As students at Washington University, I am sure that we are all familiar with the ever-popular all-nighter. Such an experience often occurs when several professors decide to hold a nefarious meeting in their underground lair (heated by the burning souls of graduate students) where they mastermind a plan to have an exam, a project and a multi-page paper due on the same day.

It would seem that a student counterplan could be implemented such that this work can be done in advance, but no. The professors have outsmarted us again, because there were mountains of reading to summit the week prior and somehow they managed to make a deal with Comedy Central to get a South Park marathon going over the entire weekend. Damn their malevolence.

The only proper response: combine three Red Bulls with five NoDose into a large mixing bowl, add a couple shots of 5-Hour Energy to taste, sprinkle with Guarana and crushed espresso beans and enjoy a whole night of sleepless school work. Unhealthy you say? Try dealing with the stress of losing a grade for every day of lateness, or in some cases receiving a straight zero, and decide then which situation is worse for your body and mind.

The day after is almost unreal. Running purely on adrenaline after the caffeine binge has abandoned a now sickly frame, a student stumbles as though drunk into classes from which he or she will learn nothing. Speech becomes almost impossible while only insane thoughts run through the mind (I wonder what they do with all of the turkey heads at Thanksgiving?). The sight of daylight may be the most disheartening notion there is, knowing that even if the work were completed in the next 10 minutes, attempting to sleep would only be detrimental to circadian rhythms, yet to lay one’s head on a pillow would be divine.

Conceptually, not sleeping throws off all previously held ideas about day and night. The two seem entirely mutually exclusive: usually we go to sleep at night and wake up in the day. However, when they run seamlessly together, from afternoon to night to morning, one begins to question the normalcy of a regular sleep schedule. One begins to think that he or she can actually feel the Earth rotating and watch the sun pass over the sky followed closely by the moon followed closely again by the sun.

But no, this is just the insanity setting in.

In the end, pulling the proverbial all-nighter seems like an accomplishment. At the least it gives you bragging rights. At the most (for those fellow masochists out there) it can be kind of fun.

A study at St. Lawrence University showed that at least “two-thirds of the students reported that they had pulled at least one all-nighter during a semester.” Considering that St. Lawrence University does not even register on the U.S. News and World Report rankings of top colleges in the nation (and that Wash. U. is No. 12), I would imagine our numbers to be a bit higher.

The current world record for sleeplessness was set in 1977 by a rocking chair marathoner by the name of Maureen Weston who managed to go 449 hours (almost 19 days) without once stopping to rest her eyes. The resulting effects are best recorded by a high school 17-year-old named Randy Gardner in 1964, who stayed up for a full 11 days, the consequences of which are effectively the same as those of doing hard drugs: moodiness, slurred speech, loss of motor functions and hallucinations. I stayed up for three days once and can attest to these ailments and to the fact that it was an excruciatingly awful experience.

More importantly, many studies (including ones done by St. Lawrence University, Stanford University and one by Brown University that found that college students are the most sleep deprived people in the country) show that, though lack of sleep may be a suitable means for getting it all done, it greatly decreases academic and sports performance and should not be used as a means for getting ahead.

So ask for an extension, make up an excuse (I was rescuing beached whales off the coast of.uh.Morocco?) or take a late grade, but make some time for shut-eye because your professors are plotting as we speak.

Christian is a senior in Arts & Sciences and a forum editor. He can be reached via e-mail at forum@studlife.com.

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