This is where people who have not slept for more than three hours at a stretch this week share how it feels

Our Lady Has Left the Building

13:00 / 16.03.07

So tell me again why you decided not to take a sleeping pill last night. Because you didn't want to feel all groggy in the morning, you say? Gosh, look how well that's worked out for you.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

05:47 / 19.03.07

Sleep would be so much fucking easier if there wasn't this recurring and highly consumptive-sounding cough going on. Apocalyptic, full-body twitch coughs with sore throats attached after ahile...

Kirin? Who the heck?

15:16 / 19.03.07

Mehhh... my eyes are itching. I'm fairly sure that scratching them won't improve matters, though.

O' course, it's all my own fault for staying up doing not-much-really until 4:15. For the last ten minutes or so, I was too tired to go to bed. I just sat there watching my BitTorrent download speed fluctuate.

Itching's back. Maybe some kind of eye bath might make it all better. Can't do anything like that until after work, though.

Mistoffelees

17:40 / 19.03.07

I have those eye itches, too. What helps is pressing a cold bottle against it (I have it standing beside the bed). Rubbing the eye doesn´t help, most of the time it makes the itching worse.

Whisky Priestess

18:07 / 19.03.07

First day of work today, three meetings and massive pinkeye/yawning. Apologised profusely and fortunately colleagues seemed to understand - I can't have slept more than three hours thanks to bodyclock adjusting and general nervousness of Monday job ... ah well. Better tomorrow I hope.

Extremely sociable (read alcoholic/sleepless) week including friend coming to stay, night spent writing until 6am, friend's birthday and another friend's wedding didn't help matters much, mind ...

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

06:26 / 20.03.07

The last job interview I had was after exactly two hours of sleep, and I was the number one applicant and got the pick of positions. Somewhere in my zombie state I lost the nervous twitching and low self-esteem and attained nirvana in a pinstriped suit.

That said, I have work tomorrow but am absolutely terrified of going to bed because, as happened last night, I'll probably end up hacking up internal organs into the wee hours and then have to stumble into said job with maniac brain problems. And that's having bought medicine today.

23:59 / 26.03.07

Didn't sleep last night mainly due to nerves, not sleeping tonight I suspect because of I'm about to break out in a fever, and of course now I have a job which isn't down the road but best part of an hours journey by tube away. I suspect I will have to drag myself to work but entertaining grim fantasies of collapsing once I get there. Unsurprisingly I've got an unfairly rose-tinted view of where I used to work right now.

10:10 / 02.05.07

Oh dear. Oh dear indeed. My body seems to have decided that sleeping is one of those things that only happens to other people.

This morning I started to fall asleep in a training session, right after the hallucinations began, and was only awakened by the giggling of some of the other people in the session. I don't know if they were laughing at me or not.

Then the sickening paranoid fear of balloons began to rise, slowly at first, but soon a nightmarish build-up of inflatable terror.

Then after the session I looked at a piece of our headed paper, and our logo underwent an awful transmogrification into some bizarre twisted insect and started moving through the air. I think it wanted to climb into my eye and nest therein.

It was than that I knew I had started down a truly special road..........

All Acting Regiment

14:03 / 02.05.07

I'm going to make everyone pay. Starting with you and ending with me.

I'm going to make everyone party! Starting about a week ago and ending not yet! Even though I want it to! I've got exams! You know that prickly feeling oyu get on your face?

14:11 / 02.05.07

Jeez. I just started to zone out at my desk, and then a marvelous tree, made of flourescent green and yellow light started to grow behind me, it's roots curling round my legs and it's branches and leaves spread out above my head in scintillating patterns, and I knew that if I could just take a little nap under it everything would be okay. I really need to go home and go to bed.

Gendudehashadenough

15:14 / 02.05.07

I feel like the paste of dried vomit that's left in one's mouth after staring, jaw gaped at the computer screen for several hours while pouring wine, tea, and milk down the throat to make the waking hours bareable.

You know the kind you scrape off with more alcohol and an air compressor on a handle cause no amount of mouthwash, brushing, or hacking will do the trick.

HCE

08:22 / 06.05.07

Every time I close my eyes I hear a bad noise. One not made by the hinges of my eyelids. I don't know if it's a sleep problem or if I'm just having one of those odd attacks of loneliness that can happen for no good reason (plenty of company, life going well, etc.) Not quite right for this thread, but I'm not going to make a specialized thread for this.

This Sunday

08:25 / 06.05.07

What sort of noise? I mean, you could have a beetle chewing on your inner ear or just a special kind of headache.

HCE

14:58 / 06.05.07

I think it turned out to be the lamp outside, knocked a little loose by the wind, vibrating.

This Sunday

15:30 / 06.05.07

So no ear-beetles, huh? I suppose that's good. Figured it was most likely something non-psychologically-induced.

Of course, now I can't sleep, and it is mostly psychologically induced. I think I had disgusting things to post, and thereby clean out the channels and look at the mess objectively. Wouldn't be so bad if I had slept last night at all. Or something more than naps yesterday.

00:56 / 16.06.07

Neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyaaaaaaaaaaaah.

electric monk

18:33 / 27.07.07

Oh God.

Average of four hours sleep each night for the past six nights. Depression is starting to kick in. I'm grumpy as hell, very near yelling at anyone who even slightly annoys me. Worse, all the rotten shit I've done in my life is coming back to haunt, insisting that I'm pretty much worthless. Frankly, there's been a few moments today when the thought of plunging a Bowie knife into my forehead seems like a durn good idea.

I've pushed myself much, much too hard. In bed by 9 tonight, I think. Till then...

MMMMMMUUUUUUUUUAAAAAAAAAHHHHHOOOOOOHHHHHOOOOOHHHHH

13:24 / 28.07.07

oh tiny baby, you are only one and a half weeks old and you are only meant to eat and sleep and piss and shit, not to mention have complete lack of head control, so why for the last 2 hours have you reared your head back out of the sling and looked around at the dark world wide eyed as if you are scoping the ground ready to make a break for it? i know i'm not the one with the milk (not yet anyway) but you still love me anyway, right? so let me sleep...

14:01 / 29.08.07

Blurp. Glarg. Fribble. Woke up befour three this morning, and was not too bad to start with. Then I took some Ibuprofen for the insomnia headache. Then I lapsed unto unconsciousness at my desk at wortk. Now I've woken up I feel like someone replaced my ibuprofen with actual drugs. But bad drugs. Really, really bad drugs.

03:40 / 30.08.07

My eyeballs have been boiled in glue.

06:30 / 30.08.07

Christ. Today's worse. I slept just for long enough to dream briefly of being infected with a plague which turned it's victims into awful sea monsters, and that's about it.

And now the sort of awful paranoid fear and hatred of everyone and everything one would normally have to read the Mail every day to experience is starting to set in.

And y'know I really don't mind having to shovel fistfuls of pro-plus and painkillers down my throat just to face a day at work if it's because I've been enjoying myself too hard, but when it's a result of my body's perverse refusal to sleep despite having gone been in bed by half nine every night this week, it's more than a little frustrating.

09:14 / 01.09.07

Dear brain: we have bolted a very large chunk of metal across that shutter now. No-one can get in without sophisticated and noisy equiptment. All other doors and windows are secured with lovely fat bolts. Why, then, do you insist on parsing every tiny noise in my very noisy building as someone trying to gain entry? STFU brain.

Dutch

09:30 / 01.09.07

The past two weeks have been one long haze of late nights, drunken sunrises, half-forgotten conversations, insane dreams and bouts of insomnia. I need to get some kind of rhythm back into my life before school starts again.

Last night was the first night I just stayed home for the past two weeks, and what little sleep I got was divided in 6 parts, with me waking from a startling dream at the sound of a fly buzzing in my ear after an hour each time.

14:06 / 02.09.07

Six weeks old now and it would be unfair to suggest that things haven't improved - you seem to know the difference between night and day now (though day for you starts at 5am). you sleep well during the day and at least once in the more useful part of the night (7pm-10pm) when it's harder for us to sleep. But why must you spend the rest of the night wriggling and grunting and generally not going into any kind of deep sleep at all for any length of time (unless of course I get up and strap you to my chest and bounce you up and down, which is not conducive to sleep for me)?

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

00:19 / 04.09.07

Sleep.

Sleep?

SssslllleeeEEEEEeeeEEEEEeeeeEEEEEp!

03:35 / 04.09.07

This summer I`ve been sleeping ten to twelve hours a day, but I recently arrived in Japan to study and for some reason I can`t sleep more than four or five hours before I wake up. And when I wake up I`m wide awake and can`t possibly go back to sleep. Weird thing is, I`m actually doing alright with that. I wonder how long I can keep this going.

Blake Head

09:20 / 18.09.07

What's the best way to round off working all weekend and four nights not being to sleep more than a few hours at a time because your partner's in so much pain, when your brain says make supportive sympathy noises and your body says SLEEEEP? Well it's an eight hour trip to A & E to find out what's wrong on a busy local holiday getting home near midnight, right! Ah well, at least we could collapse into bed knowing we'd got through it and the days of no-sleep would soon be at an end. Then the smoke alarm started going off.

There is a special level of Hell where the exhausted rise from their slumbers to silence the infernal beepings of the noise machines before going back to sob into their pillows for a few minutes waiting for the inevitable noise to resume.

I visited that level last night. Satan says hi kids!

17:37 / 26.10.07

a combination of bladder, heartburn and hips have not let me sleep for longer than an hour at a stretch for several weeks now.

i am nearly demented.

let this be a warning to you, children - pregnancy is not for the faint hearted.

07:42 / 05.05.08

I feel like a chemical plant.