All-Nighters is an exploration of insomnia, sleep and the nocturnal life.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I think about Peter Tripp.

In 1959, the 32-year-old disc jockey stayed awake for 201 hours, broadcasting updates and spinning records from a storefront in Times Square. Newspapers tracked his progress (“Stay-Awake Man Half Way to Goal,” read headline in The Times) and onlookers pressed against the window to catch a glimpse of the sleepless freak. Tripp wasn’t the first or the last D.J. to stage a so-called wake-a-thon, but he was certainly the most famous.

For insomniacs like me, the idea of intentionally forgoing shuteye for days on end seems unthinkably perverse. Even a few hours of missed sleep renders me slow-witted and irritable; I become a stupider, meaner, clumsier version of myself. But not sleeping for more than a week? That sounds like torture — and sleep deprivation has been used as precisely that by a number of countries, including the United States. It is an effective technique, if by “effective” you mean “inflicts profound psychological torment.”

For insomniacs, the idea of intentionally forgoing shuteye for days on end seems unthinkably perverse.

Peter Tripp was far from a shock jock. This was the ’50s, remember, when D.J.’s were mostly sedate and inoffensive, much like the music they played. Tripp’s nickname was “the curly headed kid in the third row.” Yet beneath that innocuous image was an edgy, determined striver, the kind of guy who liked Pepsi and cigarettes for breakfast. He had already made a name for himself in New York, but he envied D.J.’s like Alan Freed, who had parlayed his radio success into movie and television gigs. Tripp thought the wake-a-thon might provide the boost he needed.

A night of missed sleep isn’t going to kill you, even if it feels like it will. But the consequences of going for prolonged periods without sleep are poorly understood even now. The two psychologists who monitored Tripp tried to talk him out of it, but they were also clearly pleased at the research opportunity his stunt presented. Tripp, by all accounts, wasn’t worried.

Maybe he should have been. In photographs taken at the beginning of the wake-a-thon, Tripp appears confident, relaxed. Everyone’s eyes are on him, which is exactly what he wanted. After the second day, the sly grin has been replaced with a glum, nervous expression. By day five Tripp looks haggard, haunted and slightly crazed.

He was crazed, too, and not just slightly. While Tripp somehow managed to keep it together during broadcasts, off the air he was experiencing wild hallucinations. He saw mice and kittens scampering around the makeshift studio. He was convinced that his shoes were full of spiders. He thought a desk drawer was on fire. When a man in a dark overcoat showed up, Tripp imagined him to be an undertaker and ran terrified into the street. He had to be dragged back inside.

Tripp’s doctors gave him stimulants to help him stay functional, but it’s unlikely that the drugs were responsible for his unraveling. In studies, subjects who have gone more than four days without sleep exhibited similar behavior. They became paranoid, saw fog pouring out of walls and doors, and felt as if a band was tightening around their heads. Most of these studies stopped at around 100 hours. Tripp went twice that long.

When the ordeal was over, Tripp slept for 13 hours, woke up and asked for the newspaper. He seemed to be fine, though he would later complain of emotional instability and recurring headaches. When the story of Peter Tripp is told it’s often implied that the wake-a-thon drove him mad and he was forced to leave radio as a result. The truth is that Tripp got caught up in the payola scandals of the era. It was greed, not lack of sleep, that did him in.

Other D.J.’s, noting how much interest Tripp had drummed up, set out to top him, and several of them succeeded. By 1964, the record had been pushed to 260 hours, or more than 10 days, when a teenager in San Diego named Randy Gardner decided that staying awake for longer than anyone in recorded history would make for a nifty science fair project. He’d read about wake-a-thons and, with typical teenage hubris, figured he could beat the record.

What’s amazing is that he actually did, staying awake for 264 hours.

Randy Gardner decided that staying awake for longer than anyone in recorded history would make for a nifty science fair project.

It began without any fanfare. The teen was trying to win a blue ribbon, after all, not become famous. He enlisted two buddies, one of whom was with him at all times, including when nature called, to make sure that he didn’t nod off even for a second. They listened to records, played basketball and wandered the suburban streets of San Diego in the wee hours while normal people were tucked snugly in their beds.

Word got out and, by the end, Gardner was besieged by reporters. He also attracted the attention of William Dement, perhaps the world’s foremost sleep researcher, who personally spent the last few days of the experiment with Gardner, driving him and his friends around in a rented convertible. In contrast to Tripp, Gardner didn’t so much as have a sip of tea, relying on willpower alone to keep his eyelids open. But, like the New York D.J., Gardner temporarily lost touch with reality. At one point, he saw a path leading to a quiet forest, even though he was indoors at the time. The white teenager also believed himself to be the black running back for the San Diego Chargers.

I had lunch with Randy Gardner recently. Turns out, he still lives in San Diego and, except for a mustache and some gray hair, looks nearly identical to the teenager who set a record for staying awake more than four decades ago. We talked about what it’s like to be known for something you did in high school, as if everything you’ve accomplished in the interim was of no consequence. It annoys him at times, but he remains proud of the feat. Curiously, it’s mostly foreign reporters who have contacted him for interviews over the years: Americans don’t seem particularly interested, but he’s big in Japan.

During our conversation, Gardner let slip that he had trouble sleeping the night before. This isn’t unusual for him. In the last few years he’s struggled with insomnia. “Every single night I try to go to sleep and I don’t know what it’s going to be like,” he tells me. He’s been up at three in the morning, slamming doors and literally screaming in frustration. I know how he feels. I’ve pounded the mattress with my fists and fought back tears. We bonded over our common agony.

Of course he recognizes the irony of the boy who set the record for not sleeping now, as an older man, being unable to fall asleep. “Maybe it’s karma,” he says, half-joking. “Like the universe saying ‘Oh, you don’t want to sleep? Well, there you go!’” I guess that’s possible, I tell him, but it doesn’t explain what’s wrong with the rest of us.

Tom Bartlett lives in Mount Rainier, Md., and writes Percolator, a blog about ideas, for The Chronicle of Higher Education.