By Lee Frank Seventy-million Americans suffer from sleep deprivation, and half of them don't even know it. For instance, there's this disorder called apnea, which is when your windpipe closes. You stop sleeping effectively while your breathing diminishes. After you think you've had a full night sleep, you wake up feeling exhausted.
Overweight men are prone to apnea.
After studying the circumstances of his death, sleep experts suspect John Candy died of this sleep disorder. Nobody knows why we sleep. Only that we need to. To do without sleep is torture. The Spanish Inquisition and the Nazis used sleep deprivation to torment their victims.