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.

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.

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.

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

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 .

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.