Fell Asleep Driving

No commotion, no screaming brakes
Most of it's over before I awake
From the ceiling, my coffee cup drips
While out my window, the horizon does flips
The worst part was hitting the ground
Not the feeling so much as the sound
Can't help but wonder if all this is real
Cause tonight is the night I fell asleep at the wheel

— "Tonight is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel", Barenaked Ladies

Adequate sleep is very important to our daily lives. After all, going too long without sleep, just like going too long without food, water and air, will kill a person.

Unfortunately, poor sleeping habits are common and since we all have responsibilities and errands to do, driving may be added to the mix, often leading to a dangerous outcome, be it being pulled over (if you're lucky) or more likely, getting into an accident that could injure yourself, someone else... or worse. Sometimes, one can actually catch themselves drifting off or have something else awake them (like a car horn or their passenger) and they manage to regain control of the vehicle and wake up, but sadly not always.

A sub trope to Sleep Aesop and Safe Driving Aesop. A possible outcome for someone suffering from Overworked Sleep or a Triple Shifter if they aren't able to catch up on their sleep anytime between their shift and their departure from said job(s). See also Sleep Deprivation, Dangerous Drowsiness, Exhaustion-Induced Idiocy and Drunk Driver.

Remember, if you ever do feel sleepy behind the wheel, please pull over. Even if you're on a highway or expressway, this is almost always an option: the shoulders aren't just for if you have car trouble. Additionally, numerous countries have rest stops/areas that allow a person to pull into while in their vehicles to actually rest, be it for a few minutes or the entire night if necessary.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Transport Accident Commission (TAC), a Victoria, Australia-based organization devoted to teaching about safe driving, have quite a few ads about the dangerous of this:
  • Possibly one of their most famous ads, "Night Shift", features a man picking up his girlfriend from her shift late at night and they spend the rest of the night driving. By morning, he eventually falls asleep and they crash into a lorry, killing them both instantly. It was remade several years later to show what the driver should have done instead, saving both of their lives.
  • "Drowning" features a man and his family on holiday when the wife repeatedly asks him to pull over so they can rest, get something to eat, etc. only for him to decline. Ultimately, he falls asleep and they crash the car into a lake and while he manages to escape the car, his family's fates are left ambiguous as he futilely screams for help.
• RSA Ireland's Crashed Lives, an ad campaign about safe driving, features a young man talking about how his older brother died this way after meeting a friend after work for a late night movie.
• One ad from UK's "Think!" campaign has a closeup of a man with his eyes closed and the voice-over stating how he's going to die in his sleep tonight, comfortable and surrounded by his loved ones. It ends with The Reveal that he was asleep at the wheel and with his family when their car crashed, presumably killing everyone inside.
• Played for Laughs in an early 2000s commercial for Budget Rent-A-Car where a group of employees are brainstorming about ideas to make their cars more comfortable. When one suggests aromatherapy candles, a cutaway showcases a group of businessmen all asleep due to its effects, including the driver. After it goes off the road causing a huge pileup, the employees nix the idea.

Anime & Manga

• The English dub of Digimon: The Movie adds this exchange to the drivers of a truck that narrowly misses Kari and Agumon:
  Truck Driver 1: Did you see that?!
  Truck Driver 2: (drowsily) No, I was sleeping.
  Truck Driver 1: But you're driving!
• A Doraemon story have Nobita, being jealous of Suneo having his photograph of a building fire being published on the news (and Suneo's name appearing on the papers as a source) asking for Doraemon to produce a gadget that predicts disasters in advance so he can take a similar picture to compete against Suneo. Doraemon then brings up a new gadget, the Delay Camera which takes pictures of the future, and after a bunch of trivial accidents (a kid falling off his bike, a cat stuck on a roof, etc.) Nobita eventually captured a photo of the local gas station exploding, due to happen in 12 hours. Turns out the disaster is caused by a sleepy truck driver ramming his vehicle into a parked oil tanker, but Nobita eventually decides to use the premonition to stop a disaster rather than taking a new picture as a contest.
• Doraemon: Nobita in the Wan-Nyan Spacetime Odyssey have a prequel OVA set before the events of the movie, revolving around new character Hachi's childhood. As a kid Hachi is told by his adoptive mother to wear his lucky kendama necklace everywhere he goes, which he dismisses as superstitious nonsense. All that changes when the kendama starts moving on it's own, causing Hachi to suddenly stop while crossing a busy intersection during a red light - which saves his life when a truck driven by a sleepy driver suddenly crashes into a kerb that Hachi and friends would've been standing on if he hadn't stopped.
• My Roommate is a Cat begins with Subaru's parents' funeral after they died in a bus accident. A flashback in episode 3 briefly shows that the accident was caused by a truck driver who fell asleep.

Asian Animation

• The premise of the Lamput episode "Sleepy Docs" is about Lamput finding that the docs have fallen asleep in their van while chasing after him all day, leaving him to get them to safety before they crash.

Comedy

• Discussed in Rowan Atkinson Live during the "Date" segment. The narrator states that while driving your date to the restaurant that if you are aggressive (honking the horn, giving the finger, etc.), you probably will lose her respect and if you are drowsy behind the wheel, you probably should have taken a taxi.
• A joke attributed to Jack Handey: "I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers."
• Comedian Richard Pryor mentions in his act that a big reason he gave up doing drugs is that he got tired of waking up in his car, doing 90 mph (145 kph).

Comic Books

• Tintin: Land of Black Gold: The Thompson twins, tired from wandering in the desert, fall asleep at the wheel of their jeep, which wanders into a city and crashes into a mosque before they realize it.

Eastern Animation

• KikoRiki: In "Flying in a Dream and in Reality", Pin helps Barry spray chemicals on his wheat fields. Unfortunately, he got distracted by "Captain Colobo" comics and didn't get enough sleep the night prior. What follows is a bunch of shenanigans caused by Pin falling asleep on the plane, all Played for Laughs. He only wakes up after accidentally picking up Carlin and having him yell for Pin to stop sleeping. Both safely escape the plane just a few seconds before it crashes, though Pin still ends up suffering heavy injuries.

Film — Animated

• A variant in the first Cars movie; as the vehicles are sentient, they are able to drive themselves. When Lightning McQueen ties for first place with Strip "The King" Weathers and Chick Hicks, he makes Mack, his semi-hauler transport him to California for the tiebreaker race. To ensure that he gets there before his competitors, he tells Mack not to stop for anything. Mack becomes tired when Lightning refuses to let him rest at a truck stop, and as a result, he gets bounced around by the Delinquent Road Hazards, resulting in Lightning getting separated from him and lost in Radiator Springs.

Film — Live-Action

• Defied in My First Mister. When on a road trip with Randall's son Randy to say goodbye to him before he passes from leukemia, both Randy and J eat coffee grounds to stay awake as well as other entertaining hijinks in their travels.
• Dumb and Dumber: Played for Laughs when Lloyd has a lengthy daydream about his one-sided love interest while driving. It cuts back to reality when she takes off her shirt and reveals the headlights of an oncoming truck.
• National Lampoon's Vacation: Played for Laughs when the entire Griswold family fall asleep in the car on a long Road Trip. After a string of near-misses, Clark wakes up just in time to scream, hit the brakes, and swerve straight into their motel parking lot.
• In I, Robot cars run on autopilot by default but in Spooner's backstory he was in a car accident caused by a trucker sleeping behind the wheel.
• In Due Date, Ethan falls asleep while driving and crashes the car. Peter wakes up just in time to see the horror of the crash. Afterwards, Peter has a broken arm, but Ethan is uninjured because he didn't "tense up".
• They Drive by Night: The Fabrini brothers are truckers who work together in alternating shifts, with Paul driving during the day and Joe driving at nights. Joe eventually grows unhappy with this arrangement and insists that they should take turns on those night shifts. Unused to being up so late, Paul falls asleep behind the wheel during his very first night drive and crashes the truck. Joe gets out unscathed, but Paul loses an arm, and their truck is totalled.
• Mentioned by Everett in Delta Farce as how his uncle died, and that all of said uncle's friends in the car with him died trying to wake him up.
• In Highway to Hell, Charlie falling asleep while driving sets the Hellcop on their trail, kickstarting Rachel's kidnapping.
• One of the protagonists in the filler portion of They Saved Hitler's Brain is killed off when he falls asleep behind the wheel and fatally crashes.

Literature

• Golden Time: During the Beach Episode, Banri, Koko, and their friends go home after feeling tired from their vacation. However, Koko falls asleep at the wheel. And before the car swerves out of control, Banri wakes up and hit the brakes, causing the car to hit the guard rail. However, Chinami gets a bloody lip, and the car's bumper gets dented much to Koko's horror.
• Ringworld: While the group is hover-cycling over a plain larger than the Earth Teela Brown gets a bad case of "highway hypnosis" and crashes. Due to her ridiculous quasi-psionic luck she's fine but the others nearly get killed trying to rescue her.
• In one edition of Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, a girl talks about her Uncle by marriage, Bryce, who in addition to being a Cool Uncle, but is also like a big brother and a friend to her. He sadly died this way when leaving his job one night.

Live-Action TV

• Better Call Saul: Kim takes on a new client even though she already has plenty of work to do for Mesa Verde. She ends up so exhausted that she ends up dozing off at the wheel, crashing her car. When she wakes up, she is in a deserted location with a broken arm and the papers in her car scattered in the breeze.
• Defied in The Big Bang Theory. Leonard comes back home from working at a laser lab the whole morning, in time for Sheldon to ask him to drive him back to work. Despite his irrational demand, Leonard tells him that since he's working at the lab at the night shift, he must go to sleep, and therefore Sheldon must look for someone else to be his ride.
  Sheldon: Did the laser accidentally burn out your retinas?
  Leonard: No...
  Sheldon: Then you can drive. Let's go!
• Charmed (1998): In the fifth episode, after two close calls with a serial killer who attacks people in their dreams, Prue is exhausted from sleep deprivation. Despite her sisters' best efforts to keep her awake, she falls asleep at the wheel, crashes her car, and winds up at the Dream Sorcerer's mercy.
• Discussed to an almost ridiculous degree on the Dawson's Creek episode where Dawson's father died. Pacey, in his attempt to make his best friend feel better and alleviate his feelings of guilt, concocts an outlandish scenario about some unknown workaholic man causing the accident that killed his father due to his preexisting tiredness. The truth is much simpler, albeit more embarrassing; Mr. Leary died due to picking up his fallen ice cream while driving.
• Dexter: Played for Drama in "Living the Dream". Sleep-deprived from his newborn child, Dexter makes a series of mistakes throughout the episode, culminating in falling asleep and crashing his car at the end. In the next episode, he's hospitalized and his car is towed... with his latest victim's corpse still hidden in the trunk.
• The Facts of Life episode "Less Than Perfect" has Blair getting into a car accident after leaving her boyfriend's house and falling sleep whilst driving. The episode entails her having to undergo surgery to repair a disfiguring scar she received from it and her feelings of regret and insecurity over the scenario.
• Father Ted: Played for Laughs in "Think Fast Father Ted", following picking up the replacement car from Father Finnegan's Ted mentions to buckle in cause its a long drive home. The next scene cuts to them driving through the night, only to reveal their both sound asleep with the car harmlessly carrying on until it pulls up in front of the parochial house, and then both casually waking up as if it was nothing out of the ordinary.
• In Friends, Joey falls asleep while Phoebe's driving on the road back from Vegas. Because he promised her a fun ride back home, Phoebe puts him on the wheel as punishment, resulting in this trope. Then Joey puts on the wheel a hitchhiker he picked on the road, so he'll drive while they're both sleeping.
  Joey: Are my eyes open? NO!
• MythBusters tested this trope in a myth that it was more dangerous than driving while inebriated by alcohol. With Kari and Tory as the test subjects, the pair first made a control run, with both of them fully rested and completely sober. For the "drunk" test, the two of them were given enough alcohol to reach the legal limit for blood alcohol concentration (BAC) and performed significantly worse. For the final run, Kari and Tory stayed up for exactly 24 hours before taking the wheel, and not only did they perform worse than the control test, but the "tired" test results were far worse than the "drunk" run, leaving the myth confirmed.
• Every episode of Providence started with Sydney having a dream that involves her late mother, with her often having another dream at some point during the same episode. In one episode she's conversing with her mother while driving and is horrified to suddenly realize that this trope must have happened. Miraculously, she manages not to get in an accident.
• Red Dwarf: In "Can of Worms", Lister, having just eaten a large Sunday meal from Kryten, manages to fall asleep for an entire day whilst in charge of navigating the space vehicle Starbug. By the time the rest figure it out, the ship has drifted 5,000 clicks off-course on their way back to Red Dwarf, and it's their attempts to return that kickstart the plot.
• Strong Medicine Dr. Dylan West's backstory includes his fiancée dying in a car accident caused by him because of this.
• Walt Disney Presents: In "Magic Highway, U.S.A.", during an animated segment about potential solutions to highway problems, one of them is a "slumberbus" that carries cars on a hook so fatigued drivers could get some rest. Even its driver is asleep!

Manhua

• Parodied in one Old Master Q strip when Mr. Chin buys a new car. The sales promoter tells him "our latest model have the most comfortable seats around" and allows Chin to take the ride for a test drive. The seat is indeed so comfy... to the point until Chin dozes off and crashes.

Music

• Genesis: In We Can't Dance, the song "Dreaming While You Sleep" revolves around a man who fatally runs over a woman thanks to him drifting "in and out of sleep" while at the wheel. Since he's still extremely tired when he hits her, he impulsively keeps driving, resulting in him being dogged with guilt for the rest of his life.
• Barenaked Ladies' song "Tonight is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel" is from the perspective of a man who, as the title of the song suggests, fell asleep driving and got in a serious car accident.
• Falling in Reverse: "Popular Monster" mentions this as part of the self-destructive behavior brought on by the singer's depression.
  I fell asleep at the wheel again
  Crashed my car just to feel again

Print Media

• For Better or for Worse: During the summer of 1996, Deanna Sobinski (who we haven't seen for years) accidentally sleeps while driving back from college due to exhaustion from studying for final exams, and ends up in a car accident. She's found by Michael Patterson and his friend Weed (the latter of the two nearly fell asleep while behind the wheel) and sent to the hospital, leading Michael and Deanna to reconnect after several years apart.

Video Games

• Euro Truck Simulator 2 has this as a game mechanic. If you drive for a long time, your driver will start to feel tired, and begin yawning and blacking out, eventually reaching the point of fully falling asleep for a few seconds, locking you out of the controls. Thankfully, rest stops can be periodically found on the many roads you traverse, which can be used to get some proper sleep in.
• WarioWare: Twisted!: During Orbulon's story chapter, the starring alien entrusts the helm of his spaceship (the Oinker) to his Alien Bunny crew while he takes a nap. Unfortunately for him, the bunnies end up falling asleep alongside him, and only wake up when the ship alerts them about the proximity of a black hole.

Visual Novels

• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All: In the backstory to the second episode, Mimi Miney fell asleep at the wheel due to being overworked at her job as a nurse, resulting in a fatal accident.

Western Animation

• Clone High: In one episode, Abe goes through an addiction to not sleeping. When driving home, he falls asleep for a brief minute and almost hits a truck full of pandas.
• Subverted in the "Uneasy Rider" episode of The Critic. Jay takes the job as a trucker and in spite of several tempting roadside distractions (including a group of French bakers whose vehicle broke down) and his own sleepiness (even to the point of eyes blinking one at a time), he is determined to get to his destination in the designated time.
• Family Guy: The episode "Friends of Peter G." has Peter attempting to drive home from AA while completely wasted. When Carl asks if he's actually okay to do so, Peter replies that he should be fine if he cranks up the heat and blasts the lullaby channel on his car's stereo, which predictably ends in him almost immediately falling asleep at the wheel and killing himself by crashing into a tree.
• Seen plenty of times on The Simpsons and always Played for Laughs:
  • In "Lisa's Pony", Homer, who now works at the Kwik-E-Mart to pay expenses for the pony he bought Lisa, drifts off while driving home for his brief time asleep before doing his usual shift at the Plant. After dreaming about being in a pleasant dreamland of beds and angels, he miraculously makes it home with little damage to him or the car (save for a part of a gate caught on the undercarriage of it, him crashing into the garage and a power saw falling on his head once he exits the car).
  • In "Itchy and Scratchy Land", Homer is drowsy while driving the family to find a motel during the vacation. As Marge begs him to just pull over and he insist that he's okay to drive, the purple car slams into a telephone pole and catches on fire. We then see the family themselves viewing the aftermath of the crash from their hotel room and being thankful that it wasn't them.
  • In "Maximum Homerdrive", Homer, now working as a trucker, brings Bart along on one of his jobs and at one point fall asleep behind the wheel. He's only saved by a secret technique among truckers where the truck drives itself to protect its occupants from any harm and make sure their business is kept afloat.
  • In "Half-Decent Proposal", a sleep-deprived Marge, who is losing sleep over Homer's snoring, is attempting to drive Bart, Lisa and Milhouse to school, when she suddenly falls out of the car and gets some rest and leaves the children to try and drive her car instead.
• In the Justice League two-part story, "Only A Dream", Doctor Destiny uses his new Dream Walker abilities to terrorize the Justice League by trapping them in their nightmares. When Batman realizes this, he does anything he can to stay awake. Try as he might, he becomes tired enough to accidentally drive the Batmobile straight into a cluster of trash cans, cracking the windshield. Batman then orders a triple espresso, punches out the now cracked window, and turns on the most annoying radio music he can to keep himself awake.
• Garfield's Babes and Bullets: According to the police, Professor O'Tabby's death came supposedly about from him falling asleep while driving, leading to his car running off a cliff. However, his wife believes he was murdered, leading to her hiring Private Eye Sam Spayed to investigate. It turns out Mrs. O'Tabby and the police are both right, as O'Tabby's co-worker, Professor O'Felix, drugged his coffee with prescription sleeping pills before he went on a routine drive, causing him to fall asleep at the wheel.
• The Perils of Penelope Pitstop: On at least two occasions, Snoozy has fallen asleep while driving Chugga-Boom.

Real Life

• Actor Nathaniel Marston fell asleep while driving and ended up critically injured and in a coma after a 2015 car accident. Although it was reported that if he came out of this state, he would have been a quadriplegic, he never regained consciousness and died of his injuries twelve days later.
• After spending most of the previous night talking by telephone and messaging with a woman he had met online, Gary Hart fell asleep on the M62 motorway near Selby, Yorkshire, England, while driving a Land Rover towing a trailer holding another car. The vehicle travelled down an embankment on to the main rail line between Edinburgh and London. Hart escaped from the car and while he was on the phone to the emergency services, an express passenger train travelling from Newcastle to London struck the Land Rover and was derailed into the path of a freight train travelling in the other direction. Both drivers, two train crew and six passengers on board the express train, as well as one of the two drivers of the freight train, were killed. 52 passengers were seriously injured. Hart received a five-year prison sentence for causing death by dangerous driving.
• Tracy Morgan was among those injured in a June 2014 car crash caused by a Walmart driver who, according to the lawsuit Morgan filed, allegedly fell asleep at the wheel of his long-haul truck in addition to being awake for more than 24 hours at the time of the accident. The crash resulted in serious injuries for Morgan (who was also left in a two-week coma) and killed his friend and fellow comedian James McNair.
• Brent Hershman, a cameraman for the film Pleasantville, was killed this way after working a 19-hour work day on the set. In addition to the numerous lawsuits his death resulted in, the industry itself soon had an overhaul regarding work hour limitations for cast and crew.
• This is how Sylvester Ritter, better known as Junkyard Dog, passed away. He tried to make it to his daughter's high school graduation, only to miss it and after spending the day with her and the rest of his family, he fell asleep driving back home and crashed his car.
• Joseph "Joe" Bell, the father of Jadin Bell, was killed as a pedestrian by a driver who is believed to have done this. After his son's suicide, he attempted a walk across the country as a part of his nonprofit, Faces of Change, to help raise awareness of bullying and his son's honor, only to be fatally struck less than six months into his journey.

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