About 36h. One day, one night and the next day. Party + drugs.
I did this twice actually, but I like sleeping too much to make it a regular thing.

3 days so that I could finish my thesis. It happened because I was a procrastinator (I still am, but not as bad).

40 hours for me. Work related waste of my life in hindsight. Could have been only 39, but I powered through the last hour to hit the round number.

Used to be on an odd schedule when I worked overnight.

My work shifts were Thursday to Saturday, 1800 - 0500. So Sunday, when I got off at 0500, I’d stay awake until around 1900 (being up for ~26 hours) and then to go bed. Wake up Monday morning and have a normal Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, then stay up all night Wednesday night until Thursday morning (another 26 hour stint) and the go to bed Thursday morning so I could then go to work at 1800 Thursday night again.

Did that for about a year and it actually worked out reasonably well, but not something I’d entertain now that I’m older.

That schedule is also the reason all my clocks are always set for 24-hour time and I can still fall asleep in broad daylight without any trouble.

I’m not sure it was the longest, but most recently I was up over 36 hours straight.

Worked then pulled an all nighter driving to Florida to visit my friend. Got there at 7:30 am and then did a whole day with them before passing out after midnight.

Something approaching 48 hours, during college, to finish some assignments. It never works.

About two days.

I woke up, went to school (around 7am). My mom and grandma were in vacation, so I was left with my dad. My “job” was to feed the cats at my grandma’s place. Took a different bus so I could get to her. Fed the cats, and waited for my dad to come get me.

And waited. And waited. And waited.

He never came. I stayed up all night thinking he’d come back. My friend made a post on social media (I wanna say Xanga?), so I knew she was awake and I called and asked if her dad could come get me and drop me off at home.

Once home I brushed my teeth, changed my clothes, and was back on the bus. Came back and he was home, telling me there was a massive traffic jam that kept him locked in the road all night. He asked why I didn’t just stay home.

There was no traffic jam.

Dreamhack… I spent around 60 hours awake before I crashed

25h for doing a 100% “speedrun” of Paper Mario: The Origami King 5 years ago.

I was the first one to ever do it so I can say I’m a former world record holder :p

40ish hours. I was in my 20s, a phd student, with time on a one-of-a-kind scientific instrument. Got a lot of data.

I think the longest was 4 days when I was 12/13 as kind of a “I wonder if I can?” I was pretty much neglected as a kid, so I was left up to my own creative paths, and there was a time when I was trying out all kinds of new age stuff of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I think one of the things I read about was something experimental called “Delta sleep,” where you could get a night’s worth of sleep for just 2 hours only. I am sure it was new age bullshit, but “the army is experimenting with this” and so I decided to give it a try, using a biofeedback machine home kit that I had. This led to, among other things, parasomnias, but my record was 4 days with no sleep (roughly 80 hours, so less than 4 days technically).

For lack of a better term, things became “crispy.” Like too in-focus, too real, too stark. Colors were too bright, sounds were too loud, edges of thing were too defined. We all have a mask that we present to the world where there is a buffer of self versus your environment, and that was gone. My short term memory became horribly degraded, and I started seeing moving shadows where there were none, and certain things had “vibrations” and others did not. I can’t tell you which had what, because I couldn’t figure it out, and I suspected towards the end I was hallucinating, anyway. So what I am saying in all this was that’s what I remember, and I am not sure if my memories are 100% accurate. I wrote stuff down, but toward the third 24 hour period, it was indecipherable afterwards.

“Okay, the trees are like lungs of the earth… how exactly? And why is the letter X written everywhere?”

So my end opinion after all those experiments was “if you don’t sleep on the regular, your brain starts to malfunction, and not in a fun way.”

Since that time, the longest as an adult was 46 hours, when I worked a 12 hour swing shift at a vastly understaffed International; help desk, and my second called in sick for two days. So I did my 12, she called in sick so I did her 12, and then I did my 12, and after another 10 hours my boss found someone to let me go home. I was in poor shape. I never want to do that again. The desk record was 54 hours, when a snowstorm prevented anyone from getting to or leaving the building, but that was someone else, and I believe the company set up cots for everyone trapped.

Apparently a not insignificant portion of the electorate has been asleep for 8 years

Edit: actually on topic, I’ve done a few 36 to 40 hour stints over the years, but i don’t make a habit of it

About 24 hours. I’ll almost fall asleep standing up at that point and whatever reason I’ve got to stay awake just is not worth it.

I sometimes get bouts of insomnia. Usually when it happens, I’m just awake for about 30 hours or so. That’ll happen once or twice a month for me, and I’m pretty sure is just stress-related.

The longest I’ve gone was 75 hours when I was in my early 20s, which was due to a really bad allergic reaction to cedar pollen which kept me from breathing while laying my head down in any position, so I couldn’t fall asleep no matter how hard I tried. I was also running a pretty high fever while this happened. I probably drifted into microsleeps while sitting up a few times during that, but it was absolutely miserable.

I started having really bizarre auditory hallucinations after about the 40-hour mark. I’d hear a crowd of people laughing from behind the walls. Not like a malicious laugh, but like there was a stand-up routine happening in the next room over. Nobody else was home, no TVs were on, and it was like 3am so I knew what I was hearing wasn’t real, but convincing myself of that didn’t make the laughter stop.

I think I slept for about 13 hours straight after that.

4-5 days. Hard to tell.

I was 14, it was spring break, the rest of my large overbearing family went on a trip I didn’t want to go on, so I had the house to myself and didn’t want to waste a single minute.

Heavily fueled by energy drinks, and the auditory hallucinations really started kicking off after day 2. After a while you’re not even really tired, just craving a break, it’s easy to lose track of when exactly you did something and what day it is. Even still, the involuntary micro-naps started cutting in about halfway through day 4.