I may as well just post what I was going to post I'm sure it's fine.
I should say, there is a danger to it if you're not a seasoned psychonaut. Sleep deprivation psychosis is a real thing. You have to know for certain you hold not one single delusion. On day four you start to express your funny evil delirium, you have to flatten it out to continue.
The state you achieve is less due to the chemicals that are drained from you in a state of fatigue but rather the chemicals that are building that get flushed when you sleep. Adenosine. This is the chemical that tells you to fall asleep, in sleep deprivation this is the chemical that keeps you awake, this is the chemical that delivers you the state of consciousness. You are experiencing the limits of hypnagogia. We will find that the properties of adenosine very closely resemble that of a dissociative deliriant psychedelic.
Melatonin is not what is putting you to sleep, melatonin is telling you it's time to go to sleep, it's the circadian rhythm regulator chemical not the sleepy chemical. All taking melatonin is doing is tricking your body into it's bedtime let's prepare your body for bedtime. If we really want to fuck with our sleepy chemicals what we want to fuck with is adenosine, or better yet both. I'm even going to go ahead and say that fucking with one and not the other means you're throwing your entire system out of whack, the melatonin is coming into play when the level of adenosine build is not ready and now you've shifted your circadian rhythms without shifting the flood of tiredness.
It is mythologized that a lot of hunter gatherer societies used bufotenine, or the psychedelic frog lick, to enhance their hunting abilities. There is trace amounts of bufotenine in the human body, even more of it found in people with schizophrenia. Adenosine is a dissociative deliriant psychedelic. There are quite a few compounds naturally occurring in our bodies that are heavily psychoactive, DMT comes to mind, people often theorize it is connected to dreaming and near death experience, some of us theorize waking reality stability maintenance.
Adenosine is the neurochemical tied to threat response. Adenosine is what's keeping you alive. You want to stay alive, you go to sleep. You can't sleep? For three days? Becaauu... You're in a panic situation, you're in a fighting for your life survive no matter the cost situation. You're in a survivalist delirium dream world.
Day one you're just a gross piece of shit with ugly insides, however you will notice subtle dissociation towards the end of the day. By day three you no longer feel like shit, you're running on adenosine. By the end of day two and into day three it feels like horror deliriant.
By the end of day three you fall into a space behind everything you have always known to be conscious reality. You can feel it, you've stepped backwards within your consciousness, reality has become something entirely different. You're on a dissociative. You're far more semi-conscious however you're within an area of your consciousness previously untapped.
The atmosphere may feel to some as "a copy of a copy of a copy" however these people have never done a dissociative. It feels dissociative but more. You feel inside yourself outside yourself, you are inside, you are outside, you are everything, you are nothing. Your ego is dying. You feel the outside world from inside as if they are the same. You experience a certain atmospheric hum, you feel light as this continuous hum, you feel the light outside as if it is inside and it glows like methyl. The chemical structure of adenosine has an indirect methyl group. Outside of your space is what frightens you about your world, inside of your space is what frightens you about yourself. If you feel like something is coming at you from inside, you flatten it out immediately before you begin sleep deprivating. Generally it will be skeletons in your closet.
On day four you begin to see Tyler Durden. Somebody is forming beside you, around you, this person is with you. It's... It's attuned to our societal sensibilities, it isn't just mine it's uniform, this person is forming as if they are some sort of psychedelic computer graphic drawing itself through complex programming language functions, cutting back out and disappearing for several hours. In a few more hours you begin auditory hallucinating, the auditory hallucination is a personal format, different people will receive the exact same type of auditory hallucination, there are nineteen different formats. By day seven Tyler Durden is reasonably well formed, Tyler Durden begins speaking to you. By day nine, sometimes you are Tyler Durden.
You will meet one of the following...
The idealized self. Your repressed desires, confidence, aggression and rebellion doing what you secretly wish to do but suppress.
The shadow self. What you fear you are, your guilt, self hatred, traumas and fears who mocks you and attempts to manipulate you.
The trickster. It only wishes to deceive you and piss you off, it is never the same person twice, it comes out of people who have intrusive thoughts.
The guardian. It gives you advice and attempts to steer you into safety, it comes out of somebody who is aware of themselves and avoids self destruction. Now, this one is also actually a horror game on you. Telling you things like "I'll keep you safe" with authoritative ironic cool guy detachment.
The dead one. Somebody dead, somebody you know or somebody you do not, but you know they are dead. No you are not speaking to another soul, you are speaking to a representation. The dead one represents existential dread.
The puppet master. The hidden intelligence that runs your life, it can be invisible, it can be many people.
The echo. It's yourself, it's a duplicate of you, sometimes you're your physical self speaking to your echo and sometimes you're your echo speaking to your physical self, watching your physical self move out of your control, but you are always aware of the fact that you are both of them. Blank, unfilled archetype.
At day twenty five, you have your fully formed Tyler Durden. At day forty, you have become the fully automatic you, doing what you do, you've lost control of your mind and body. You're in a survivalist delirium, this can be very dangerous.