Accidentally Practicing for 24 Hours in a Sleepsack

Photo Credit: Rocket, Object: Rubberfreak

Yep, I'm still sleepsack obsessed after all these years… Maybe more than ever.

A goal that I've had for a long time (probably more than 10 years) was to do 24 hours in one.... After either avoiding it or failing to schedule the time for it it finally happened in February of 2018. In some ways I think I was afraid to fail.

I guess I may as well start at the beginning of the events a full year prior that precipitated the actual attempt.

In 2017 I’d done some various challenges/goals — 3 weeks doing every night in a sleepsack, then another longer run of something like 5 weeks in it every night for bed. All of this started with just kind of seeing if I could do it night after night and get better at it. I blame MakoGimp for putting the idea in my head to begin with in December of 2016.

Pretty quickly we learned that my bathroom cycle just does not allow a full, unbroken night of continuous sleep. This ended up requiring MakoGimp to often let me out of the sleepsack once a night to use the bathroom and then reinstall me. Lots of broken sleep for that one, but he bore the burden with stoicism and enthusiasm.

Despite the difficulties, we were pretty committed to the idea, up to and including taking my leather sleepsack on our Atlantis cruise and roping it to the bed to sleep in every night. I’m sure our room attendant was wondering what it was all about (though he was very professional and a pretty nice guy).

Once I’d done the 3 week and 5 week run, we collectively got the idea in our heads to see if I could do more than half of the nights for the entire year of 2017.

It seemed like an insane goal, but I thought ‘Why not?’.

That's how MakoGimp ended up sleeping more nights on the floor of my room on a mattress, with me nearby on the bed in, securely roped down in my sleepsack than he did at his own apartment. Thanks to MakoGimp, Rocket, Chicagogear, Johnnygear and anybody else I forgot, I managed to spend right around 192 nights in 2017 securely sleepsacked for bedtime (bathroom trips notwithstanding).

To be honest I got pretty damn good at sleeping that way. I’m normally a notorious insomniac and something about the tightness of the whole thing seemed to calm me down and help me sleep. By the end of the year it got to the point that I’d sleep better in it than I would sleeping normally, almost to the point that I’d depend on it to get to sleep.

Something about that is pretty appealing for a sleepsack obsessed fetishist…

In February of 2018, I realized that if i was *ever* going to have a shot at a successful 24 hours in the sleepsack, this was it. After half a year of nights in the thing I was as practiced as I could get — we scheduled a slot of time with Rocket and MakoGimp and just like that, the date was set.

 To be continued... I'll share the experience itself, and probably a bunch of things (some intuitive, some not) that I learned along the whole journey.

-rf