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Idiopathic Hypersomnia
Excessive, persistent daytime sleepiness with no identifiable cause, often with long sleep and a difficult, confused waking.
It is considered rare, but estimates vary widely between studies and it is probably underestimated because of diagnostic difficulty.
It is a central disorder of hypersomnolence: the need to sleep stays high even after a full night, and waking comes with an intense, prolonged sleep inertia. It does not depend on sleeping too little.
More sleep does not make up for this sleepiness, and sleep inertia is strongest in the first minutes after waking, often just when people get into the car. Diagnosis and treatment reduce that sleepiness.
It is one of the hypersomnias, the family in which sleep invades the day beyond the control of will. Drive Awake documents it because it shows, in clinical form, the limit of simply sleeping more.
