Driving on autopilot

NOW THAT I am a senior citizen, one of my biggest fears is becoming more susceptible to falling asleep while driving and accidentally hitting someone or something. I have always been nocturnal, but now my sleep patterns have become more irregular and I find myself awake when I should be asleep and drowsy when I should not be.

Finding myself sleepy at the wheel, I resort to all sorts of things to keep myself from conking out. But sometimes no amount of pinching or slapping myself on the face or playing loud music works. I have to stop at a service station to sleep before proceeding. Lately, I have taken to stashing an energy drink in the car, which I gulp down whenever I feel cloudy-brained and heavy-lidded during the slower-than-snail-paced traffic on Edsa or C5, or even SLEx, and I cannot readily go to the road shoulder or an emergency bay or a service station.

I make sure to put the car in neutral in bumper-to-bumper traffic because on several occasions I found myself drifting off while I was still in drive and I only had my foot on the brake. What if my foot slid off or unconsciously eased pressure on the brake? I would surely rear-end the vehicle in front of me.

In the open stretches of SLEx and the Skyway, where I used to drive at up to 150 kilometers per hour before the maximum 100 kph speed limit was strictly enforced, I would notice that my speed would be down to 60 kph in the fast lane, with other vehicles avoiding me and zipping by on the right. I had fallen asleep and I had instinctively slowed down!

Wait, there’s something that keeps me awake: I would talk aloud about my sexual fantasies, but only when I am alone in the car, which is usually the case. It’s a variation of what I was told by a long-distance runner of the UP track and field team: to endure the pain and sheer monotony of training, he would fantasize about all the women he wanted, and it would help him finish his run. He would disconnect from the task at hand and go somewhere else more pleasurable.

The irony about trying to fight off drowsiness while driving is you think you’re awake but actually you’re not. I would just find myself wondering where I was already—or worse, wonder how I got to where I was. A couple of times, upon miraculously arriving home in one piece, I went around my vehicle looking for dents because I could not believe that I did not graze anything.

Certainly, adequate sleep is very important. And so is its regularity. Sleep deprivation or disruption of sleep patterns is not healthy. But the world is far different from when I was younger. Now stimuli are not only physiological or vicarious, they are also virtual and instantaneous. Not counting the endless duties one has to discharge in places far and near in a sprawling metropolis. Which amounts to being awake at odd hours and also not being able to sleep during the daylight hours.

Plus turning 60 makes you feel really mortal and with such limited time. It’s like while you have become more discriminating and you don’t want to waste your time on fluff, you can’t read fast enough to go through all the books you want to read or watch all the movies you want to watch or have enough energy to still be productive and take care of business. So you want to make every waking hour count. Which makes you, in the end, sleepy. And since I have to drive regularly to three far-apart cities separated by long stretches of heavy traffic, I have to contend with this predicament.

I must have some kind of sixth sense, or there’s an autopilot feature in my brain that keeps me from straying out of my lane or not sensing a hazard fast enough, and which still brings me safely to my destination. I suppose it is some kind of muscle memory reading the driving paths and patterns hardwired into my brain from doing the same things countless times. But it can also fail. Once, I took the wrong exit and wondered where I was. It was the exit before mine, so it was maybe because I really wanted to get home and could not get there fast enough (something my wife would be glad to hear).

A deterioration of my physical faculties is inevitable, and I’m afraid I’m gradually shutting down. But until driverless cars become the norm, I will have to rely on my internal autopilot to keep me safe when micro sleep creeps up on me while I’m behind the wheel.

Oh, did I say that my right leg cramps when I’m driving for long stretches?

Roderick Toledo, 60, is a freelance communication projects manager.