Everyone sleeps, even those who claim not to. Sometimes people don’t know they are asleep because, well, they sleep through it. For many years the record for sleeplessness was held by a Californian teenager, Randy Gardner, who, in 1965, managed to stay awake for eleven days – that is, 264 hours. Gardner achieved this feat with the help of friends and a lot of physical activity such as walking, using a baseball machine in a pinball arcade and playing basketball. He got a bit cranky at different times, lashing out at the people who were keeping him awake because he had forgotten why they were tormenting him like this, and he probably had a lot of microsleeps, of which people were not yet aware. But the ordeal didn’t seem to leave Gardner with any permanent scars. Once he’d reached the milestone, he slept for nearly fifteen hours. The next night he slept for over ten. After that, he seems to have returned to a normal sleep pattern. Randy was most at risk during the marathon itself.
If sleep doesn’t happen in the right place, it will happen in the wrong place and in the wrong place sleep can be lethal. One night the twins had taken turns to scream for a couple of hours and at long last the house had fallen silent. We were in bed, desperate to sleep but unable to get there. I can’t recall the time. It was after three-thirty. Suddenly we heard a crash and explosion in the distance. Then there were sirens and after that a ghostly silence.
Next morning, we discovered that a truck had pulled over for repair on the interstate freeway; another truck, carrying lawnmowers and generators, ploughed into the back of the first truck and burst into flames. The driver of the second truck was killed; the other driver had been standing at the point of impact only a minute before the collision and was just lucky to have stepped out of the way. The highway was closed for most of the next day while the mess was cleaned up. Eventually, a small part of the dead man’s truck would be incorporated into the roadside memorial that marks the spot. The truck’s log books were destroyed in the fire but everyone knew that sleep was the murderer. It happens every day. The driver couldn’t stay awake, while we couldn’t get to sleep.