Inside the Fringe World of Sleep Tripping

Staying up all night is a common trope of drug use, whether you’re popping MDMA in an underground Berlin club or watching a universally affirming sunrise while tripping on LSD. But what if the act of being awake itself, for extended periods, could inspire psychedelic hallucinations, depression relief, or even connectivity to alternate realms?

That’s the premise of r/Sleeptripping, a subreddit “dedicated to gaining experiences and pleasure through the forceful deprivation of sleep,” and it’s largely trip reports of varying levels of sketchiness. “I feel completely detached from my body,” writes one recent user after 96 hours awake while periodically taking amphetamines. “The garbage bag I have sitting by my door to go out looks like it’s moving and crawling. If I stare at it long enough, it moves more, my laundry basket looks like a penguin,” writes another Redditor after 66 hours of being awake.

One detailed trip report from 2020 states that between 36 and 48 hours of sober sleeplessness, “Time stops mattering…Patterns pop into my perception. The visuals are closer to LSD than to DMT or mushrooms, but completely different.” Between 48 and 69 hours, the sleeptrip evolves: “I'm talking about shapes layered over top of other shapes spinning independently of each other with little worms or snakes slithering between them…There is definitely partial ego dissolution, but the experience cannot be compared to the ego dissolution that a psychedelic provides.”

We reached out to a handful of recent posters of the subreddit for comment and received radio silence. “It’s pretty fringe,” says Cyrilio, a /SleepTripping moderator who works across other subreddits concerning drugs and harm reduction, to DoubleBlind. Cyrillio says a portion of the community has a mental health condition, and also includes some psychonauts. It’s obvious that a lot of the users are also combining legal and/or illegal stimulants to push on through to the other side. “When you add sleep deprivation, it's like taking the guard rails off,” he says.

One might compare the sleeptripping experience to a version of psychosis. A 2018 meta-review of 476 papers published by Frontiers in Psychiatry stated that, between 24 and 48 hours of being awake, symptoms of sleeplessness include everything from perceptual distortion to anxiety and depersonalisation. From 72 hours and beyond, the authors write that “the clinical picture resembled that of acute psychosis or toxic delirium.” They even draw a connection between this and witchcraft trials: namely, the practice of “tortura insomniae," a method used during witch trials whereby the accused were kept awake for days, often leading to disorientation, hallucinations, and confessions that sealed their fate.

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