About 4 days. I went on a “how high can I get from insomnia” binge with my friend when we quit drugs (yes, I’m aware of the irony).

We were both people who got into drugs really early (12 for me) and were voluntarily sober by 15-16. So we needed something to do while all our friends were dropping acid (and both already had insomnia).

Do NOT recommend. It’s the second closest I’ve ever come to losing my mind

About 42 hours. I start getting hallucinatory sparkles at roughly 40 hours and usually go to bed then.

Only done it a few times in my life, but the most memorable one was while in the middle of a 5-day LARP. We were going hard, I was NPCing, and I started seeing shadows in the middle of a fight. I took that as my cue to dip out and crash.

About 24 hours. I’ll almost fall asleep standing up at that point and whatever reason I’ve got to stay awake just is not worth it.

Definetly about 3 days or so I was Nightshift in a supermarket and sometimes during heatwaves I just spent entire days trying to sleep and failing.

Apart from feeling awful I did start seeing things like thinking birds were flying over the aisle I was stocking and similar small things so not recommended really.

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.

About two days.

I woke up, went to school (around 7am). My mom and grandma were in vacation, so I was left with my dad. My “job” was to feed the cats at my grandma’s place. Took a different bus so I could get to her. Fed the cats, and waited for my dad to come get me.

And waited. And waited. And waited.

He never came. I stayed up all night thinking he’d come back. My friend made a post on social media (I wanna say Xanga?), so I knew she was awake and I called and asked if her dad could come get me and drop me off at home.

Once home I brushed my teeth, changed my clothes, and was back on the bus. Came back and he was home, telling me there was a massive traffic jam that kept him locked in the road all night. He asked why I didn’t just stay home.

There was no traffic jam.

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.

38 hours, I was working on a creative project I was passionate about with a hard deadline. I worked on it basically non-stop the entire time, I don’t remember much of it though. I do remember that after about 30 hours I started seeing patterns on things, like the walls and ceiling were covered in shifting sliding wallpaper.

Ohhh, story time from 30ish years ago.

It is summer in the late 90s, living downtown with nothing to do. 4 of us decided to stay awake as long as possible, with the help of LSD and PCP and my locally famous “acid walks”. We did an escalating amount of LSD(forget the actual amount started at 2 each then more each following dose) 2 quit after 48 hours, they just dropped asleep to the floor. Myself and a woman friend did another 48 on top of that and added some PCP to the mix. It was a very, umm, interesting and confusing 4 days, I don’t know how lucid I was at the end. Don’t really remember much more now. plz do not do this I slept the 5th day completely. Don’t abuse the power of youth, harness it.

Unrelated, another friend of mine from that era took enough valium at a party that he slept for 4 days straight, best part was when he did finally wake up he asked the host what happened to the party. She was laughing when she told me, as did he.

4-5 days. Hard to tell.

I was 14, it was spring break, the rest of my large overbearing family went on a trip I didn’t want to go on, so I had the house to myself and didn’t want to waste a single minute.

Heavily fueled by energy drinks, and the auditory hallucinations really started kicking off after day 2. After a while you’re not even really tired, just craving a break, it’s easy to lose track of when exactly you did something and what day it is. Even still, the involuntary micro-naps started cutting in about halfway through day 4.

Aproximately 80 hours, because of a power drink.

Whatever it was in the mix, it kept me going for the better part of three days and three nights, plus a few extra hours.

I went to work, went to night school and played Fallout, with no signs of fatigue. When it finally wore off, whatever it was fuelling me, I slept for 36 hours straight, woke up, showered and emptied the fridge, the pantry and everything else there was to eat available in the cupboards.

That was a crazy event.

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 .

After this recent election I didn’t sleep for 5 days. Just seemed like one really long day that eventually seemed like one really long dream. My sleep schedule is still messed up but I am sleeping again. Unfortunately I’m not waking up from this nightmare.

As a teenager I stayed up for 36 hours playing warcraft3 online.

In university I once spent 48 hours finishing a project. Afterwards I remember trying to count coins to get milk. After 4 or 5 unsuccessful counts my girlfriend at the time went and got milk while I slept for nearly 20 hours.

8 days.

I was in my early 20’s and invincible and spent a week one summer bouncing about between clubs, house parties and outdoor raves, and taking a metric fuck ton of party drugs and psychedelics.

The week started with some really good exctasy at a nightclub (like REALLY good, the whole smoking area was basically a giant cuddle puddle in the photos), and then there was a lot of speed and drone/mkat at the various after parties.

We had rooftop ‘picnics’ (blankets, cushions, and drugs) watching stars and sunrises and having lots of beautiful, silly, fun moments at several different houses, and more picnics were had in the following days in gardens and one place had a pool.

There were outfit changes and showers at various points of amphetamine induced efficiency too. I lost my favourite tshirt (Cult, Love album) somewhere and we were all swapping/sharing clothes at one point for photos. (It probably found a good home where ever it ended up though and it’s part of party karma for all the various clothes I lost and acquired that year)

Mid week, someone came round selling DMT and I’m pretty sure I induced some kind of REM state by smoking a piece (see below if you want to know what that was like). I did a bunch of ketamine too after it wore off, so that probably also really helped, what with the semi-lucid visuals that induces.

On the 8th day, (I was the last original survivor of the core group, most had dropped off earlier in the week and come back though) I was feeling relatively fine all things considered, but admittedly by this point I had a music and various song lyrics looping in my head near continuously and in a more intense way than I normally do.

Then I thoughtlessly took a tab of acid at a night club we were at (wrong environment completely for me to take acid), and very quickly stopped having fun.

I remember feeling the lsd in my jaw and then feeling very paradoxically sober and overwhelmed (go autism, go) as everything was now too loud and people, and flashing lights and humidity.

I borrowed a friend’s keys and took the night bus back to their place as it was closest, and I remember really struggling to get the key to work in the lock of their house door. It had a pull push motion required to get the latches to flip while turning and I could not figure it out. Probably only took a few minutes but it felt like forever.

Eventually I think muscle memory kicked in and I got it. I woke up like 10 hours later as my friends were getting back from another club, for another afterparty at their house, and I went home.

That was a very fun year for me, and that week of awake is legendary, even if I do say so myself.

DMT, for anyone wondering what it’s like, was absolutely fucking incredible.

You get this like little clear sheet of resin that you have to smoke in a weed pipe, covered with and on a bed of ash, so as not to burn it.

Inhale deeply, hold it in for as long as you can, and then lie flat back and close your eyes to exhale.

The visual fractals upon the exhale are intense, eyes open or closed, you are floating in the matrix with them. It’s sorta like what you see when you push on your eyelids, but more fluid and sacred feeling, and your whole body feels like it is floating. It feels like this trippy visual part lasts hours too, but in reality it’s less than a minute.

You also get this beautiful feeling of pure oneness with everything and safety, and this grounded inner calm that lasts for weeks afterwards.