As in the song, main character Sam Forstmann (played by Ed Wynn) believes his life is tied to his clock's ticking.
Desperate, he tries breaking into the house, but a passing policeman is alerted by the sound of the window shattering and takes him back home.
No man can prolong his allotted hours, he can only live them to the fullest—in this world or in the Twilight Zone.Ninety Years Without Slumbering was a drastic reworking of an original script by George Clayton Johnson, Tick of Time.
Johnson disapproved of the changes made to his story, especially Sam Forstmann's anticlimactic confrontation with his own ghost: "It makes the whole plot trivial.
Marc Scott Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion, was similarly appalled by the "inept" rewriting of Tick of Time as 90 Years Without Slumbering, particularly the climax: "Imagine: Sam Forstmann has fanatically clung to his beliefs, however misguided, in the face of all logic to the contrary; he has proclaimed said beliefs to a psychiatrist, even resorted to breaking and entering to keep the clock ticking...and what does he do at the last possible moment?