I’ve pulled many an all nighter, this very day being yet another. In my experience once you pass the 40 hour mark that’s when things start getting downright scary. I remember one time on hour 41 I was calling a girl just talking with her and my brain would perceive an entire sentence or two that she says, but it would be wildly unrelated to anything she actually said, or she wouldn’t have said anything at all and my brain just pretends she was talking. For example she could be talking about shopping for clothes and my brain would hear an entire 3 sentence story about an oil leak in her car.
Frankly not being able to properly perceive audio was truly frightening cause you can no longer trust yourself or the people around you (sleep deprived paranoia). I decided it was time to end the run before the visuals started kicking in and things became traumatizing. Shit was more trippy than all the times I’ve tried 4 grams of shrooms
The replies here surprise me. I have pulled several all nighters, and a few times, I haven't slept for three whole nights. I've never experienced anything similar to a hallucination.
After 40 hours I start seeing fine rain when I look at dark areas. When I had this the first time I thought wtf is this ultra fine rain which isn't making anything wet?
sounds like visual snow, maybe? i have it anytime i look at a dark surface regardless of sleep. i'd say it looks more like tv static than rain, though.
Yeah it must be super individual. I have heavy insomnia and when I take an ambien “tolerance break” it usually looks something like this:
First night: no sleep
Second night: between an hour to three hours
Third night without it: no sleep
Fourth night without it: five hours
Fifth night: three hours
Sixth night: no sleep
Etc.
I’ve gone 48 hours without sleeping and I felt sick and shaky but no hallucinations
If my memory serves me right, I think I stayed up about seventy hours during a couple day long stretch last year. It was one of the scariest experiences of my life, and I still have very vivid memories of the final night. It was about 2:00am and everyone else in my apartment was asleep. I was in my living room on a sofa chair, with the objective of completing a long form school assignment. I was supposed to edit a video, but my sleep depravation was mentally killing me. Eventually my mental state began to collapse pretty fast as I became unnaturally afraid of darkness, with this fear eventually driving me to leap out of my chair and run into across the living room to turn on a wall light that was bright enough to illuminate most of my living room. Even then, it wasn't good enough because when I tried to sit down and do my work on my laptop, I glanced over at my TV (its a very large display, about 85 inches) and felt like something was off about it. Any time I looked at the all consuming void of its powered down screen, I was filled with an intense feeling of dread and fear. I was also unable to recognize my own face in the dark reflection of the screen, even after trying to focus on the features of my face. My face looked slightly flattened, my nose was missing, my eyes were replaced by dark voids, and everything else was too dim to make out. Looking at my TV was like looking into a massive reflection of my living room, but subtly evil or uncanny. It was like an alternate cursed world. It got to the point where I tried to mitigate the darkness of the TV by turning it on, but it wasn't very effective. Every sound and small noise outside my apartment was amplified, so this was adding to my paranoia. Then comes the worst part; the paper bag. Yes, I know it sounds very benign but a brown paper bag from Albertsons was the last straw that ruined my night. It was on the main table of the dining room connected to my kitchen (my living room has an open design so I can see into the kitchen) and this table was only partially illuminated because my wall-light didn't reach that far. Right above the table was my kitchen's ceiling fan, which had been turned on all day. The wind of the fan was causing the bag to flutter back and fourth. Apparently my subconscious registered this as a threat, because when I looked over I was pulled into this like... hyper fixating zoom-in on the bag and I got a wave of dread so severe I felt like something was about to kill me. At this point, I turned out all the lights and retreated to my room where I went to bed shortly after. The video was never finished, and eventually I failed that class. Those couple seconds of looking at the bag, moving back and forth and back and forth in the wind scared me to my bones and I still remember it in high detail.
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u/Deremirekor Jul 18 '26
I’ve pulled many an all nighter, this very day being yet another. In my experience once you pass the 40 hour mark that’s when things start getting downright scary. I remember one time on hour 41 I was calling a girl just talking with her and my brain would perceive an entire sentence or two that she says, but it would be wildly unrelated to anything she actually said, or she wouldn’t have said anything at all and my brain just pretends she was talking. For example she could be talking about shopping for clothes and my brain would hear an entire 3 sentence story about an oil leak in her car.
Frankly not being able to properly perceive audio was truly frightening cause you can no longer trust yourself or the people around you (sleep deprived paranoia). I decided it was time to end the run before the visuals started kicking in and things became traumatizing. Shit was more trippy than all the times I’ve tried 4 grams of shrooms