From a blog post I wrote back in 2006, after spending the whole weekend in an RPG convention:
So, the bit about too little sleep and too much caffeine? Well, I probably stayed up for something close to ~60 hours in a row, getting only something like a total of one hour of sleep during it. I also ingested about 600-900 milligrams of caffeine during the last 24 hours, when my bottle of caffeine pills suggests a maximum of 200-300 a day. I thought it wouldn’t be a problem, since I’ve had 300-400 before with no problems, plus I drink a lot of tea anyway, so I figured that I’d built up a tolerance. Well, I was wrong, and what followed was definitely the weirdest and quite possibly the scariest mental state that I’ve ever experienced.
I first started realing something was seriously amiss when I went to listen to Hite’s final speech. At that point I had dulled senses, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, tunnel vision—unpleasant, but nothing very out of the ordinary, considering how long I’d been up. Then I noticed a few people among the audience that looked familiar but who I quite couldn’t place, so obviously I looked at them to try to figure out where I knew them from. Then the thought crossed my mind—if this was in real life, it’d be impolite to stare at them, but fortunately I can safely do it now since this is just a dream/movie. A few seconds later I realized what I was thinking and gave myself a mental headshake. So my brain was getting so tired it mistook reality for a dream. That felt funny, but not yet worse than that.
It was on my way home that things started getting unpleasant. The earlier thought had just been a momentary one, but now the sense of being only in a dream got so strong that I had to make a conscious effort to keep telling myself that no, this is actually real, I’m not dreaming. Hadn’t I kept telling myself that, I might have forgotten some tiny little detail about real life, like the fact that you need to look before you cross, and that jumping on the street to be run over a by car is really, really, really not a good idea.
That was already pretty bad, but it got worse. My friend H lives in the same direction as me so we were going the same way, which is something I’m really grateful for—because a few minutes later, she was my only focal point to reality. A familiar face being nearby helped me keep myself at least slightly convinced that I really was awake and not perpetually stuck in some dreamlike, unreal world. I had a feeling that if I now got lost, I’d be lost forever, and that it was pointless to try to find my way home since the only way I could get home would be to wake up in my bed. I can’t really properly even describe the way I felt—it was literally the first time in my life that I’ve been seriously scared for my sanity. Not only was I scared of getting lost, every thing that felt even the slightest bit out of ordinary, surprising or unexpected made me fear that I’d hit the “no limits phase”. You know, the one you occasionally get when dreaming, when at first everything seems normal, then first a single bizarre thing happens, after which all the normal rules of reality cease applying and you descend into a full-blown nightmare. The fact that I was seriously afraid of that happening any minute should tell you something about my mental state.
Fortunately I then got home without being run over a car or anything, and pretty quickly fell asleep. Looking at it in retrospect, it was sorta pretty neat, but I don’t think I’d want to experience it again.
From a blog post I wrote back in 2006, after spending the whole weekend in an RPG convention:
So, the bit about too little sleep and too much caffeine? Well, I probably stayed up for something close to ~60 hours in a row, getting only something like a total of one hour of sleep during it. I also ingested about 600-900 milligrams of caffeine during the last 24 hours, when my bottle of caffeine pills suggests a maximum of 200-300 a day. I thought it wouldn’t be a problem, since I’ve had 300-400 before with no problems, plus I drink a lot of tea anyway, so I figured that I’d built up a tolerance. Well, I was wrong, and what followed was definitely the weirdest and quite possibly the scariest mental state that I’ve ever experienced.
I first started realing something was seriously amiss when I went to listen to Hite’s final speech. At that point I had dulled senses, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, tunnel vision—unpleasant, but nothing very out of the ordinary, considering how long I’d been up. Then I noticed a few people among the audience that looked familiar but who I quite couldn’t place, so obviously I looked at them to try to figure out where I knew them from. Then the thought crossed my mind—if this was in real life, it’d be impolite to stare at them, but fortunately I can safely do it now since this is just a dream/movie. A few seconds later I realized what I was thinking and gave myself a mental headshake. So my brain was getting so tired it mistook reality for a dream. That felt funny, but not yet worse than that.
It was on my way home that things started getting unpleasant. The earlier thought had just been a momentary one, but now the sense of being only in a dream got so strong that I had to make a conscious effort to keep telling myself that no, this is actually real, I’m not dreaming. Hadn’t I kept telling myself that, I might have forgotten some tiny little detail about real life, like the fact that you need to look before you cross, and that jumping on the street to be run over a by car is really, really, really not a good idea.
That was already pretty bad, but it got worse. My friend H lives in the same direction as me so we were going the same way, which is something I’m really grateful for—because a few minutes later, she was my only focal point to reality. A familiar face being nearby helped me keep myself at least slightly convinced that I really was awake and not perpetually stuck in some dreamlike, unreal world. I had a feeling that if I now got lost, I’d be lost forever, and that it was pointless to try to find my way home since the only way I could get home would be to wake up in my bed. I can’t really properly even describe the way I felt—it was literally the first time in my life that I’ve been seriously scared for my sanity. Not only was I scared of getting lost, every thing that felt even the slightest bit out of ordinary, surprising or unexpected made me fear that I’d hit the “no limits phase”. You know, the one you occasionally get when dreaming, when at first everything seems normal, then first a single bizarre thing happens, after which all the normal rules of reality cease applying and you descend into a full-blown nightmare. The fact that I was seriously afraid of that happening any minute should tell you something about my mental state.
Fortunately I then got home without being run over a car or anything, and pretty quickly fell asleep. Looking at it in retrospect, it was sorta pretty neat, but I don’t think I’d want to experience it again.