I can't encourage anyone to use designer stimulants to stay awake for several days in order to induce abnormal mental states. Incredibly bad idea in almost all circumstances.

However, can confirm, from a neurological/cognitive systems perspective, totally fascinating. The sort of "see how it works by breaking it" approach for which I tend to recommend psychedelics, except even more so. It gave a really visceral sense of the gross structure of the brain's information processing pipeline, because when something failed you could see the knock on consequences and reconstruct the ordering of the process chain.

I'm pretty sure you could use the observations there to help construct some sort of AI data pipeline that replicates the same processing architecture. Well, I mean, I'm pretty sure that science has already independently derived the overall pipeline of the brain's concept processing and someone has already attempted this, but fairly awesome to be able to see the inner workings firsthand.

I hadn't realised that objects in my vision (and elsewhere in my senses/world representation) had a sort of implicit concept/identity label attached to them until that started being incorrect sometimes, and changing on the fly. And really cool to see what an object is changing visually in real time. The entire world we see really is just one big hallucinatory reconstruction.

Another observation: the above effects were a lot less pronounced in known environments that are already comfortably mapped with their expected contents in memory. The brain is doing a lot more guessing in unknown environments. I think this is in addition to the increased guessing in places with less sensory data, such as in the dark or interpreting the edges of the visual field. The mind relaxes and allows for reconstruction from memory when it is comfortable that it knows where it is and therefore what's around it. But when something contradicts the expected model, or there is anxiety/suspicion about one's surroundings induced, the hackles can go up and the brain will increase its direct guessing based on senses again.

things fall apart and there’s anarchy everywhere; falcons fly freely and can’t be compelled.

Dimming the tide there is blood in the water and everywhere customs of innocence drowned.

Held by the worst is a fervent intensity; lacking conviction the best run aground.

Surely there must be some kind of apocalypse; surely epiphany must be at hand!

Visions unbidden from Spiritus Mundi of something awakening out on the sand:

Head of a man with a leonine frame and a pitiless gaze that’s as blank as the sun;

sleep became nightmare by passage of centuries long before eons of slumber were done.

Higgledy piggledy, beast of antiquity, imminent, just as the prophecies warn,

meow like a cat

claw at tstuff also like a cat