I've been awake now for around 36 hours due to flying, combined with waking up at 4:30am the day we flew, fighting the last few hours before heading to bed.
On driving down our street, in the outskirts of Bangkok, I commented to my wife that there was a Shetland Pony tied up outside one of our neighbours houses.
I was quite excited by this pony, as for the weird world of Bangkok this was something on the top end of the scale. I was looking forward to taking our daughter over to see it.
As we got closer my wife was asking me what on earth I was talking about, I was pointing away at the Shetland pony, saying "the pony, there the Shetland pony".....
Which then after a few more meters turned out to be one of the rather large street dogs that has lived on the street for the past 10 years.
Puzzled looks from my wife, who then told the driver, who now has a tale to tell about the weird foreigner who sees horses in the street.
What weird shit has lack sleep done to you?
Currently coming off sleeping tablets which I've needed for the last 3 months. Not fun at all. 4 nights on the bounce of hardly any sleep and when I do eventually 'sleep' I'm in limbo having terrible dreams. Currently feel very drunk
Been up for 36 hours straight because I went a bit manic before an interview.
Just went through the drunk feeling stage and overheated on the tube as well. I've just put an icecold waterbottle on the back of the chair so I can rest my neck on it - totally cured it - it now feels like I've done a lot of very relaxing drugs as opposed to feeling nauseous and drunk.
I heard my mum on the phone to her best friend saying that my father-in-law had arranged to have me murdered.
Stimulant psychosis can make you very paranoid 😳
I work 12 hr shifts (2 x days 2 x nights) and often don't sleep after my last night. Best way to describe lack of sleep is drunk without alcohol.
Regularly run on very little or no sleep, apart from making silly mistakes such as putting coffee or tea bags in the fridge I can't say I've had a drunken experience.
but are you seeing Pokemon yet?
Fell asleep at a red traffic light. Not ideal 😯 . Long time ago though.
Early in my freelance career I had my first two proper big jobs overlap really badly - one was converting a double decker bus into a travelling venue the other was helping cast huge glass sculptures. I was working longer and longer days until finally got into a rhythm where I was having a shower and 1hrs sleep at midnight and the same again at midday for a couple of weeks. The two jobs need to be completed at the same time but in different cities.
This led up to a non stop 48hr shift at the end of which was an overnight session in a crystal glass factory where me and the girl I was working with had negotiated access to their acid polishing facilities. So we were dipping these big cast crystal sculpture elements into baths of hot nitric acid. A major fly in the ointment was a piece of machinery we used to grind flat facets on the glass pieces had broken down but we needed to be out before the factory opened up again at 6am.
So one person was doing the acid dips and i having to use carborundum grit between two pieces of sculpture and rub them together so that they ground each other flat and rotate sets of three so that I could make sure they were flats rather than convex and concave. The pieces of glass weighted about 60kg each so it took some effort. And the only room we had access to was the polishing plant so I was doing this work surrounded by tanks of acid.
As I was working I got into a bit of a dazed state with the repetitiveness of it all.... and noticed that I was wearing a hat. A slightly too small, too tight knitted hat with a big bobble -there weren't any mirrors in the room but I could just feel it was there and feel the bobble wobbling about as I was working. Then I thought about how I don't own a hat like that and realised I was dreaming. I had fallen asleep standing up. Snapped myself out of it and I hadn't even stopped working while I was asleep.
We hurried out as the day shift was arriving - headed home via a stop for fuel spiced up by my inexplicable decision to try and start a hot malfunctioning engine by spraying it with coldstart and a brief and exciting inferno. Could still feel the dream hat when I was driving. The girl I was working with then slept so deeply that she woke up with a third degree burn from her hot water bottle.
I once saw trees running alongside me (as in properly lifted their roots out of the ground and they were acting as legs) as we travelled back from a T'Pau gig at Birmingham NEC. I can still see them in my mind's eye right now.
When our first child was born I ended up in A&E with heart palpitations, anxiety type attacks, mild hallucinations and felt drunk and lethargic. Sleep debt / deprivation for you.. But didn't link the symptoms immediately to the cause..
Having rotated on to nights for the last 30 years, I don't really get the weird wonderful things. I do get the utter depressing almost paralyzing fatigue that drags on for days after finishing. I reckon I lose about 3-4 hours sleep per day so end up with a significant sleep debt that never really gets repaid.
Did 5 whole days and nights in ibiza. Wasn't pleasant. Truly horrendous psychosis by the end of it. By the 3rd day I was taking loads of Stilnox to sleep but then just taking more class A's on top of them to stay awake. It was 18 years ago but still pretty vivid.
Had a few Stilnox fueled multi dayers. I can't believe they were available over the counter in Spain. Bloody dangerous things!
My son didn't really sleep much for the first 18 months due to medical issues. This, combined with me and his mum worrying about him not waking when he did sleep resulted in lots of extended periods with no rest. I remember calling my boss one morning and telling him I wasn't going to risk driving to work. He asked why and I replied that I'd just spent a couple of minutes looking at the Jack Russell sat at the top of our stairs. We didn't have a dog.
Sleep deprivation is awful. I ended up on tablets for stress, anxiety and depression. The lack of sleep definitely played a large part in this. I also ended up breaking my arm whilst out on the bike after two days without sleep. Looking back it's like it all very surreal.
Toms experiences very similar to mine. Awful to feel the whole wired/drunk/nauseous thing...
Currently suffering from another bout of restless legs which means I'm probably averaging 4-5 hours of sleep at night, that's bad enough.
Lots of long-weekend benders 15-20 year ago, but more through travelling nowadays. A guest lecture at Stanford Uni with about an hour's sleep in five days is my best so far. The wonderful bit is that I was too exhausted to be nervous. No super-tough questions, so got away with it!
I am Hector Riva, welcome to my world! 😆
I spend an awful lot of the year, not just the winter months, feeling like I've been woken up after ~2 hours sleep, it can really mess with your head and energy levels.
BTW, lots of artists use sleep deprivation to help cultivate ideas, most notably Salvador Dali.
BTW, lots of artists use sleep deprivation to help cultivate ideas, most notably Salvador Dali.
Yep - but all I got when I opened the doors of perception was a hat. If only I'd known then that 20 years later bobble hats would be totally on trend.
Dali in a hat...
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Managed a few hours last night but woke 3 times with my heart beating out of my chest 😐
There was no partying involved in this, although a bit of a hangover from plane boozing.
I saw the dog today, it is definitely a mangy dog, not a horse.
My Bloody Valentine created their Loveless album on sleep deprivation according to Kevin Shields. Makes sense when you hear it. Those little moments where you seem to slip out of and back into time portrayed by his whammy bar.
A lack of sleep can get kinda fun, but not fun enough that I go looking for it...
I go through the creative phase (writing, ideas, visualisation etc come much more easily)
...the overheating phase
...the 'unable to work out if something happened or if I dreamt it' phase (often it's a mix of both, but my memory starts to get patchy)
I find my heart starts missing beats when I'm really tired:
dub...dub...dub... ...dub...dub...dub... ...dub
It leaves me feeling a bit winded
Not quite in the same vein as the above, but after two weeks of partying in Thailand I was so tired that I fell asleep on a beach at a black moon party in Koh Tao directly in front of a blaring speaker stack, and managed to sleep through until morning. No drugs or alcohol involved.