That happened to me driving across west Texas with the cruise control on. The wide apron with rumble strips saved me. I had been asleep long enough to be dreaming. Waking up from a dream behind the wheel of a car headed off the road was a real shock. Traffic was thankfully very sparse and there was little to hit other than low scrub, but still. I won’t use cruise to this day because of it.
Sigh. I don’t do that anymore, but when I was in the Navy, I thought I could do nearly anything.
I got up at 10 AM, worked a full night shift at work, jumped in my car the next morning and drove straight through on leave from Jacksonville, FL to Boston, MA, about a 24 hour journey. When I got home, I immediately dropped my stuff off at home, visited with as many friends as I could, picked up a gal I had arranged a date with, and drove up to Hampton Beach in New Hampshire with her for dinner and beach activities.
Around midnight (about 50 hours since I woke up in Florida) as I was driving my date home on 495 South in Massachusetts, I fell fast asleep.
No warning, just fell fast asleep (she was sleeping in the passenger seat of my MG Midget already). Next thing I knew, my head was bumping the inside of the convertible top of the MG. We were transversing the grass median of the highway diagonally at about 50 mph.
I was so damn lucky it was relatively flat and clear. No rocks or trees. I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been. I could have killed that girl, not to mention myself.
What amazed me was how quickly my brain just turned off.
I had the same experience in CA. In my case the strip was made of divots indented in the edge of the asphalt. I was headed over a bluff when I woke up. What’s funny now is, as shocking as it was, it was nothing compared to the terror of the next 50 miles before I could find a place to get off the highway. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stay awake but couldn’t stop. Kept having these “am I asleep again?” moments every 45 seconds or so. It was like some twisted Outer Limits episode. Never again will I knowingly drive exhausted.
Your experience reminded me that, yes, I did have a real close call. Driving over to Georgia in 1962 to see a girlfriend, I was driving at night and was awoken from my slumbers by the feeling that I was no longer horizontal. The car was going down a hill. I was able to stop it. My laundry had the rest of the story.