Follow TV Tropes

Following

Triple Shifter

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/bruce_wayne_tired.png
Bruce Wayne: Caped Crusader by night, tired businessman by day.

"I have a recurring nightmare that I'm never going to get a good night's sleep and then I wake up to find it's a recurring reality."
Bill Raibert, Freefall

Anyone whose description is "Normal Job By Day, Crimefighter (or other things) by Night!" probably doesn't have a lot of time to sleep.

So we'll see them doing stuff during day and night — constantly. Don't they ever need to take a nap? No Sleep Deprivation? The actual physical consequences are rarely taken seriously, except maybe by showing a teacher or boss annoyed that the character is dozing off from time to time. Rarely anything else happens: if it is shown as a constant issue of exhaustion, it will usually be school or work that suffers, as opposed to their night-time adventures, even though being tired means they should have a much harder time fighting. Night is naturally the time for saving the world when you Wake Up, Go to School & Save the World.

Of course, one could assume that Evil doesn't strike every night. But it sure seems that way based on the presentation.

Compare and contrast Plot-Powered Stamina. Fell Asleep Driving could be a bad result of this.

Not to be confused with Shapeshifting where one has three forms.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • In Bakuman。, the main characters, collectively known as Muto Ashirogi, start drawing manga late in middle school, and first get serialized in high school. The manga clearly shows that a manga artist's work week is extremely strenuous, and the strain of keeping up with school and his manga results in Mashiro being hospitalized for overworking himself.
  • Played with in Cardcaptor Sakura:
    • Though catching magical and mischievous cards shouldn't be particularly exhausting (considering she catches 52 of them over the course of roughly 15 months; it's not even a weekly occurrence), transforming them so she can become their full-blooded owner becomes quite draining to her limited magic. (As well as using the Time and Return Cards, which even knock Syaoran for a loop!) Because of this, in the third season Sakura tends to doze off during class, or immediately after said transformation. She will also occasionally fall asleep in class for the purpose of having a prophetic dream (which tends to require the dreamer to be asleep at the time).
    • Yukito/Yue plays this trope far more dramatically. While he starts as an Ordinary Highschool Student, it turns out he's the vessel of Yue, a powerful magical being who has been cut off his source of mana since his creator, Clow, is dead, and Clow's successor Sakura is, well, a little girl with a big heart and great potential but limited magic at the moment — and she's also using the few magic she currently has to transform the Clow Cards into Sakura Cards. As such, the Big Eater and Heavy Sleeper traits that were a mere Running Gag at first become way more serious. It takes Touya willingly transferring all of his Psychic Powers to Yue/Yukito to restore his strength, and when poor Sakura finds out, she has a heartbreaking Heroic BSoD and blames herself for it for not having enough power to maintain Yue's presence.
      • In a completely mundane instance, Sakura was shown to be dozing off in class all week long. Syaoran and Tomoyo thought she was transforming cards behind their backs. She was actually rushing to knit Syaoran a scarf before the winter festival, knowing how much he hates the cold.
  • Lelouch/Zero from Code Geass. In one episode, after schoolgirl/terrorist Kallen is publicly embarrassed due to nodding off in class, Rivalz suggests she take lessons from Lelouch, who's the undisputed master of sleeping through class without getting caught, napping through about half the school day on average. He still manages to pull a straight-B report card and somehow maintain his public persona while secretly working to overthrow the government nights and weekends. Even better, he could have easily gotten a straight-A+ record, if not for the necessity to maintain a low profile.
  • Fresh Pretty Cure! actually showed the end result of an action such as this - Love, Miki, and Buki actually got themselves hospitalized because they pushed themselves between dance practice, school, and being Pretty Cure.
  • In an episode of Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, Sousuke, due to the combined stresses of completing schoolwork and typing up reports for his superiors (not having slept for four days in the process) collapses with a fever.
  • Kaguya-sama: Love Is War:
    • Shirogane rarely has time to sleep due to having to attend school, study hard enough to keep his position as the number 1 student, do all his duties as Student Council President, and work multiple part-time jobs to support his family. As a result, he has permanent Exhausted Eye Bags and relies on a constant supply of coffee to keep himself from passing out.
    • Hayaska also attends school, works as Kaguya's full-time valet, and is the de facto head servant of the household due to seniority. Chapter 179 establishes that she only gets about 4 hours of sleep per day and has no social life that extends beyond seeing her friends during school hours.
  • Kekkaishi's Yoshimori is constantly falling asleep in class since he's in school during the day and hunts Ayakashi during the night. His 'breakfast' is often coffee-flavored milk.
  • Lyrical Nanoha:
    • The matter of sleep was actually addressed in the third episode of the first season, with Yuuno telling Nanoha to take a break since she's exhausting herself. Naturally, that led to her missing a Jewel Seed that proceeded to damage her town. Also, in the second season, the Wolkenritter go out searching for Linker Cores at night causing them to wake up late the following morning because they spend their days with Hayate, who is not supposed to know about their nightly trips.
    • And then there's Teana in StrikerS, who puts herself through a rigorous training regimen (in addition to her regular training which in and of itself is very demanding) resulting in only sleeping four hours a night. At the end of it, she's so exhausted her body needs 30+ hours of sleep to recover.
  • In Mission: Yozakura Family, Taiyo has to juggle his schoolwork, spy training, and missions every single day. As a result, he shows up to school exhausted and falls asleep on a roller coaster because of how relaxing it is by comparison. This also becomes a plot point in one chapter, as Kyoichiro tries to force him to go to sleep as an excuse to rough him up in class.
  • The Persona 3 manga adaptation nods directly to this trope as well, as Minato (the Player Character) dozes off all the time even when he's been getting a good amount of sleep otherwise. His daily life is already busy and add on the sheer stamina-draining wear of constant fighting in the Dark Hour, and he's pretty much what you get. In the game and manga both, the Player Character's endurance improves as he gets used to it all, but it still takes a toll.
  • The girls get hit on both ends in Powerpuff Girls Z. When they have to fight at night they look exhausted the next day, and they're shown having to take a supplementary class. On one occasion they actually have to leave the professor to fight monsters while they take their school finals.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica overall averts discussing this trope, showing magical girl veteran Mami spending her after-school hours searching for witches and fighting them, but still capable of attending school, and Sayaka seems to do the same once she contracts as well. The Rebellion movie does imply that fighting the nightmares at night leaves the girls with issues, like Madoka not doing any reading before lessons and Sayaka staying up late to complete homework.
  • As the Sailor Moon English Expository Theme Song tells us, the titular heroine is "Fighting evil by moonlight, winning love by daylight..." Even before becoming a warrior of love, she was having problems getting to school on time, but somehow being Sailor Moon doesn't compound it at all.
  • SPY×FAMILY: Loid is often overworked and exhausted by his spywork, with his Ace status requiring him to take on more missions than the average agent due to WISE being understaffed. Once he starts living with Anya and Yor, the stress of also being a husband/father and a psychiatrist consistently exhausts him.
  • While Super Sonico is not a heroine, she is still a college student, a band member, part-time model, part-time waitress, and lives alone with five cats. The first scene in episode 1 shows how it affects her, as it takes several alarm clocks and the aforementioned cats to even wake her up.
  • Karina "Blue Rose" Lyle from Tiger & Bunny is a sponsored superheroine, an Ordinary Highschool Student and a lounge singer. She doesn't like it.

    Comic Books 
  • This point also applies to the two other teens on the All-New, All-Different Avengers roster, Miles Morales and Sam Alexander. All three had running themes of being overworked in their solo titles, and during Avengers Standoff Deadpool, of all people, pointed out that expecting teen heroes to meet the obligations of being on Earth's premiere superhero team was insane.
  • Batman is the Trope Codifier. In some continuities, it's explained that he doesn't sleep but rather engages in a 30-minute trance every day that "gives the equivalent of a six-hour sleep." In other continuities, no one bats an eye because he occasionally makes a brief but memorable evening appearance as Millionaire Playboy Bruce Wayne, carousing the night away with beautiful women on his arms. So he's assumed to be sleeping all day thereafter, as an Idle Rich man.
  • The DuckTales comics imply this to be the case with Launchpad. He continually drops references to his other life in St. Canard while he's with Scrooge and his family, which seemingly indicates that the pilot skips back and forth between the two cities to keep up with both of his "families." How he manages to do this without collapsing in exhaustion (or being absent very often from either Duckburg or St. Canard) is never explained.
  • Judge Dredd makes mention of "sleep machines", which grant a full night's sleep in a matter of minutes (whether you're still hungry afterwards isn't addressed), allowing judges to do a large number of consecutive shifts. However, overuse of sleep machines without any natural rest causes a mental breakdown referred to as "sleep machine psychosis", leading the Chief Judge to mandate natural sleep at regular intervals.
  • The 2016 annual of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers includes a short story that shows one week in Jason's life as he juggles high school, running an after-school karate class, and saving the world from monsters. He just about manages it but spends most of Saturday dead to the world in bed.
  • Paperinik New Adventures: Paperinik, the superhero identity of Donald Duck whose authors generally know how ridiculous they're being, gets off easy: his regular identity is a layabout loser who arouses no suspicion by catching "Z"s during the day.
  • Robin: Tim Drake, the third Robin, doesn't appear to have had time to sleep in 5 years. He spent his days at school, his evenings socializing, his nights as Robin, and his weekends at the Teen Titans — who train and fight supervillains and cults and hordes of their own members who've turned evil day and night. As Red Robin, he simply cut out his friends and family (most of whom had died), not to mention school, for superheroing and sleeping. And brooding. A lot of brooding, about how many people he knows who are dead (a lot) and how many of those are his fault (perhaps half).
  • Ms. Marvel (2014): Kamala Khan, like many teen heroes before her, runs into this. It's especially a problem post-Secret Wars, as she now has to juggle high school, solo heroics and being an Avenger. It's costing her a lot of sleep and time with her friends, to the point that she's the last person to learn about her best friend dating someone. It really doesn't help that her powers drain a lot of stamina.
  • Spider-Man: Spider-Man also does this, though he isn't as lucky as Batman and is constantly harassed as Peter Parker for being sleepy.
  • Supergirl:
    • Pre-Crisis Supergirl went through an era during which she hardly had any sleep. She was working as a soap opera actress, which was extremely time-consuming and only left nighttime to operate as Supergirl. She was going mad due to the lack of sleep (her body doesn't need the rest but her mind does) and private life, so in Superman Vol. 1 issue #376 she quit her job and told her cousin she was moving to Chicago because she could not juggle her job and her hero duties.
    • At one point of Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade, Linda Lee dozes off during Science Class because she spent the whole night saving cows.
  • This is mentioned in Watchmen when Rorschach notes he hasn't slept in days and that he is getting too tired to think straight. He also chides himself for falling asleep without removing his mask. The guy is a bit crazy and has immersed himself in his superhero persona so deeply that he seems to forget the need to rest every now and then.
  • Wonder Woman (1942): The Huntress feature shows that Helena's job as an attorney and nightly superhero activities don't mix well. Her lack of sleep is sometimes devastating for her day job, with her turning up hours late or being incredibly short-tempered. She does usually try to only patrol as Huntress for the first part of the night in order to get some sleep, but this doesn't always work out.

    Fan Works 
  • In Code Geass: Redo of the Rebellion both Lelouch and Kallen, particularly the former, have even more trouble than canon with juggling their lives as students and revolutionaries. It reaches the point where C.C. turns off Lelouch's alarm clock, citing that he's been getting an average of three hours of sleep a night for weeks and has been getting frequent headaches and becoming increasingly distracted. She insists that at some point, he'll have to choose between being Lelouch Lamperouge and Zero.
  • Date A Live: Altered Timeline: Not only is Nia a Manga artist, with many all-nighters needed to meet her deadlines, she is still a high school student, which does causes her to be nearly late to school on a common basis.
  • In Hero Chat, Hawk Moth has a really bad habit of creating Akumas in the middle of the night, much to the frustration of the protagonists who have school to attend. They wonder why he never seems to have to get up early for his day job.
  • In the Worm fanfic, Intrepid, Sophia is a student by day, a Ward by night, and goes out in a Second Super-Identity behind her boss's back.
  • In Last Child of Krypton: Shinji goes to school, works for Misato, and is a superhero. Since he's Superman, he doesn't need to sleep.
  • In Superwomen of Eva 2: Lone Heir of Krypton Asuka is a thirteen-years-old kid that goes to school, pilots mechas, and at the night dons her Supergirl costume and saves people.
  • Ultimate Spider-Woman: Mary Jane Watson starts to suffer from this trope when she becomes increasingly unable to juggle her acting career, her waitressing job, her mother's therapy bills, her superhero career, and her failing grades. She's increasingly stressed out due to a lack of sleep, and when a particularly Unsatisfiable Customer becomes too much of a pain in the neck, Mary Jane finally snaps.
  • In Not Set in Stone, Laurel works as an ADA by day, Black Canary by night, and occasionally catches up on paperwork after that. Lampshaded by Oliver "And people wondered when he slept."
  • The Cutting Edge: Laurel works in CNRI, works out in Ted's gym (and some other places), attends AA meetings, is the Black Canary, and makes time to plan their vigilante activities (helped by future knowledge). More than one character asks when she sleeps. There's some indication that having died young in the last timeline, she now wants to live as much as she can.

    Films — Animated 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The Batman (2022): Defied by this version of Bruce Wayne, who gets by through the simple solution of hardly ever going out in public: unlike most versions, he seems to not actually be involved in the day-to-day running of Wayne Industries. When he actually shows up for Mayor Mitchell's funeral, it gets the attention of the paparazzi in a big way.
  • The Dark Knight Trilogy shows that Batman's constant triple shifting are wearing him down, and making him a little sloppy at the beginning of The Dark Knight. He also complains of exhaustion at least once. There's also this exchange in Batman Begins:
    Bruce Wayne: (after Alfred has drawn the curtains back, letting sunlight in) Bats are nocturnal!
    Alfred: Maybe, but even for billionaire playboys, 3 PM is pushing it.
  • At one point in Men in Black, Jay actually asks Zed whether they ever sleep. Apparently, the organisation works to an alien schedule of a 37-hour day. The lack of sleep is implied to be offset by drinking copious amounts of coffee.note 
    Zed: You get used to it. Or suffer a psychotic episode.
  • By the beginning of Spider-Man 2, Peter is falling asleep in his college classes, missing some, and turning assignments in late due to this. Dr. Connors considers Peter to be another trope, and is on the brink of failing him.

    Literature 
  • In Ark, the titular character grows so dependent and focused upon New World that he gets by on about 2 hours of sleep a night - which, at one point, drives him to a severe illness which is only helped by Justiceman's posse.
  • Full Metal Panic!:
    • In the second novel, he falls asleep in class with his eyes open after having spent the night dealing with a Humongous Mecha rampaging through Tokyo.
    • The plot of The Second Raid is centered around the fact that Sousuke can't keep up his Wake Up, Go to School & Save the World routine as his presence is needed to pilot his organization's only Super Robot.
    • In the later novels, his sleeping habits are shown a bit more... and they're very unhealthy. Apparently, he got into the habit of always sleeping under the bed, with his eyes open, and is always holding a weapon of some sort. During the time when he sleeps, he also has nightmares of his mother dying, and actually counts himself lucky when he gets six whole whopping hours of sleep that day (after wandering around until he passed out from fatigue). It definitely doesn't bode well for his life expectancy.
  • A common problem for the Animorphs. They often casually mention failed tests or sleeping in class due to night-time missions. Sometimes they just get the Chee to double for them when a mission requires them during odd hours. In one book Jake mentions that he's managed to get by on random power napping whenever he has twenty minutes or so free.
  • Averted in A Clockwork Orange when Alex skips school and stays home the day after a night out with his droogs, to sleep it off. And, well, by the fact that he's a sociopath by night instead of a hero by night.
  • Hermione does her level best to achieve this in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban with her time turner, but can't quite pull it off. She receives special dispensation to use the time turner to travel backwards in time in limited amounts in order to take more classes than there are scheduled periods in the day. Being a fourteen-year-old girl with (aside from the whole magic thing) no other special abilities, the stress of keeping up with her schoolwork takes its toll. Harry and Ron, not privy to what she had been doing all term, notice that she becomes increasingly distracted and short-tempered, culminating in a fairly minor nervous breakdown. At the end of the book, she turns in her time turner and does not use it again for the remainder of the series. Presumably, she is restricted in its use and cannot, for example, use it to extend the sleep and/or leisure time that she cuts into keeping up with her heavy workload.
  • InCryptid: Somehow Verity finds time for cryptozoology, ballroom dance, and working as a waitress.
  • In Mistborn, Allomancers can use pewter to resist fatigue, though doing so can have unpleasant long-term consequences. Several characters in the second book note that Vin is getting unhealthily little sleep — on the order of two hours a night — between her various (often self-imposed) duties to the fledgling kingdom.
  • The heroes in Relativity all suffer from this to varying degrees, and have different ways of handling it. For example, Michael has Yule to cover for him at meetings. However, Ravenswood and Melody run a business together (a coffee shop). If they're both out crimefighting, there's no one left to run the shop. In one story, "Exit Strategy", this leads to a fight between the two of them: Ravenswood is on a case and has to stay on it several nights in a row, meaning that Melody is stuck running the shop instead of crimefighting. Eventually they promote some of their employees to managerial positions so they can both be absent at the same time.
  • In Renegades, Nova leverages her power as The Sleepless to fill her time with work - a Renegade hero during the day, an Anarchist in the evenings, and a number of odd jobs, from helping the Renegades file evidence to working on her own projects, during the night.
  • Hawthorne from Rumor's Block joined the support group because she has trouble balancing her hero life with her day job.
  • Pilots throughout the X-Wing Series, especially in the novels, have a nasty habit of running a full load of combat missions — often one every few days or every day — while also dealing with other, more cloak-and-dagger threats on the sly. This is particularly noticeable for Wraith Squadron, during the period where they're an active fighter unit in addition to dealing with their own particular brand of espionage, their internal prank wars, and their "insane planning and speculation sessions". In at least two instances — directly after their seizure of Night Caller, when half the squadron was performing unfamiliar duties flying said ship, and during Solo Command when they have more-than-once-daily strike missions against Zsinj for a week straight — it's noted as taking its toll on the pilots. In the latter case, they would sometimes forget which day it was, but kept soldiering on (no pun intended) because it was necessary. At least some of them catch on:
    Janson: I'm not going to get any sleep tonight, am I.
    Wedge: Sleep when you usually do. During pilot briefings. During missions.
    Janson: Oh, right.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Everyone on 24, it seems, mandated by the format of the show. Jack Bauer only gets to sleep between seasons. This may be more justified than other examples as it is only one long day, usually with a few years' gaps between. With caffeine and adrenaline, most people can function on one missed night of sleep and everyone aside from Jack has opportunities to stop and catch their breath at some point. Jack usually shows the toll by the end of the day.
    • In a Danish parody, Jack spends the first 12 episodes sleeping. The dramatic highlight comes along in episode 13, where he is finally awakened by the mailman's arrival, only to receive a huge telephone bill.
  • Deconstructed in Arrow, where Oliver is trying to be a vigilante and the CEO of a Fortune 500 company simultaneously and is entirely incapable of it. The joint-owner Isabel ends up doing everything, and when he skips out on the annual board meeting, the one meeting she insists he absolutely needs to come to, she convinces the board to remove him and make her the sole owner. While this was part of her evil plan with the season's Big Bad, it's hard to argue that his removal wasn't completely justified.
    • Played straight with Laurel, who manages to be a successful ADA by day and the Black Canary by night.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • Although Buffy often complains about it, and it seems that most of her bad-guy-fighting is done in the evenings rather than smack in the middle of the night. It's assumed by many that "getting by with very little sleep" is a minor Slayer ability, perhaps a subset of being super-tough - except, of course, when the plot requires her to have a prophetic dream. Her friends actually do have problems matching her schedule; they mostly seem to go to bed once the club closes.
    • "I have at least three lives right now, none of which mesh. It's like oil and water and... a third unmeshable thing."
  • Daredevil (2015): Matt Murdock's nighttime vigilantism as Daredevil can interfere sometimes with his day work as one of the partners at Nelson & Murdock, like when he oversleeps the night before he's supposed to deliver the opening statement at Frank Castle's trial, forcing Foggy to improvise on the spot.
  • Dexter:
    • Dexter Morgan seems to ignore this problem entirely, with no apparent problems. By day, he's a skilled forensic scientist and has never been shown to doze off at work. In the afternoons and evenings, he spends time with his girlfriend/wife and her kids or goes bowling with the guys from work. At night, he stalks people he suspects of being murderers, and once he is sure, abducts them, kills them, and cuts them into little pieces he can dump in the sea. Sleep? Optional.
    • It is actually lampshaded in a couple of episodes of the second season, when Dexter is considering turning himself in (which would almost certainly ensure that he spends the rest of his life in prison), he comments "I could finally get some sleep." Towards the end of the arc, however, with the difficulties resolved, he just shrugs it off as he prepares for another triple-shift day. "Sleep! What a concept..."
    • The fourth season starts out with him completely exhausted, to the point of dozing off while driving away from a kill. Things continue to spiral out of control from there, but the lack of sleep is noted. In this case, it's partly played for laughs, because on top of his normal routine, he has to take care of his infant son.
    • The same is true, but even more exaggerated for the Ice Truck Killer. He not only has to maintain the day job/night murder routine, but he also has to keep near perfect surveillance on Dexter himself.
    • In the reboot season, Dexter goes through at least a 60-hour period without any sleep at all and is not even remotely impacted by tiredness, despite multiple injuries, extreme emotional distress, fighting, and spending a few hours at his girlfriend's house on Christmas Day.

    Music 
  • The narrator in Jonathan Coulton's "The Future Soon":
    Work through the daytime, spend my nights and weekends,
    Perfecting my warrior robot race, building them one laser gun at a time....

    Podcasts 
  • Red Panda Adventures: For much of the series, this trope is avoided as the Red Panda's secret identity is a wealthy socialite and his sidekick Kit Baxter, a.k.a. the Flying Squirrel, is the rich idiot's chauffeur. This allows them to be together at nearly any moment without arousing suspicion of superheroics or needing other employment. Early on, when Kit confirms that she still gets paid to be a chauffeur, the Red Panda notes she does because she wouldn't be much use as a sidekick if she had to get a second job. This changes later in the series, when many of the Red Panda's agents, informants, and foot soldiers enlist in the military during the build-up of World War II. Kit takes a job at a newspaper owned by the Red Panda to make use of the paper as a source of information. From then on she's generally shown balancing her work life with her hero life, such as worrying about filing a story at the office about recent villain-stomping or being exhausted at the paper when hero matters keep her busy.

    Tabletop Games 
  • d20 Modern games can run into this as well. The game is meant for "cinematic action" so it openly acknowledges that there are significant Acceptable Breaks from Reality along these lines, though if you run a game where the players are directly employed by Department 7 or some other mysterious patron, it's a lot easier to justify.
  • Averted in Eclipse Phase: most transhuman bodies, or "morphs" have it as part of the standard suite of upgrades to require no more than four hours of sleep per 24-hour cycle. This is averted with the unmodified Flat morph, who are commonly owned by eccentrics, throwbacks, or bioconservatives; and exaggerated by Hibernoid morphs, who can enter hibernation for space travel, or run off of two hours of sleep for a 24-hour cycle, or shift into a four-hour sleep cycle for every 48 hours.
  • The lack of Metaplot-mandated constant, large-scale warfare in the New World of Darkness means this is less of a problem. The danger of regular life being intruded upon by the supernatural is still a possibility, and one of the Sourcebooks notes that being more human than the other supernaturals is something that can be used against mages.
    • Princess: The Hopeful: This is called out as being one of the issues the eponymous Hopeful will often have to deal with. It's particularly bad for them because one of the ways a Princess replenishes her magic and strengthens her Belief is by spending time with non-Hopeful friends and family, so a Princess cannot neglect her civilian life without weakening her ability to fight the Darkness.
  • Old World of Darkness games with living protagonists (Werewolf, Mage, Hunter, Changeling, etc.) are set up like this, with the heroes balancing their supernatural lives with mundane jobs and relationships. Werewolves born as wolves don't really have this problem, but it's a wonder everyone else can get up for work after spending all last night fighting the Sabbat, Technocracy, and/or Black Spiral Dancers, let alone hiding/explaining away any wounds from such a battle. However, creative Storytellers can make this part of the challenge. On the other hand, werewolf society generally puts the money-earning burden mostly on the homid Kinfolk (werewolves' human relatives) so the Garou don't have this problem and don't have to worry about frenzying and mauling their coworkers.
  • Averted with the Space Marines of Warhammer 40,000 sleep four hours per 24-hour day. They are capable of taking a twenty-minute nap to keep them refreshed for hours afterwards, or they can alternate resting each half of their brain to keep vigilant for days on end without proper rest, but doing so causes them great fatigue. They use the four-hour regular sleep period for a proper measure of sleep, even though they can cheat around this.

    Video Games 
  • In the maze level of Watcher's Keep in Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, the party runs into a mad elf referring to himself in the third person as Yakman. He's so paranoid about the dangers of the maze that he hasn't slept in all the time he's been there. Elves don't sleep as such in Dungeons & Dragons, but they do need to enter a meditative trance for a few hours a night (half as long as humans need to sleep, naturally). As CHARNAME can note, "You can't just not sleep for two years, you'd...go...crazy."
  • Crusader: Between the start of No Remorse and the start of No Regret, six months pass. Though never spelled out, this is alluded to in No Remorse by the player character being able to go to the bar to catch up with his fellow rebels, go to his footlocker (presumably at the foot of his bunk), and so on. However, there is no such downtime in No Regret. After spending 48 hours in a cramped lifepod, the Silencer then appears to go full-tilt for the next few days to a week, depending on how quickly you play through each level. This is understandable; he's one of those Super-Soldier shooter-protagonist types. What's not so easily explained is how his entirely human Voice with an Internet Connection companions not only stay on the line the whole time but, when they trade off, also go on missions of their own (including two of them who were just in the not-so-tender care of the Lunar Mining Cartel for months...).
  • Gordon Freeman in Half-Life 2. Supposing he arrives in City 17 in the late afternoon, he spends the first night fighting in Ravenholm, the next day fighting and driving, the second night fighting in Nova Prospekt, and fights again in the late afternoon of the third day (from his viewpoint). Then come the extensions, which may or may not have allowed him to sleep (or be knocked unconscious) in between. Of course, he had just slept for twenty years, and maybe those medkits contain Food Pills. And maybe caffeine...
    • There's a one-week break (which seems like a minute to Gordon, so maybe not...) at the start of chapter "Anticitizen One", and he's in stasis again by the end of the story, giving him unknown hours of sleep between the end of Half-Life 2 and the start of Episode 1. The same applies to the gap between Episodes 1 and 2; it appears the same again will be true of Episodes 2 and 3. He does manage to go for three whole days without sleep, but the episodes are a different affair.
  • Doesn't exactly fit with the crime-fighting description, but earlier Harvest Moon games allowed you to stay up all night working, only being forced to "sleep" at the hour when you wake up every day so that you can have breakfast. Loss of stamina could be easily remedied by eating food or bathing in the hot spring, so it was common to go the whole game without sleeping for any reason other than skipping days to reach a particular event. This has been averted in later games however by the inclusion of sicknesses from going without sleep for too long and the difficulty in increasing stamina, not to mention the crippling effect that low stamina will have on your character, making it near impossible to perform any task worth staying up for.
  • Persona:
    • Persona 3 features a group of (mostly) high-school students who can only fight the world-threatening evil during a slice of non-time accessed at midnight. The resulting exhaustion is a status effect that puts a massive crimp in a Tired character's performance. The status effect lasts into the next day as well, can degrade further into being Sick [even worse than tired], which further interferes with classwork for the day. Bit of an aversion compared to the usual "Doze off in class, feel 100%". You actually can doze off in class... but you don't get to hear the lesson if you do, and when exams come, if you didn't hear the lesson, you don't even get to attempt the related question.
    • Persona 4 has the dungeon-exploration take place during the day, avoiding this (and if you do it you can't do anything that night out of exhaustion). But the characters seem to have no trouble staying up until midnight several nights in a row to watch the Midnight Channel. It's possible that they also took a nap and set the timer to wake them up in time or sleep in until the very last minute the next morning. It's also an infrequent event(a few nights a month) and a lot of reasonably healthy teens have little problem staying up until 12:05am and then getting by on 5 or 6 hours of sleep for several days every once in a while.
    • Likewise, Persona 5 has the dungeon crawling during the day. While you normally have to go straight to bed if you spend the day in the Metaverse, maxing out Kawakami's Confidant unlocks the ability to get special massages that put you back in the fight and let you do stuff at night. A downplayed example occurs in Royal, as rather than having to go straight to bed after visiting the Metaverse, Joker is now allowed to do things inside the coffee shop such as study, play video games or craft infiltration tools.
      • Kawakami herself is an example, as she works as a teacher in the day and as an on-call maid in the night due an onerous debt placed on her. At one point in her Confidant, she uses Joker's call as a time to take some much-needed rest, and later on in the Confidant, it gets to the point where she's hospitalized due to overwork.
  • Played for Laughs in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet with Larry, a salaryman, Normal-type Gym Leader, and Flying-type Elite Four member with permanent Exhausted Eye Bags and an inability to raise his voice loud enough to be heard in the next room.
  • Spoofed with the Guildmaster in Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale; he's at the merchants' guild at all hours, and sometimes the pub because he's avoiding his wife.
  • In Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love, Sagitta Weinberg (Cheiron Archer) is actually more like a quadruple shifter. She's a lawyer, a stage actor, and a mecha pilot for a secret anti-demon force. And in her spare time that somehow exists, she's the leader of a Harlem biker gang (though it takes her a little while to pick up that particular mantle again).
  • Part of the game mechanics of Twilight Heroes - the justification for limiting the number of turns your character can play per day is that they have a day job; caffeine and sugar allow you to stay up later each night.
  • Downplayed for the player in Stardew Valley. Stay out until 2 AM, and you will pass out and need rescue no matter how full your energy meter is. Even staying up past midnight (which is required for late-night events) incurs a penalty to your energy meter the next day. However, if you can compensate for the energy loss and rescue fees, you can exist on 4 hours of sleep per night indefinitely.

    Webcomics 
  • The title character of Axe Cop only sleeps 2 minutes a night, allowing him to fight crime during the day and night.
  • In Freefall, the Ecosystems Unlimited executive Bill Raibert pulls triple shifts during the Gardener in the Dark crisis, which threatens both his company and the planetary colony under its supervision, and ultimately passes out on his computer even after downing enough caffeine to give a whale the jitters. Several characters comment on how unhealthy it is.
    • Raibert apparently deals with such crises on a regular basis, as his "regular" order at the local pizza parlor is topped with coffee beans, sugar cubes, and Carolina Reaper peppers to keep him awake.
  • Apparently, there is an "Ancient Skifandrian Technique" that allows that in Girl Genius. Hardly ever taught to outsiders. And the Baron taught it to Gil.
  • The hero of the comic Hero by Night. He's a Legacy Character with a Magic Ring, which grants him superhuman vitality. This translates into enhanced physical abilities and toughness, but also a removal of the need to sleep. He does need to meditate, as his predecessor did, to stay sane with no ability to dream.
  • Oglaf's tale of Sir Coffee is about a knight who is simply too good at saving fair maidens and whose reputation — and whereabouts — are too widely known to allow him any rest. Or sleep.
  • In The Order of the Stick, the undead Sorcerous Overlord Xykon gets quite upset that he can't be a triple shifter: the RPG Mechanics of the setting limit him to eight hours of magic item crafting per day, leaving the Sleepless Psychopathic Manchild sixteen hours of boredom to fill.
    • As noted in Dungeons & Dragons lore, elves meditate instead of sleeping. After the fall of Azure City, Vaarsuvius throws themself into arcane studies to the exclusion of their trance time and suffers traumatic nightmares when they do trance... and it shows.
  • Most Magical Girls in Sleepless Domain don't have to worry too much about this. Their school hours are adjusted to allow them to spend days in school, nights fighting monsters, and mornings in between sleeping. They're also perfectly free to take nights off as needed. Those, however, are the ones who register with the government and attend a specific school. Magical Girls who don't register, but still fight monsters, like Tessa's classmate Rue, have to cope with normal school hours along with nighttime monster fighting. Rue has worked out a system for sneaking naps throughout the day, such as in the first few minutes of class where the teacher regularly talks about her life before going into the lesson.
  • In this xkcd strip, one of the characters proposes a sleep schedule that allocates 28 hour days, as the other person has a flexible work schedule. The Alt Text notes that actually attempting this will cause the individual to go insane.

    Web Original 
  • A genuine problem for Sailor Nothing, of course, as Himei's sleep deprivation compounds her combat fatigue, stress, and general misery at being an unwilling Magical Girl.
  • Epithet Erased: Molly is the only person in the Blyndeff household with any semblance of a sense of responsibility, meaning that the other two dump all the work onto her. She has to manage a cut-down but somewhat functional education, keep the toy store open until quite late (with her sister Lorelai occasionally rostered for a shift but likely to spend it in one of her imagination bubbles, leaving the register unattended), cook, clean, do the taxes and take care of basically every other bit of adulting required for the Blyndeff household to actually function. Word of God is that were it not for the intervention of Giovanni Potage, self-proclaimed greatest villain in the world, who takes about an hour to be a better guardian to Molly than her actual father, Molly would most likely be due to snap within 1-3 years, and the first sign that Giovanni is positively influencing her is that she ends the Museum arc by closing the toy store and going to get some sleep.

    Western Animation 
  • In the Musical Episode of The Amazing World of Gumball, Larry briefly mentions having to deal with this in the Crowd Song.
    My fifth
    all-night shift
    my mind is starting to
    (twitches) bamboo
    but I'm singing!
  • The first episode of The Batman has Bruce Wayne commenting to Alfred that even though it's been 3 years since he donned the outfit, he still can't get used to being tired during the day.
  • Danny Phantom used this as a Running Gag in at least one episode.
  • Darkwing Duck used to have no problems with this — he did his crimefighting thing at night and slept during the day. Now that he has to be a single dad during the day, one has to wonder when he gets to sleep. Although if you've seen Gosalyn in action, it's obvious parental supervision is a sometimes thing.
    • In the new comics, it's revealed that S.H.U.S.H. gave Darkwing a pension.
    • The episode "Getting Antsy" shows this outright. With Darkwing and Launchpad coming back after a night of patrol and just planning on going to bed and leaving Gosalyn on her own, getting annoyed when she says they promised to take her mini-golfing that day.
  • DC Animated Universe:
    • Terry, Bruce's successor as Batman in Batman Beyond, is regularly shown struggling to balance the demands of his daytime life with his responsibilities as Batman, and frequently his daytime life suffers as a result: he falls asleep in class and has poor grades, and both his mother and his girlfriend are often on his case about his apparent lack of reliability.
    • In one episode of Justice League, Batman hasn't slept for three nights straight... as they fight the Villain of the Week whose power is being able to attack you in your sleep. At the end of the episode, after he and J'onn save everyone, he's seen slumped over in a chair in the Watchtower's infirmary, snoring. Admittedly, in order to manage to stay awake, he'd consumed a super-caffeinated beverage, proving that the Batmobile has Bat-cupholders.
  • Parodied in the Futurama episode "All The Presidents' Heads," in which, for plot purposes, Fry suddenly works a night shift at the head museum in addition to his regular job (and, subsequently, never does again).
    Leela: You have a night job?
    Leela: But—
    Fry: Gotta go!
  • Gargoyles:
    • Villain Demona is a gargoyle who magically turns into a human during the day, which means she loses the stone sleep that most gargoyles use to recharge. And rather than rest, she uses her human form to run a vast corporation. Word of God says that the magic spell compensates somewhat while she manages to get the odd couple of hours of rest in, and no, this isn't helping her general lack of mental stability.
    • Elisa comes pretty close to this at times. True, she works the night shift, but during the Avalon Voyage, she seems to be pulling day shifts as well as staying with the gargoyles at night. This is also true when Elisa is suddenly (though temporarily) shifted to the day shift.
  • The Powerpuff Girls used this as a plot point once, as the Girls started sleeping in class after fighting crime all night. Miss Keane convinced Professor Utonium to establish a curfew, which results in the City of Townsville being overrun and nearly destroyed by villains deciding to take advantage of it.
  • The Simpsons: Homer has a plan to do this when he has to get a second job at the Qwik-E-Mart to pay for Lisa's pony. His productivity immediately plummets to new lows as he falls asleep at both of his jobs and even on the drive home.
    Homer: I work from midnight to eight, come home, sleep for five minutes, eat breakfast, sleep six more minutes, shower, then I have ten minutes to bask in Lisa's love, then I'm off to the power plant, fresh as a daisy.
  • Steven Universe gives us Mr. Smiley, a Perpetual Smiler who runs the local arcade and theme park. By himself. As he manically announces in one episode, "I haven't seen a bed in six days!". He finally gets a break in Steven Universe: Future when Amethyst starts a retraining program for Gems and hooks several of them up with jobs at the theme park.
  • Stripperella: Stripper by night. Superhero later at night.

    Real Life 
  • Polyphasic sleep cycles sleep for shorter periods more often, with the purpose of minimizing time asleep for sustained periods. Example schedules include a half-hour nap at 6-hour intervals, 20 minutes every 4 hours, or one 2-hour sleep with short naps during the day. Although popular in some athletic and professional circles, most users stop because of conflicts with other people's schedules. Can also manifest as a serious sleep disorder.

Top