Waking up randomly, weird things.

That's pretty common. Wait until you're in a rest area sleeping in the drivers seat and the truck next to you starts pulling out of his parking spot; you wake up and start slamming on the brake pedal thinking your truck is rolling.
Another scenario is, you wake up in that same situation and think you fell asleep driving and start slamming the brake pedal.

 

I notice those moments only happen after being extremely tired, which doesn't happen often.

So many variables affect how well we sleep (food/drinks, TV, health, age, drama from last week etc).

Try doing absolutely nothing an hour before bed.

 

It's not just because you're new at it but because you are focused so much on what you are doing it becomes part of you. I drove for 42 years and woke many time wondering where I was and like you said it felt like your truck was rolling. I retired 12 years ago and still have weird dreams some nights about trucking.

 

Yeah, I’ve had all of that stuff happen too. It comes with the job.

 

That tells me you are overtired.

You need to find a 34 hour reset in a hotel away from the truck (Don't even look at the #### thing) and think about nothing but getting proper eating, hydrate and rest. (And catch up on some entertainment or home calling)

I don't want to get into my own experiences too much. There have been plenty of places where I get some sleep and don't know where the hell it is. I'll go inside and look up the information from the cashier. What town? Sometimes what state. They laugh but it's all good.

What I do is I make a note of ODO miles at midnight. And location.

That gives me a datum data point to work back from the waking up odometer sometime in the future. One little sentence in the ledger pad.

I remember my first hayward fault quake at 4 am near Salinas It was a nice 4.9 a rocker as far as the sleeping problem is made on the airride is concerned. It was not my first quake. We had two in my lifetime below our hose in the bedrock which is quite different than the rollers near Memphis and westcoast.

I would wake up instantly the moment that reefer unit coughed or quit (Did someone shut the #### thing off?)

The ultimate wakeup problem was coming out of dreamland to a snapshot of my spouse out of room in the corner of the Pax side of the cab with a sexual predator coming across my drivers seat. A knife and me moved fast to take care of that little problem. Literally no time to think. Something snapped and I moved really fast.

Man moved faster and was gone in like three steps. My spouse said that I should not be moving that fast from dead sleep to her I was moving way too slow. (Time distortion due to extreme stress of life and death problem in body and mind)

I don't know if I can move that fast now 20 years later into my 50's without some sort of heart failure or some other problem.

Finally but not last. I don't have a body clock and am a night runner by nature. Or by necessity. I know enough to try and rest between roughly 5 am to 8 am because that is a dangerously stressful time against the body who has been up all night.

As far as certain incidents, the worst case for me was sleeping with my foot on the service brake about 14 hours on a uphill on the side of the road. My foot was killing me and I gotta say that angels kept it there loaded and all. I had reached for that last 200 miles over 2000 gone and it was a bridge too far that night for me. White line fever told me to put it down somewhere before I took someone out.

It would be another 10 to 15 years before I was able to have some sort of sleep pattern without the disruptive dreams related to trucking problems. I was a wall climber at times. It's stupid but sometimes the mind has to work on the material at night and fails to put the body under properly for sleep where it is ( Sleepwalking is the closest example and for me that only happens during times of really strong stress.)

You would think I would be dead by now of stress. But that's not what will take me out. It will be something I don't see coming and I will have all the sleep there is.

 

#### glad I do not run anywhere near hard enough for that crap anymore

Barr-Nunn running overnight DHL loads stopped for a quick power nap in Carolina. Woke up knowing I fell asleep driving. Bout broke my #### wrist grabbing the wheel and jammed my ankle on the brake.

Told them pull me off those runs for awhile.

 

It’s not good to do this. If you train your body to sleep in that drivers seat, it makes it much easier for you to fall a sleep while driving. Very bad habit to be in.

 

I haven't had anything like that happen yet. I have random dreams of running over stop signs and such. But as far as being awake, I'll pull over, take a nap, then wake up to resume driving and leave my codriver behind at the truck stop. That and leaving my CDL behind. Those are my two things so far.