When one sees a car accident while driving at night , the immediate assumption is that one of the drivers had to have been under the influence of alcohol. The possibility of the driver falling asleep behind the wheel doesn’t occur to many. While alcohol may be a factor in causing most accidents, sleep, particularly one’s sleep debt, remains the underlying issue, despite its innocent facade. Sleep debt is the accumulated hours of sleep every night when one did not receive an adequate amount of sleep. William C. Dement and Christopher Vaughan evaluate the idea of sleep debt in order to reveal the atrocious reality of sleep deprivation.
Dement and Vaughan’s excerpt from The Promise of Sleep, Sleep Debt and the Mortgaged Mind, reveals that the influence of sleep debt could be the major cause for most accidents. They prove this by discussing humans ignorance over the topic of sleep. Alcohol is blamed to be the main culprit for any accident, which disregards sleep as a potential factor. In reality, those with higher sleep debts are more influenced by alcohol ,
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Dement and Vaughan put an emphasis on the fact that recovering from sleep debt is a difficult task that most tend to struggle with. Once you have accumulated a sleep debt, the recovery from it is almost impossible. People believe that they can decrease their sleep debt by making up the hours loss over the weekend by sleeping in late, but our biological clocks won’t allow us to sleep for very long. For every hour you are awake, you require two hours of sleep, which for most people will be 8 hours a night. Dement and Vaughan address the relationship between alcohol and sleep in order to educate the public of the possible outcomes. With the information released to the public, they hope that it will impact them in one day helping to save their