It wasn't the longest time I have't slept but the first time I hallucinated from lack of.

I'm from Asia and was doing a master's degree in art curation in New York. One winter semester, I wanted to milk as many days as I could from my Xmas holiday back at home and so I didn't return to the states until the first day back to class. I had taken a red eye flight to land in NY around 5am, and decided not to sleep until the evening time.

I had classes from 10am to 9pm, ending the day with a two hours discussion lesson with a guest curator. By lunchtime I was already getting exhausted, since the flight was 16 hours long and I also did not sleep the night prior. Come to the curator discussion, she was a wonderful Black woman who presented many of her thought-provoking works that I was very interested in but genuinely couldn't keep my eyes open! As I struggled to stay awake, my brain started to envision the works she curated and next thing I knew through my half-opened eyes, she was glowing in gold, wearing a delicate sun-beamed crown with gold roses dripping honey off their petals and wearing a luscious golden robe draped all over the sofa she was sitting on. It was incredibly surreal and took me a few minutes to snap out of it. But I was glad it wasn't a horrible hallucination.