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Vice Blog

LONDON – LOSING SLEEP

Tony Wright looks like shit. After 266 hours awake, Tony thought he'd cracked the world record for going without sleep and finally drifted off for a well-deserved snooze. However, if you thought he looked bad before, you should have seen him when he woke up and realized that he'd misread the clock, gone to bed too early, and fallen short of the record by a few hours. But Tony doesn't care. He's become such an authority on not sleeping that David Blaine (whose next stunt is evidentally a stay-up-athon) comes to him for advice. We thought we'd drop in on Tony and catch up on some sleep deprivation…

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Vice: How hard is it to stay awake for 11 days?
Tony Wright: I was a little sleepy the first night but then I was fine until day six or seven. Then I just needed to be a bit more vigilant. From about day nine it just got weird.

How so?
It's a bit like doing psychedelics. I had no classic hallucinations, but the different sides of the brain kept shifting over. It's like shifting personalities. Your ability to stay in control starts to go.

How did you manage it?
Well, I switched my diet to the raw food eaten by our ancestors, which helps. I also had lots of practice. I started off doing runs of three to five days without sleep, but sometimes as long as seven or eight days. I've probably done about one hundred runs of that length over the past ten years.

What do you do to pass the time?
I listen to music—mainly deep trance. During the last run, I played pool for five solid hours a night. I also had people with me 24/7 making sure I didn't fall asleep.

Do you not like sleeping?
I only sleep three or four hours a night. Anymore than that and I feel groggy and I can't think straight. I'm sharper and more alert if I don't sleep too much. I'm not an insomniac though. I can sleep, I just choose not to. Very creative people don't sleep much. Da Vinci is one example.

How did you feel when you woke up and heard that you'd fallen short of the record?
There are several claims to the record. I went for Randy Gardner's because it was the best documented. Nobody had bloody heard of the Finnish guy until I did the event.

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Were you gutted?
Not really. My remit wasn't to break records, it was to observe my own mind.

It must have been irritating though.
If it were that irritating, I'd just do the bloody thing over. I'm currently advising David Blaine, because he is going to have a crack at it. He's aiming to do eleven and a half days or, as he puts it, a million seconds. If I were that bothered about it I wouldn't be helping him out.

The Guinness Book of Records no longer list staying awake as a record because they don't want to encourage people to try it. Do you think it's dangerous?
It's not all that dangerous clinically, but psychologically it can
change your perspective. That's part of the attraction for me, but it
can be a challenge for some people.

So you would or wouldn't recommend this to others?
No, in the same way as I wouldn't tell anyone to take a bunch of psychedelic drugs. You could go mildly psychotic.

- Tony has written a book about extreme sleep deprivation called Left In The Dark.