Well, I was working nights, got up around Noon, went to work and worked all night, and left for home at around 8 AM the following morning.
I drove all day and all night, arriving home around 6 AM the next morning, immediately washing my car, and then jumping back in it and driving on a date up to New Hampshire, and around 1 AM the following morning, fell asleep at the wheel and went off the highway into the median driving the girl home from that day at the beach. I had been awake by my account around 61 hours, and I couldn't let a minute of leave from the Navy go to waste. I was young and stupid. I could have killed or maimed that girl I took on that date, not to mention myself or some other innocent driver.
I have never done anything like that again.
But, I had three funny things happen on my way home from Florida on that long sleep deprived night...as I got through New York and was going up the Merritt and Wilbur Cross Parkway, it was pouring rain, probably maybe 2 or 3 AM, and I had the windshield wipers going double-time but it wasn't helping. Somewhere south of New York, I had taken No-Doze tablets, something I had never done before, and I wasn't even a coffee drinker, and as I went through New York City, I was swerving, dodging in and out of traffic in my little yellow MG Midget, giving people the finger, shouting swears out the window...I was completely overdosing on caffeine in a body totally unused to caffeine! (I had taken more than 'just two' of those damn things)
Anyway, in Connecticut they wore off and I bonked completely. As I drove down the deserted Merritt and Wilbur Cross Parkway, peering with blurry eyes trying to stay awake through an even blurrier water drenched windshield, I was going uphill on a long stretch, and suddenly...there was a tree across the road, all the way from one side to another! I blinked, then slammed on my brakes, my car skidding sideways and hydroplaning until I stopped in the middle of the highway.
As my eyes adjusted, I realized it was not a tree in the road, but an overpass that was coming into view as I climbed uphill on the long stretch of that highway. My heart was hammering, and I didn't have any problem staying awake after that.
But in relation to the subject of this thread:
A few hours later, just as the sky was turning light, again, nobody on the Mass Turnpike heading East, I was less than an hour from home, when suddenly, I found my car driving through a swath of gore on the highway.
Bright red blood and chunks of meat and bone everywhere. I was through it before I could even touch my brakes. It was unreal. As if someone had hit a cow or something. It was even too big to have been a deer. The carnage covered the entire expanse of three lanes, side to side.
I was so sleep deprived, it was like an apparition.
Very oddly I have had the same experiences as you described. Sleep deprived driving hallucinations and a road covered in a sea of blood from what must have been a deer obliterated by a tractor trailer.
Although the deer blood was at night, it was not the same trip as the sleep hallucinations.
I used to live midway between Cecil Field and NAS Jax...
Larger than a deer? Could have been a moose, they are making a comeback in the Northeast, even as far south as N.Y. State.