What kind of alone time do you need?

Tonight, in my group, several people mentioned that they need a lot of alone time. They need three or four days a week just to recuperate from being with someone for several days. There was recently another question addressing this—asking if people would live in a separate domicile from their significant other.

I’ve always needed to be around other people, and have believed that alone time would scare me or annoy me or make me feel lonely or something. But in thinking about it tonight, I realized that I have not had any extended alone time in decades. By extended, I mean a couple of days or more.

Now I’m feeling the need to go off somewhere in nature and just be still and observant. I’d love to be able to just pitch a tent and stay there. I want it to rain. I want there to be green mosses everywhere. I might not mind another person there, so long as there was silence and we were very sensitive to each others moods.

What kind of alone time do you need? Do you get your alone time? What do you do with that time? What does the alone time do or you?