What is the longest you've ever stayed awake without any sleep?
What is the longest you've ever stayed awake without any sleep?
8 years ago by kiltman
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What is the longest you've ever stayed awake without any sleep?
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When I was around 19 or 20 I managed to stay awake for three days straight. I couldn't manage any longer than that. My body is not very forgiving of a lack of sleep.
Four days unfortunately. I was hallucinating at the end. I had to finish this paper and my underwater seascape screensaver kept coming on as I was spacing out and I thought water was coming off of my screen. I went home and made some tea, sat down on the couch and promptly fell asleep for 24 hours. Then went to my bed and slept for another day or so. Apparently my roommates had a little party in the room that night and I didn't even notice.
Tried this in college. Also started hallucinating after four days. Kept getting motion in my peripheral vision. Another time I was up for about the same amount of time and at the end I just fell asleep while I was talking to people. Just shut down mid sentence like a narcoleptic.
My context is that I was doing something called a moot. It is a fake legal appeal. And something that you have to compete to do within a law school to do externally. And this was one of the prestigious external moots. So it is not something that is taken lightly. Generally you start writing right after Xmas break and have to hand in your paper (ie. factum) maybe the 1st of March and present it the next week or so. It is a solid 2 months work. Probably a forty page document with a few hundred sources. I can't remember exactly.
I was the student adviser, kind of like the captain of the 4 person moot team and the faculty adviser was lame. I kept telling her that one member was not doing shit but she would not do anything about it. Four days before the factum was due it turned out that one team member had not done shit. So I had to step in and do 2 months of work in four days. I did not leave the library. People brought me a coffee maker, food, clothes and smokes. People pulled shifts 24 hours a day in getting me resource material. Oddly enough, the factum won third place which was better than the fifth place I got the year before when I had 2 months to prepare.
40ish hours. I can't do it these days, no way.
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Maybe you should ask Shia Labeuf.
Around 45 hours. It was a trip coming back from Paris, I arrived around the middle of the night in America, and I had to take a bus from the station a few hours later (first one in the morning, around 4:30 AM), for which I had to walk from the airport : no public transit at such early time, and I didn't want to take a cab (the station was closed anyway, I'd rather walk than wait for 2 hours). It was a small town airport, only about 4 or 5 km (about 3 miles) between the two. Then I arrived around 7 AM, had breakfast with my family before going back home on another 3 hours car ride with my parents. I spent the whole day awake and went to the movies that night with some friends. Needless to say I had some trouble keeping up with the movie's plot. Good thing I had read the book first. ;-)
That's the cost of cheap flight tickets (about USD 250 for a return flight to Paris)!
52 hours, in grad school. It was awful but it had to be done.