21. After 30 hours I started seeing insects on the walls and on my desk, that weren’t there. Might have just been the light, or paranoia because I’m massively afraid of spiders. Made it to 50 hours without really seeing anything else though.
– WolfyX18
22. In college, there we had a major group project. We all stayed on campus for 48 hours and no sleep. Let’s just say that by the end we were all hallucinating while writing our code. At one point I remember thinking my code was talking, but the music had just started playing.
– zazvorniki
23. So in training to join the British Army Infantry everyone does a ‘defence’ exercise. Basically, you deploy onto the area then spend 72 straight hours digging trenches, no sleep, no rest. It’s a double whammy between sleep deprivation and exhaustion.
Although I never hallucinated (I did pass out onto some bloke though) I did see a few blokes experience crazy stuff. One bloke walked into a foggy field and was missing for hours. Once he realized he was lost he led on the floor, flipping between the channels on his radio saying “hello” and hoping someone would hear him. Another bloke who was a Welsh speaker lost the ability to distinguish between the two languages. He’d speak to you in Welsh, then get annoyed when you didn’t understand him, believing he was speaking perfect English.
– LeviMeredith
24. I was going through a lot with an abusive ex, he’d keep me up for ages and when I could finally sleep I would have nightmares. So I started hallucinating spiders in my ceiling and it felt like hands were touching me. It lasted for days since the hallucinations messed up the little sleep I got. I got diagnosed with a beginning psychosis and schizotypal disorder mostly because I didn’t dare tell them about my ex so they couldn’t set a PTSD diagnosis for me. They started giving me drugs to help the psychosis, but since it was because of my ex and lack of sleep it didn’t really help and I had to deal with just being drugged as well.
– Scaramouche_
25. I once worked a 17-hour shift. I was working on an event for a cocktail company. Work started early in the morning, and I drove about 30 minutes to their company premises.
The event was a private wedding in a field, and we were a pop up cocktail bar. After loading all the fresh fruit onto the van, I was driven about an hour away to the venue, where we unloaded the van. We had to physically set up a metal bar, stock it up, prep ingredients, decorate it, and get all the glassware ready. People started ordering drinks at 3 pm and it went on late into the night. Although we had broken, we were on our feet all night.
The person in charge of our van had forgotten to pack light, so we loaded the van back up in the dark, almost ran over one of the guests who had passed out in the middle of the field and I cut myself pretty badly.
We got back to the barn storage at about 4am, and I had to drive home. I was so worn out I was seeing cows everywhere. I kept having to stop for cows on the road, cows in the bushes on the side of the road. But none of it was real. when I eventually got to lighter roads I stopped seeing sh*t that wasn’t there and I’ll never put myself through something so dangerous again.
– lapinkumbrella
26. I had really bad sleep problems for years… At one point I went to a party having been awake for 36 hours when arriving… I didn’t really hallucinate also because I couldn’t sleep, but when I finally did, I got the sleep I needed. The problem was mostly falling asleep.
For me stress and lack of sleep trigger some form of sleep-paralysis and these weird dreams where I’m lying down somewhere and I can’t see properly and I can’t get up because everything is just so blurry and spinning around… It made me wake up in cold sweats and I remember once waking up and falling back asleep so many times because I was too exhausted to keep my eyes open, that I called my mom crying because I did not know whether I was awake or not. I’m better now.
– softbabydragon
27. Visions…people existing where they shouldn’t be. Like walking across rafters and ducts high above factory floors. Memory loss. Irritability like you’ve never been through before. Pain. You lose time. An hour here. An hour there. Your cognitive abilities decline. I’ve gone week-long stretches where I probably averaged between 10-15 hours of sleep over a 7 day period so many times that it became normal. It wasn’t that the stretches themselves were long. Maybe 20 hrs at most. But there was no deep sleep in the downtime. Without deep sleep, you start to go mad. And I’ve been pretty close to going over the edge.
– zorboc0604
28. I was a passenger in a car and looking out the window the shadows from trees would morph and grow and move. It was kinda scary but I enjoyed it. It was like drugs before I did drugs. Don’t do drugs. Do sleep.
– cominaroundthecorner
29. Stayed up for 2 and a half days. Saw a straight-up guy walk through my apartment. Nobody was there.
– Eli122333
30. Yes and it isn’t fun. In my case, I could no longer tell what was real and what wasn’t. I was seeing scary sh*t, I felt nauseous and thanked the heavens once I finally fell asleep.
– cerea1killer_
