Would those be accurate side effects of intense sleep deprivation? Some people get very irritable and violent, others suffer intense hallucinations, and very simple tasks are impossible to execute. In the movie, even within a couple days of people being unable to fall asleep, society falls apart. There are some numeral examples, unfortunately on Wall Street, where senior bankers who have been driven to extremes-staying up for 36, 48 hours-have either taken their lives or died in their office or at home in the middle of trying to do work despite being in a complete state of sleep deprivation. What we do know is that when we deprive ourselves of sleep for extended periods of time, we increase our risk of death. It’s at the heart of a question we often get: What if we were to go without sleep, or will there be a treatment on the horizon that alleviates the need for sleep? But this person had a very severe brain injury of some kind and after that, they did not appear to need as much sleep as before. My professor recounted a tale, or a case study, that is largely anecdotal to my understanding. There are a couple of instances where there’s been-literally I’m going back now in my mind to a psychology course I took 20 years ago in college. Is there any conceivable way for someone, or for a group of people, to just lose the ability to sleep? In Awake, there’s this global electricity blackout, and suddenly all of humanity can no longer fall asleep. We discussed Awake’s ridiculous premise, what would really happen to the human body after days without sleep, and the importance of consistently getting a good night’s rest even if mass extinction isn’t in the cards. Rebecca Robbins, an instructor at Harvard Medical School specializing in sleep research. To help break everything down, I called Dr. But is there any logical scenario in which a person can never fall asleep again, or is Awake just another in a long line of ridiculous apocalyptic films relying on shoddy science? While it’s probably the latter, I felt it was my journalistic duty to make sure that we’re not one blackout away from a worldwide and potentially incurable case of insomnia. It goes without saying: Sleep is important, and not getting enough of it can have serious effects on the body. One little girl can still fall asleep, and the American government is racing to find out why she’s immune-FYI: It’s not extra strength melatonin gummies-before nearly all of humanity perishes from sleep deprivation. But, as these post-apocalyptic tales usually go, there’s a catch. Crankiness quickly devolves into societal collapse by way of highly agitated individuals shooting one another, while others embracing the inevitability of death start roaming around naked, which is arguably just as worrying. In the appropriately titled Awake, a mysterious cataclysmic event wipes out all electricity (not great) while also making it impossible for every person on Earth to catch some Z’s ( really not great). Undeterred by those failures, though, the streamer has cooked up another post-apocalyptic scenario with an unconventional twist: losing the ability to sleep. (Perhaps The Silence and The Society could’ve used more dank memes.)

Bird Box was a legit phenomenon when it debuted in 2018, but the results elsewhere have been middling: The Society was canceled after one season in 2020 the same year, The Silence was savaged by critics before disappearing into the vast, unknowable abyss that is the Netflix digital content library. Whether it’s Bird Box (sinister entities come to Earth), The Society (the parents in a small town inexplicably vanish), or The Silence (basically A Quiet Place), Netflix has been trying to corner the market on niche post-apocalyptic scenarios.

New movie sleepless