I lost a lot of sleep over the past week, then after being up for a couple days straight, I started to trip. First my eyes would close involuntarily and I could tell my body wanted to sleep. I would 'daydream' but my eyes would be open.
I wanted to stay up since it was sunrise, but I didn't. When I was fighting it though, I noticed everything breathing and moving. In youtube, the thumbnails looked like they were moving. These were out of the corner of my eye though.
I also remember the white walls started to have black cracks going across them. It was trippy, I would also recognize things, out of the corner of my eye, that would turn out to be something else.
This was the first time this has ever happened to me. If I had stayed up that day, I would have probably hallucinated hardcore or collapsed into sleep.
Not gonna post too much now, but a few other interesting things happened. I kind of want to try it again, but record the process in writing and audio. It was just crazy to have that happen for the first time!

started happening to me yesterday - had been up since i got burned 2 days ago.
didnt feel so kewl tho - was like i was going mad.

TrustLoveMan

Sleep deprivation is quite interesting, i have found that it has similar affects to fasting but the affects are far more intense and actually come on much quicker than fasting. I stayed up for about 5 days straight in high school just to see how far i could push myself, i experienced a complete merging of my waking state and my dreaming state.

I wasn't able to tell at all whether i was awake or dreaming at times even though of course I hadn't slept yet. I saw colourful hallucinations during the entire duration, i also experienced periods where my mind was intensely calm and clear. Definitely an interesting experience all together...


Much Peace and Sunshine

Being awake all night into the next day reminds me a bit of the latter stage of an acid trip, when everything is no longer moving. All colours are more vivid, senses are heightened, I get pixilation and subtle fractals appearing, and am prone to weird thoughts and feel quite drunk. Definitely has a powerful effect...not very good for the body or brain though.

I also had a merging of waking and dream state. I would have small waking dreams, I guess hallucinations, then I would snap out of it. For me it was enjoyable, especially since I wasn't expecting it.
But I have heard of this tripping happening before. I wonder why scientists don't measure dmt/chemical blood levels while having deprived hallucinations. Maybe it could explain more about dreams and the mind.

Microsleeps
Microsleeps occur when a person has a significant sleep deprivation. The brain automatically shuts down, falling into a sleep state for a period that can last from a second to half a minute. The person falls asleep no matter what activity he or she is engaged in. Microsleeps are similar to blackouts and a person experiencing them is not consciously aware that they are occurring.

That's what was happening!

It is my opinion that sleep deprivation is a poor method of exploring consciousness. Not to discount anyone elses' experiences obviously, but my friend's five/seven day deprivation "experiments" (sometimes involving stimulants) resulted in just utter psychosis and unpleasantness. The only thing he learned was to not do it again.

He did not feel on the path to higher consciousness, he was just delusional and retarded. Like he'd be after dosing datura or diphenhydramine.

By day 5, he'd be afraid someone was behind him when he was taking a shower, people peeking behind corners of trees at night, even hallucinated people that weren't there and had imaginary conversations.

My friend admits it was fun in a fucked up way, 7 days is the most he's ever gone, but my friend was never able to extract anything practical out of it, no fish to bring back to have fish dinner as McKenna would say.

Strange because when I fast I don't experience any thing like that. After 2 day's of fasting I begin to feel utterly awesome. I awake in the morning with amazing energy and a positive attitude about life. Fasting is literally a great anti depressant in my experience...and there is nothing delusional feeling about it at all. In fact during a fast your brain begins turning over it's serotonin production at a faster rate...thus you really are feeling better and better...until you begin to starve, but for most people that's like 30 day's down the road.

I was up for almost four days during my undergrad and it definitely felt a bit like the end of an acid trip (you know when things look like pixelated clay). Things were shifting and slightly morphing on my computer screen. I had a playing card on my desk that had images of birds on in that started flying off the card in the corner of my eye. It was far from fun though and i wouldn't recommend people doing it on purpose to hallucinate. It definitely feels unhealthy.

If people are deprived of sleep for long enough there are two things that could happen: 1- they will start to have short moments of sleep that happen instantly, often without them noticing it. or 2-they get sick and die.

Depriving people of sleep is officially recognized as a method of torture and thus forbidden in most countries, although it happens.

I can fully understand why this is so. If there is one thing that fuck's me up big time, it's lack of sleep.
Not getting enough sleep realy IS torture.

After a certain amount of hours, the torture suddenly starts to increase rapidly and every extra hour get's harder on your mind then the entire period before.

The reason why this is used as a method of torture, is that if it lasts long enough, eventually EVERYBODY has a point where he simply breaks.

sleep deprivation eh? Jeez man, just eat a cactus or something. To eat their own, I guess. But sleep deprivation is very unhealthy.

QFT.

The combination of sleep and light depravation produces an unusual effect. This effect has a lot to do with how much processing your brain does as you look at the world. Your brain tries to perceive colors accurately regardless of the light source you view with. If you view a white piece of paper under a yellow lamp, your brain is pretty good at figuring out that the paper is white. When you are up and about in the presence of light, your brain adapts to the type of lighting and does a good job deciding what is 'white'. All other colors are referenced to your brain's choice of white.

When you stay awake in the dark for a long time, you loose this ability. If you are in complete darkness AND awake for an extended period of time (using your black and white scotopic night vision) your brain loses it's sense of what color white is and reverts to a native color gamut. In this case, your sense of color shifts radically. Sources of light you would normally consider to be white light take on different colors and your whole sense of color becomes distorted.

Incandescent lamps appear yellow. Fluorescent lamps appear a strange green. Mercury street lights appear blue. Colors all appear very vibrant. Sound familiar?

This only happens if you are awake AND in complete darkness for (say) 12 hours. I'm not recommending anyone try this. SWIM did it once because of a work assignment.

I mean, if you want a depriving experience, try a sensory deprivation tank. Add silene capensis or an herbal brownie to make it extremely wild. If one wants to experience altered states without the use of substances, I would think the main reason for that is to be "natural". But sleep deprivation isn't natural. I mean, the idea of depriving your body what it needs just to see what you experience, is not a good attitude, imo. That's pretty much the attitude of paint sniffing. Sniffers are doing something that is known to be unhealthy, they know it deprives the brain oxygen, and just to experience an odd sensation. What are you doing man? It doesn't even sound enjoyable and certainly not useful at all. You just sound like you were confused. And just to experience odd movements on keyboards and the appearance of breathing walls? I don't get it. Sleep deprivation sounds very different from psychedelic experience. I'd just like to see discussion of ways to explore consciousness that aren't self destructive.

The effects from sleep deprivation are really interesting but i don't think that it is something that should be repeated more than once... I was fascinated to see how far i could push myself nothing more than that though. Something that I realised through my sleep deprivation experience is that my mind is much stronger than i thoguht.


Much Peace and Happiness

Anyone have any sleep-deprivation + psychedelics experiences?
I've combined short-term sleep deprivation (~24 hours) with medium-dose pharmahuasca - I found this experience to be altogether annoying. I was completely wiped out, with the harmala actually making me that much more physically tired, but the DMT activity on my receptors just wouldn't allow for sleep. What ensued was a morning of strange, twisted neon-puke-green patterns undulating themselves all around me, almost sliming up my vision. I was having very disjointed visions, mostly representative of what I'd been doing over the previous days, TV shows, and other bits of useless information rolled up into one long pointless array of confusing images. I would get brief respites every thirty minutes or so (I guess?!) with some of those involutary blackout "mini sleeps". The BEST part of this experience was finally getting to sleep around hour 5.
I don't recommend this, it wasn't good nor did it add anything whatsoever beneficial to the experience. But maybe pharma isn't the best one to be using with this, maybe another would do better. But I dunno.

Other than that I've been up for about 48 hours on my own + coffee, and 5 days during a stimulant binge several years ago. The 5 day one ended with me seeing a horse-headed man about 3 feet tall on a cellphone who then loped away in the CREEPIEST way and skuttled off turning into a crowd of snakes slithering off into the woods. I then put down the dope pipe and went home to get some MUCH NEEDED SLEEP.

As Dale Pendell (I think) said - "Sleep is a great thing; try some every day."

I'm still waiting on a massive sleep deprivation (3 days+) and DMT experience report. The longest I endured was 6 days. I've done it several times with the help of drugs. Sleep deprivation can get very sketchy. Its hilarious at first tho

36 hours, melatonin, 5HTP, caffiene and DMT is a killer combo.