sleep

The hours of sleep I got a night over the past few days looked like this:

3, 3, 2, 2, 1.5, 5. That's slightly over two normal nights of sleep over six days. 

Sleep deprivation in architecture students is an interesting thing. A little can act as a stimulant- when you're tired, you're less critical, acting less rationally and more intuitively/erratically. For me, there's four stages to serious sleep deprivation, say, on 3 hours of sleep a night or less:

1. Tired - Maybe after the first night of 3 hours of sleep. You feel a little haggard, a little worn, and a little tired. You feel about the same as usual, just thinking idly about how it would have been nicer to have been able to sleep in another hour.
2. Punchy - A short phase- you feel oddly light and awake. Everything strikes you as kind of funny, and you feel lightly drunk. You work and think you're actually being super productive because you're feeling so good. This whole lack of sleep thing isn't really a concern, maybe I can live my whole life on 3 hours a night! But then you realize how quickly you're zoning out, and how you always have to keep moving your eyes around to keep from being hypnotized by everyday objects. 
3. Painful - The fun time is over. Your body hurts. You go to bed tired and wake up feeling ten times more tired. Your eyes burn, your face is greasy, and your hair is a fire hazard. Your stomach is always borderline nauseous. You've lost all sense of humor, and actually, you find yourself often in extremes of emotion- you're quick to fly into irrational rage or abject misery. You write incendiary a irrationally hostile messages about print labs. Your neck is stiff, and you frequently have to walk around to keep from falling asleep at your desk. You feel thin, immaterial, spread way to thin. You fantasize about sleep.
4. Undead- You've lost all emotion and your face is as wooden as the work table. You can barely move your body. People stop you and tell you that you terrible and you just stare back at them expressionless with empty eyes. Your thoughts and motions are slow, and your mind works like a telegraph operator typing out S.O.S. while freezing to death, one ping coming down the line after another. Beyond this point, there are hallucinations, illness. Your own body force-quits you to get some sleep in an automatic override and I've known people who have missed their own final reviews because of it. Just today, someone told me that they have no memory of getting up, walking across thier house, shutting off the alarm, and walking back to bed. 

And this is the slow version, if you don't sleep at all, you'll reach phase 4 by the third night. 

The Russian KGB used sleep deprivation extensively as a means of torture. Solzthenitzyn writes extensively about it in The Gulag Archepelago, how it was used because its so incredibly effective at destroying the will, eliciting signed confessions, and it leaves no bruises or visual scarring for the Red Cross or Amnesty International to photograph. 

The US government uses it too to torture terrorism suspects, really no different from the KGB. 

Supposedly, a night without sleep is supposed to take days off your lifespan. 

But, my review is done. And I'm going to bed.