 4 years. Longest I ever stayed up was 4 days and the walls were crawling almost nonstop. The precise time before you go loopy is probably different for other people. I don't sleep that much under normal circumstances.
In college I once went sixty hours without sleep. I had two 15 page papers due on the same day. One's relationship to reality becomes somewhat fluid when you haven't slept in two and a half days. It is kind of like a drug or the mystic's experience. You lose the ability/desire/energy to insist that reality conform to your model of what you "know." You still see the same sunlight, the same trees, the same people, the same buildings, the same everything, but you no longer resist reality's expression of itself, you surrender your insistence that reality is whatever you always thought it was. It is a difficult way to go. It can be dangerous also. Sleep may overcome you at a critical moment (so don't drive), and if you have never questioned your sanity, your reality orientation, your relationship with reality then you may be in for a surprise or two. It can also take a lot out of you. After I turned in my papers (I earned A's on both of them) I went home and slept for 14 hours. It was a few days before I felt "normal" again.
