It was a hot summer night in 1980, and the 45-year-old Australian builder was so exhausted he was nearly falling off scaffolding. He had sleep apnea — a condition that causes people to struggle to breathe while sleeping — and his body was barely holding itself together due to a severe lack of quality sleep. Finally his doctors told him that he had a choice: Either punch a hole in his throat so he could breathe while sleeping, a procedure known as a tracheotomy, or become a test subject for a new machine called a CPAP, short for continuous positive airway pressure.
The builder chose the CPAP, and from July 8 to 9, 1980, he took a literally historic snooze. When the builder woke up the following morning, he remarked at how refreshed he felt. For the first time he could remember, he felt genuinely awake and well-rested. His brain fog had dissipated; his blood pressure had improved; and, perhaps most strikingly, he realized he had been rendered partially color blind from exhaustion. One thing he did not recall, however, was how he wound up in the room with the CPAP in the first place. It is a somewhat cruel ironic twist: The first person to ever sleep with a CPAP was so desperately tired when he agreed to wear it that he did not remember doing so the following morning. He even asked where he was because his brain had not recorded memories of his own pioneering slumber.
