I recently stayed up for nine days back around New Year's. I was actually just doing it because I was bored. I have been put in a situation where I have pretty much no responsibilities, and it's been like that for more than half a year. I don't have anyone to see, and I live in a secluded area, and after a couple weeks, I just stopped going outside. So now I just read, learn languages, instruments or pretty much anything (khan academy is my shit), work out enough to stay skinny, and waste the rest of the time on reddit. This has been my life for more than half a year.

So a few months spent inside your house alone, and you'll get super fucking bored. At first, I played video games, but I felt like a slob after doing that for a week, so I decided to get more creative with entertaining myself. I started to experiment with things that mostly start with "what would it be like if I were..." I spent a week wearing a blindfold to 'see' kind of what it would be like to be blind, although the two are not entirely the same. The second one I did was the "no sleep for extended periods of time". I saw the world record was 11 days. I wondered what it felt like to be that guy, and how much fucking sheer determination it would take to do that. The answer? A fuck ton.

I planned on 9 days being the goal. I read a little on erowid about it, and that was the amount of time that guy did, so I thought I should be able to get there. I also read about coffee only briefly helping before you crash and everything gets harder, so understand also, I did this all without stimulants.

Erowid mentioned hallucinations, and I thought well that could be good or bad. Nope, just fucking bad. I felt like shit by the time I started hearing voices and music playing. I felt fucking gross. I was getting super pale (coming from someone who guards their eyes from the sun when taking out the trash). I looked like I was dying, and I also felt like I was dying. I stayed up by standing and reading books to keep my mind busy. I lost my appetite pretty quickly, so I didn't do much eating, probably not the healthiest decision, but sleep deprivation doesn't sound healthy either. Standing up while being so fucking tired was like having an itch you can't scratch (while you already feel shitty). On the 7th day, I'd get halfway through a book before I realized I had no fucking clue what I was reading. Like title, main characters names, fucking nothing. Small visual hallucinations made the words move and get blurry, so by the ninth day, I was pretty much just reading the same 100 pages over and over again, and not recognizing anything because the words were jumbled. Still, I was determined as fuck, so I did it anyway.

Then the fucking worst hallucinations I could imagine started happening. I was seeing things, like very vividly, and it was mostly pertaining to very personal memories I'd like to forget. It was worthy of a mental breakdown I'd say. At that point, I thought, "reached my goal. Fuck this." I tried to board the nope train departing from (somewhat literally) Living Nightmareville to Sleepy Town. Laid in bed, closed my eyes, and realized I couldn't get to sleep that easily. The voices got louder and my eyes were burning whenever I closed them. I'm sure in reality, I got to sleep in like 5 minutes, but that shit felt like hours.

I slept for a couple days. Woke up, ate, drank a lot of water, then took a nap for good measure.

Tl;dr: Stayed up for 9 days to see what it is like because I don't have anything better to do. That shit was tortuous. I applaud the man with the world record.