When I was in middle school (like about 12 or 13 I think -memory on exact dates isn't so good), my best friend at the time invited me to go with he and his grandfather, who were going to go to the Wisconsin Dells for a week. The Dells is basically one huge resort-town area -lots of expensive tourist crap, shows, water parks, go-karts, blah blah blah.
Anyway, at that age (and not being responsible for any of the substantial costs), it was a lot of fun. So much in fact that my friend Jeff and I didn't sleep the entire time, which in total meant we were awake from the time we got up at about 08:00 on Friday morning until we got back the following Saturday evening (at about 18:00), but I ate dinner with my parents before actually going to sleep at sometime around 20:00. All told, that's about 8-1/2 days, or about 204 hours.
During the time we were awake, starting on around the 3rd or 4th day, we did have some minor hallucinations. Most of them were auditory (hearing odd noises that weren't possibly real, but seemed real enough at the time), but there were some visual ones and a few brief periods of completely inexplicable dementia and paranoia as well. None of them lasted very long, though they did get a bit more frequent and persistent toward the end of the week.
Once I did fall asleep, I slept very soundly, and did not recall any dreams. I woke up around 4 pm (16:00) the next day, so I slept about 20 hours straight, which is an insane amount for me, since normally I only sleep about 3 hours per 24 on average. Other than the uncharacteristically long sleep period itself though, I felt absolutely fine and alert.
One other time a (different) friend and I stayed up about 5 days during a marathon on-on-one table-top RPG session, but that's the closest I've ever come to doing that again. These days, I've occasionally been awake for about 3 days at a time before I finally knock off for about 6 - 10, but any more than that I just don't have the stamina for, or there's simply not enough going on to keep me sufficiently interested in staying awake over getting some sleep by that point.
I don't know how long it would take to actually kill a person, or do them permanent harm via sleep deprivation alone, but I would expect it would likely be at least two weeks, if not perhaps significantly longer. Also, by that time, I would suspect that the increasingly drastic measures which would ultimately be required to avoid having the person simply pass out from total exhaustion would probably end up doing more damage than the loss of sleep itself. I don't know specifics, but I know some cultures across history have toyed around with sleep deprivation as a means of torture / interrogation, and most of those which I've heard anything about involved various methods of inflicting fairly significant amounts of pain to keep the subject awake.
It's interesting stuff, but I think I'm too old nowadays to run out and volunteer to try to break any records. Best leave it to the young.
-Wraith
