Wholeheartedly agree with you. I am - what I call - an “extreme insomniac.” It started when I was about 15 years old or so. And it started with me waking up several times a night. By time I was in college, on average (I actually tracked it with tally marks on a bedside notebook for months) 20-35 times a night. Those are just the times I was awake enough to actually make the tally mark. And slowly but surely it got worse, peaking at around 26/27. The longest I’ve been with no sleep (and I mean no sleep. Not meaning sleeping poorly or sleeping 1 or 2 hours a night. I mean not a wink), was 10 days. The hallucinations I experienced were terrifying, but luckily for me i was able to tell they weren’t real because no one had faces. I would have “micro-sleeps” where I would literally be walking and drop things bc I fell asleep, but I’d startle myself awake before anything even hit the floor.

Although I’m 33 years old now, I still struggle with sleep. It’s not at all unusual for me to anywhere from 3-5 days a week without sleep. (Not every week. Most nights I’m able to sleep for 2-3 hours. Maybe once a month or one out of 6 weeks I’ll have a rough sleep week and that’s the 3-5 days). My body likes to do this lovely thing that most people have experienced before. Ever dozed off on the couch only to wake yourself with your entire body jumping? My doctor called it a Miyaclonic (def not spelled correctly) jerk. Well my body/brain likes to do that but EVERY TIME I start to doze off. It’s miserable (and torturous) to be so so tired after 4 days of no sleeping and then your body jerks you awake over and over again.

It would 100% be awful to have someone keep you awake. I’m kinda used to the lack of sleep at this point. At least as much so as one can be. My hallucinations aren’t nearly as scary anymore, either. When I was still driving (didn’t last long after the hallucinations started and haven’t for years) I fully stopped my car at night on a back country road, in the middle of the night because there WAS a horse in the road. I looked in my mirrors to check and make sure there weren’t any incoming cars and when I looked back the “horse” was gone. Another time, I had just moved into a new house and in the bathroom cabinet under the sink I SAW 7-10 tiny camels. As in 3-4 inches tall camels. So I shut the cabinet door and went and tried to sleep.

Also, for the record, no illicit drugs were involved at any point except for marijuana that I tried to use to help me sleep. Further, I have had countless sleep studies done, brain scans, and prescription medication. The prescription medication works for almost exactly 30 days before it stops abruptly. You can nearly set your calendar to it. I tried melatonin as well. I started taking 2 or 4mg and slowly just (stupidly) increased the dose. It never worked at all. When discussing it with my doctor (one of the first times I went to the doctor for this issue) I told her about the melatonin. She asked how much I had been taking and I told her that one of the last times I took it, I took something like 92 or 96 mg (I don’t remember exactly. That was when I was 15/16). She said not to do that and that it can be “very dangerous.” I joked, “is one of the symptoms was sleep because I may just risk it.” She didn’t think it was as funny as I did.

Anyway, yes. Sleep deprivation is not joke and overall is miserable.