What is the longest you've been awake without sleep? When and why did you do it?

About 70 hours, at that time in my life it was normal for me to go 24 hours or so without sleep because I was addicted to WoW.

That time I realised I'd hit 30 and decided to see how long I could go without sleep.

At somewhere after 60 hours I began hallucinating and became convinced that there were elephants inside the walls making them deform.
That was the sign I needed to go to sleep, and I slept for almost 20 hours straight.

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.

About 36 hours in Marine Corps Boot camp. I'm not sure how long everyone else stayed awake because at about 24 hours I failed the medical exam and was separated for discharge.

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.

24 hours is sadly quite common for me. Max might have been just past 45 hours. I don't think I ever reached 48.

1994, I was... A manager for Radio Shack. No, I didn't wear bad pants.

My District Manager (DM) promoted me to a larger store from my current store. The other manager was being demoted... To MY store. Which made the whole thing a bit awkward. The other manager and I also were not getting any more help. We literally were going to do the takeover inventories ourselves... both stores.

I got up Saturday morning at 7:30 and got into my store at 8:30am and worked till 6pm, when my store closed. One of my employees said he'd help with my store's inventory, but he couldn't work past 10pm. We entered final counts and started reconcile at 4am. Reconcile is typically left to the manager taking over, but I didn't trust the guy, so we both did the reconcile (comparing what we counted in the store vs what the computer said was in the store and explaining any variances). That was done about 6am, largely because he wanted to dispute items that were at the repair center that I had documented. We then moved to his former, my new store. Which had a much larger inventory. We stopped and picked up breakfast and started counts around 7:30. By this time I had been awake and working for 24 hours.

Inventory of my new store was a fucking nightmare. Counts were WAY off from computer's inventory. Entire computer systems were missing, monitors, a couple of hi-fi receivers. Don't even get me started on force feed. At about noon, I called our DM and said I needed either him, or a senior manager onsite to cover this inventory and some helpers. My DM's lazy ass wasn't about to work on a Sunday, so he sent a senior manager and two employees. The senior manager, someone that I knew and trusted, did reconcile as we finished counts. Boy was the inventory completely screwed. That was just the large items, by 10pm we hadn't even gotten into the force feed items (items hanging on pegs). We finally got counts done at 6am and I signed off on the reconcile around 7:30. The store opened at 9am, but I lived 25 minutes away, so I just freshened up in the restroom, went and bought a case of Cokes and opened the store. I was supposed to have an employee come in at 1pm and another at 5pm...

The employee that was supposed to work from 1pm to close (9pm), decided to just never show up, he was also the other key holder. RS only had two key holders in the store back in those days. The one at 5pm was a part timer and could not close. So I ended up working until 9:30 that night.

I got home at 10pm, made some dinner and got to sleep at 11pm and it was Monday night.

So I was awake from 7:30am Saturday till 11:00pm the following Monday and was at work all but maybe 30 minutes. I think that was about 63.5 hours and I still had the rest of the week to work. It took me about a month to get my sleep schedule back into any semblance of normalcy.

I will starve and die in the gutter, before EVER working retail again.

Around 48-50 hours. I didn't want to. I was in excruciating pain and couldn't take anything due to conflicting conditions. I didn't hallucinate in the way of seeing people who weren't there, but I have no idea if any memory from that stretch is real or something I imagined.

72 hours, uni final exams

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.

~40 hours literally a few days ago. Had a project due date through which I procrastinated heavily. Not proud of that one.

I don't think I experienced any hallucinations, but it sucked. What was weird was that by hour ~33, I tried going to sleep, but failed and ultimately got back up. Hopefully never again.

Edit: just occurred to me as well that of that time, I worked for 20 straight hours. Don't be like me.

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.

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.

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.

Close to 72hrs. I work in the entertainment industry and we had a project that was poorly lead. Overpromises were made, not enough time and people. It was two of us working from Friday into Sunday. The issue with the place with worked at (besides the company itself) was that the heat would shut off at night and the weekends. We both worked in a little small office, that used to be a closet. An electric space heater kept us warm while we worked, but once you opened the door into the main office space it was freezing, because it was the dead of winter. I tried to catch a nap a few times, but it was way too cold to actually sleep on the couch. The other issue was the noise being created by the city that was building a park across the street and breaking through the foundation. We eventually finished the project, and when they were thanking the people involved for all the great work, the two of us were not mentioned. Lovely place.

56 hours was my longest stint. Was in late high school and just had back to back to back events non-stop including a 24h film festival planning production and submission after a day of classes followed by a big blowout senior party by which point it was just a challenge to see how far to take it. Was a pretty fun roller coaster all told. Plenty of 30-36 hour days since then too, but it’s getting more difficult to go past 24h as I age.

3 or 4 days. Abuse of stimulants. Not sure my body could handle that in my late thirties.

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 .

40 hours for me. Work related waste of my life in hindsight. Could have been only 39, but I powered through the last hour to hit the round number.

3 days so that I could finish my thesis. It happened because I was a procrastinator (I still am, but not as bad).

I’m not sure it was the longest, but most recently I was up over 36 hours straight.

Worked then pulled an all nighter driving to Florida to visit my friend. Got there at 7:30 am and then did a whole day with them before passing out after midnight.

5 days
Was mostly partying and doing stuff on the computer

More often I did 2-3 days, when I got hooked at something that interests me - usually something computer related

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

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.

Very often almost 3 whole days because I didn't want to (younger) or because I couldn't (2 weeks ago). Hard to remember because after like 30 hours, shit gets blurry and I don't know what was real or what was a dream.

Apparently a not insignificant portion of the electorate has been asleep for 8 years

Edit: actually on topic, I’ve done a few 36 to 40 hour stints over the years, but i don’t make a habit of it

Used to be on an odd schedule when I worked overnight.

My work shifts were Thursday to Saturday, 1800 - 0500. So Sunday, when I got off at 0500, I’d stay awake until around 1900 (being up for ~26 hours) and then to go bed. Wake up Monday morning and have a normal Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, then stay up all night Wednesday night until Thursday morning (another 26 hour stint) and the go to bed Thursday morning so I could then go to work at 1800 Thursday night again.

Did that for about a year and it actually worked out reasonably well, but not something I’d entertain now that I’m older.

That schedule is also the reason all my clocks are always set for 24-hour time and I can still fall asleep in broad daylight without any trouble.

About 36h. One day, one night and the next day. Party + drugs.
I did this twice actually, but I like sleeping too much to make it a regular thing.

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.

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

40ish hours. I was in my 20s, a phd student, with time on a one-of-a-kind scientific instrument. Got a lot of data.

My sophomore year of high school I snuck out of the house one night, my friends and I pushed the car down the driveway and got it going. Hung out all night. Got caught about 5AM by the local police. (I didn’t have a license either, I was 15 I think.) Cop drove me home and dropped me off to my mom. By then I had been awake 22 hours and was exhausted and tried to go to bed. Oh no. My punishment was going to school. So about 4PM when I got home…. 34 hours awake? (I was a pretty good kid in school…. Most of the time..) 😁

Dreamhack… I spent around 60 hours awake before I crashed

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

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.