What happens when you stay up too long?

[General Mostly Electrified Steel]

Well, since I have nearly two weeks off for Easter (best school ever), I've been staying up for days on end to play NWN2. Unfortunately, I have an appointment in the real world which must be kept tomorrow, so I leave for the land of sleep.

That said, what do you lot notice happens to you when you go without sleep for way too long?

At the moment, I'm just seeing faces where there are none out of the corner of my eye. Things can warp around in space too (my monitor was just doing it a few seconds ago), and sometimes parts of my body seem to fly off into space (last part to get hit was my jaw, strangely).

 

[Mstrswrd]

Not much, I just become more twitchy then usual. As an isomniac, I'm used to little to no sleep for extended amounts of time.

 

[Anarchemitis]

I fall asleep.

 

[Finnish(ed)]

I suffered from serious insomnia when I was a teenager and still do occasionally. However, my time of service in the army cured me from the worst of it. I remember when we were marching through the woods, in the winter, from sundown till sunrise, with only a few hours of sleep during the entire week previously, I had some nice hallucinations. When we stopped for a few minutes to wait for road to clear or something, I would fall asleep standing up and then wake up just in time to stop myself from falling down face first. I guess the hallucinations were due to my subconscious intruding on my conscious mind, because I did not get the usual dose of unconsciousness we get during sleep.

EDIT: After a year in the service, I have not had as much trouble falling asleep as before.

I went for three day without any sleep one time. That was not so bad actually, since I did not have anything really physically demanding to do at the time.

 

[mshcherbatskaya]

You know that feeling when you are on an elevator and it just starts or stops? That little "whoops!" feeling? I feel like that continuously until I get some sleep. I also start dreaming while I'm awake. Apparently the dreams are perfectly happy to kick in whether my eyes are shut or not. I also get very noticeable muscle spasms [http://www.rls.org/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?&pid=477&srcid=471] which my friends find very amusing.

 

[bulletproof12]

get cranky, tired (duh), and if i am up playing late i usualy get twitchy and paranoid that my parents will come down and yell at me for staying up till (insert time between 3am-noon next day) playing RSV2

 

[Anniko]

I start to enjoy FPS games alot more. Either that or the people awake at that hour in TF2 are just nicer.

 

[Knight Templar]

Nothing at all, sleep is something I can even stop myself from doing. As long as I have a FPS

 

[coverfire]

I was under the understanding that if someone stayed awake with absolutely no
sleep (including power naps etc) for more than four days one can expect
hallucinations, and as many as six days could cause mental breakdown and with
suicidal tendencies.

 

[Fire Daemon]

I don't feel that bad except that my eye's feel heavy.

Although if I stay up late playing a game then I usually end up dreaming about it in some way.

 

[Larenxis]

I talk less and imagine things more. I sort of go into my head rather than truly experience the world around me. I've never gone 2 days without napping though, so I don't think I've gone far enough to hallucinate.

Sometimes if I've been playing or watching a game for too long and it's the last thing I see before going to bed, I'll continue to see the tetris blocks falling, or the Rock Band notes coming, or the scenery going by like in racing games or what have you, when I close my eyes. It kind of sucks.

 

[Cameoflage]

A sort of (relatively mild) achiness over my whole body, increased irritability, irrationality (mainly manifested as a tendency to make stupid decisions and inexplicable mathematical errors, although I notice neither -- especially the latter -- until after the fact), the obvious fatigue, and my vocabulary retreats like the sea at low tide. I also have difficulty recalling most of what happened while sleep-deprived when looking back on it the morning after, although I thankfully don't get entire blocks of time disappearing from my memory. On the plus side, though, I do tend to experience an upswing in creativity, even if I do have to write the ideas down and wait until I've slept to make sure they aren't completely insane or just plain dumb.

That's all I can think of at the moment (it's tough to recall the symptoms when I'm not actually in that state of mind...); I can't really stay up for more than ~38 hours straight, because after that I tend to crash whether I like it or not. Therefore, seeing as how I've never experienced hallucinations, I assume that point is beyond what I normally reach.

Sometimes if I've been playing or watching a game for too long and it's the last thing I see before going to bed, I'll continue to see the tetris blocks falling, or the Rock Band notes coming, or the scenery going by like in racing games or what have you, when I close my eyes. It kind of sucks.

Yeah, I've experienced that on occasion; most recently, after playing Portal a lot I'd fall asleep still seeing its crosshair in my mind's eye (which I think was followed by at least one dream in which I actually opened portals, although I don't recall whether I used them).

 

[jaykray]

when i'm really tired and don't go to sleep for at least a day (which is alot for a 14 yr old) i end up never really knowing if i fell asleep or not. sometimes i can convince myself i did but other times i just don't know

 

[Duck Sandwich]

The longest I've gone without sleep is around 36 hours. (stayed up all night doing an essay and didn't go to sleep the next day until 10PM. When I go for a long time without sleep, I seem to randomly drift between feeling tired and drained of energy, and feeling just fine. It also depends on the situation.

Once after a night without sleep, I played a game of hockey in gym. I felt just fine. I had as much energy as I usually do when playing hockey. But when doing regular mundane activities, I feel like I had almost no energy at all.

 

[Jumplion]

When i don't fall asleep longer than usual, my eyes usualy start to burn and i'm forced to close my eyes and sleep unwillingly.

 

[Dudemeister]

Well, since I have nearly two weeks off for Easter (best school ever), I've been staying up for days on end to play NWN2. Unfortunately, I have an appointment in the real world which must be kept tomorrow, so I leave for the land of sleep.

yeah, since leaving school for easter I've spent roughly 23 hours of each day on WOW. I never really appreciated how short the day was untill now.
Still, I have very bad insomnia anyway so this just means I'll be spending the early hours of the morning doing something semi-constructive.