Trump, joking about falling to second place behind Carson, said at a rally in October, "You know some of them: 'We have a breaking story. Donald Trump has fallen to second place behind Ben Carson. We informed Ben. But he was sleeping."

One such occasion, he writes, is how he knew he was meant to be with his wife Candy.

As a senior at Yale, Carson was driving a sleeping Candy Rustin (now Candy Carson) back to New Haven from Detroit, when he too succumbed to fatigue.

"With my hands relaxed on the wheel, the car flew along at 90 miles per hour," he wrote in his 1990 autobiography Gifted Hands. "The heater, turned on low, kept us comfortably warm. It had been half an hour or more since I'd seen another vehicle. I felt relaxed, everything under control. Then I floated into a comfortable sleep too."

He was abruptly awakened, he says, by the "vibration of the car striking the metal illuminators that separate each lane," at which point he "grabbed the steering wheel, and fiercely jerked to the left." A "heartbeat" after the car came to a stop, "an eighteen-wheeler transport came barreling through on that lane."

It was then, he writes, that Candy told him she thought they were meant to be together and Carson said he thought so too. It's a story he has re-told in other books, such as this year's You Have A Brain.

Fast-forward to 1998, when, according to a friend quoted in a Real Clear Politics piece on Carson, the renowned neurosurgeon had another epiphany after falling asleep while driving.

The RCP story says Carson was "weighed upon" by the death of the friend's daughter and "a late night of surgeries," when he passed out at the wheel, only to be awakened by the "sound of the cars' wheels on the shoulder."

"The episode also awakened Carson to a work-life dynamic that he decided was gravely out of balance, Boyer recalled; the next day, Carson asked that his workload at Johns Hopkins be reduced," RCP reports.



Carson writes of a similar event in his 1999 book The Big Picture. He fell asleep at the wheel twice "in a matter of days," in the weeks before the completion of that book.