Why yes it is...Invariably every student has his share of all-nighters, usually to reset a body clock that's gone very much horribly wrong at some point. I was going to bed at 7am and waking up 4pm, and that just won't do.
It's only sensible then to wake at 4pm, then stay awake until about 11pm the following day, where tiredness will be enough to send you quite happily to sleep, or such is the theory...
The problem for me are the effects that happen within this time. It's sort of like an adventure or quest, where you know where you've started, you know where you're heading for, but in the middle you'll undergo battles and pit traps and strange men who sing and dance in a frustrating way.
Some people manage to stay awake for ages, probably down to the fact that they are, in fact, robots. As for me, I'm struggling already at 22 hours or so...
A couple of years ago two friends and myself decided to watch the entirety of a TV series in one sitting, which is a good 24 hours non-stop. Now in case you're not planning to read all of this, please let me tell you now that it's the worst idea anyone can possibly concieve, nevermind the Millenium Dome or whatever the government have been doing or anything like that; the worst idea is to watch 24 hours of non-stop TV show.
It's even more stupid than managing to crash an enormous boat into an island.
It would be fine if all that happened was you watch for a while, get a bit bored then fall asleep. There's no problem with that lineup, that's pretty much what most people I know do every night. Oh no, what made it a killer for us were the phases that it put us through.
It starts off pretty much okay, it's entertaining and you're loaded up with sugary food and what have you, so things are well.
Within a couple of hours you begin to have your first doubts, as it's been about 2 hours and you realize that leaves only... 22 to go. But that's okay, nothing too weird's going on yet so onwards you go.
After about 6 or 7 hours, your brain begins, ever so slowly, to shut down. You won't notice, in the same way you can never remember the moment you fall asleep because it gets lost in the fuzzy haze of memory and cranial switchoff. You might start noticing holes in the story, scenes that don't fit together, characters who are in one city one moment and are in some Ukranian missile silo the next.
This leads all too quickly to confusion. Half-braindead, your mind screams and insists something is wrong, but there's naught you can do but sit there and drool slighly. It's normal at this point to start noticing hallucinations or gremlins running around your room. Perfectly normal.
At about 14-16 hours in, things are getting worse, mainly because you can now feel those gremlins sitting on your head and poking your eyeballs. Your muscles give up and tearfully sign the surrender forms, your body slouches and your eyes glaze over. Things are happening on the screen, you see pretty lights, but nothing really makes sense anymore.
Within a few more hours, 19-21, your body, now convinced it's undergoing some kind of bizzare American torture will attempt total shutdown, this is where your head starts nodding over and over as your brain repeatedly Ctrl-Alt-Deletes and hits the Reset button.
And then strangely, towards the end, things start coming back, sensory perception, cognative processes and anything else you need to live all start coming back online. You now understand what's going on onscreen, but because you've just spaced out through about 12 hours of it, it makes no sense and your natural reaction is not to trust it.
Eventually it ends, and you feel cheated and used. It might be the closest thing to rape one can experience, and you somehow find the strength to get up and go home, upset and wishing you hadn't bothered.
When one of the two others got home, his parents actually, truthfully believed he had been taking drugs, so let that be a lesson to you.
3 comments:
hmm while i can relate quite well to that, it usually takes me between 2 or 3 nights of no sleep to start undergoing a lot of the symptons youv expressed so wonderfully here.
ok, so beat this - I managed 41 hours continuous awakeness a coule of years ago when I travelled to San Francisco. I had to be up at t2am to get to the airport, so I omitted to go to sleep. I couldn't get to sleep on the plane for some reason - odd, as I've been known to fall asleep as soon as I sit down before take off and wake up on landing 10 hours later - then I had a transfer at LAX followed by another flight to SF, then took two hours to exit the airport and (this is the scary bit) get to the car hire place.
So my first recollection of SF is hallucinating while driving on the freeway. Thank god American roads aren't like ours, or I'd never have made it. The worst thing is, after 41 hours I thought I'd sleep really well but apparently because the body is flooded with adrenaline and toxins it takes days to normalise your sleep pattern. I crashed fully dressed on the hotel bed at 11pm, and was wide awake and staggering around SF looking for breakfast at 3am the next morning.
Bloody hell, mate. I don't think there's much more to say with regards to that, except to ask if you still enjoyed yourself? (Waha~!)
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