I am not sure what else to call this except “road hypnosis” although it might be a bit misleading. Still, when I mention it to friends most of them claim they have experienced the same thing.
Essentially what I am talking about is driving on a long road trip on the highway (where the driving situation does not require as close attention as stop-and-go driving). At some point in the trip I’ll sort of “wake up”. Not that I was asleep but all of a sudden I realize I cannot remember the last hour or two of the trip at all. This always freaks me out some but nevertheless I am still in one piece, car is fine and all is as it should be (zooming down the highway in my lane).
So, it seems I sort of hypnotized myself and while it seems I had blanked out I still managed to drive the car.
Is this a known/common experience for many drivers?
Is it dangerous? By dangerous I mean since my consciousness seems to have drifted am I less able to respond to an emergency situation? Or, conversely, am I in a better state to react to an emergency situation than if I was still concentrating on driving (being more relaxed and letting reactions be faster than if I had to think of what to do first)?
Highway hypnosis
I’ve found that iced tea quarts at a time as opposed to coffee is better for long distance road trips. In addition to the caffeine, there’s the sense of urgency of needing to empty one’s bladder. Very hard to drift to sleep when you have to pee like a mofo. Also, requisite stop every two hours (to pee and get more tea) is another helpful way to keep from dirfting off.
I’ve had the normal kind of “road hypnosis” experience where I don’t remember parts of the trip. The scariest one was when I was sick, so it may have been because I was taking medication or just not feeling well. I blanked out for a good five minutes. I remember turning onto the street and driving down the first part of the street, but then the next thing I knew, I was at the end of the road with no idea how I got there. It wasn’t like typical road hypnosis–it felt truly blank. I was at the light, and I thought it was another light closer to where I turned in, and then I realized that I was at the end of the street, and I had to turn left, but I was in the right lane, so I had to make a quick lane change (good thing there were no other cars around). I think I had a short period of amnesia.
The really weird thing is, after that, when I drove down that street, I’d wonder if I’d remember it later.
Dangerous? You betcha. I had an English teacher who had to give up driving because once he actually became a skilled enough driver to relax behind the wheel, he then became unable to avoid entering a trance state on a semi-regular basis. After his third devastating crash, he stopped driving completely.
Personally, I think the advice in the wikipedia article to turn up the radio is pointless-- if you’re too tired to drive, pull over and take a nap.
This happens to me all the time, but it’s never been for long, or been like a complete blackout. I think it sometimes happens when I’m just in the groove of driving - you know, like when you are so in touch with your car, feeling the road, making continuous tiny adjustments to the wheel with one or two fingers, keeping perfectly in your lane. Sometimes after 10-15 minutes of this I’ll realize that I don’t remember driving those last few miles, even though I was concentrating in the moment at each moment. Intense short-term thinking in the present overriding the creation of longer-term memories?
Other times this happens when I’m doing routine driving. Ever want to drive somewhere that may be a different turn from your route to work or school, and end up not going where you want? You start out thinking about where you you’re going, but forget and realize you’re on the wrong side of town. How’d that happen? This happens to me rarely but regularly.
I have heard a few first-person accounts of losing great chunks of time while driving on a long straight road, but I don’t know how sleepy (or drunk or drugged) the tellers were.
The usual advice for non-Prairie drivers is to not watch the road, just look at it frequently while keeping your eyes moving. Having been raised as a Prairie boy, I find myself following that advice whenever I’m on a straight stretch, and have never been hypnotized.
For my part my experience with road hypnosis has never been due to any drug whatsoever (except perhaps caffeine which I doubt is an issue). I likewise have never fallen asleep at the wheel. Everytime I did experience this whough was on long, straight, boring stretches of road with light traffic. It was also always expressways as I think anything smaller instinctively tells me to pay closer attention (e.g. undivided highways).
Oh, oh, I have one more story! Not really road hypnosis, but related.
This happened just a few weeks ago. I’d been driving for about six hours, and I was getting a little tired. It was dark and snowing, and the road was very curvy and hilly so I had to be really focused. Something about the movement of the snow in the headlights mesmerized me. My eyes kept following the snow as it moved through the headlights towards the road, and then I’d think, you know, I really should be paying attention to the road. I almost had to stop for a while–it took a lot of will for me to stop focusing on the snow.
I’m not sure if microsleeps are the same thing as the OP describes.
“Microsleep” is the latest buzzword here (I knew that’d be an Australian link before I clicked it), but they are, as the name suggests, actual tiny periods of sleep or near sleep. Long enough to enable you to wrap your car around a tree though. On the other hand, what I thought of with the OP is something that happens to me regularly (and in busy city traffic too, not on lonely highways): I will be sitting at a red light, and I’ll start going off on a train of thought. Suddenly, I am about a mile or two down the road, I’ve been through several busy intersections, I’ve been changing gear, keeping in my lane, etc. NO MEMORY OF IT! I’ve done this often enough with passengers in the car to know that I’ve not driven poorly. They have been sitting there quite happily looking out the windows or talking at the moment I’ve “snapped out of it”. It also doesn’t necessarily happen when I’m tired.
I’ve also experienced the phenomenon, and it has nothing to do with sleepiness. In fact, I’ve occasionally noticed the effect when I know that I’ve been concentrating extremely intently on the driving conditions. My WAG: it’s got to do with the flow between short-term and long-term memory. When I “snap out” of it, I can still remember right before that moment, but not much further back. I assume that I’ve been concentrating on my driving, but enough other work was being done by my brain that the memory of that concentration never gets put into my long-term memory.
I’m usually pretty on-the ball with highway driving, but I had one scary incident where I just…phased out. I drifted slightly onto the other side of the highway and a honking car and worried boyfriend had to snap me out of it.
My boyfriend, another driver that’s usually on-the-ball, almost ran into a car on the side of the road during a long trip. He just didn’t see it, even though it was daylight - I had to tell him it was there. That was also VERY scary.
We might have been tired, or bored of seeing the same old road for so long. When it happened to me, we were almost home from a 9-day trip that involved a lot of driving. I think at that point I had the mindset that we were in familiar territory and so close to home that I didn’t have to put as much effort into knowing where I was headed.