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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 .

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.

I did a little over 4 days when I was a teenager just to see how long I could go. Really kinda sucked after the first 2 days. But I was just playing video games.

I did many 2-3 day stints in the Army. That sucked way, way more because yeah, I was definitely not playing video games.

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

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.

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.