The brain damage that would go along with depriving your brain of oxygen for five minutes straight actally explains a lot about your posts. 
It's actually more like 150 instances of 30-60 seconds of deprivation. It lowers the blood oxygen levels progressively. Each person is different, obviously, and my oxysat counts never got below 90% during the tests. That means that while I have a lot of incidents that destroy the quality of my sleep, I don't suffer nearly as much of the metabolic disruption as other people with the same number of incidents. The tech's theory was that it was a function of being in far better condition than the average in my incident range. My problems are all on the less dangerous side.
I was camping with a friend who was mildly snoring and once every 2-3 minutes he would just stop breathing altogether for about 15-30 seconds, after which he would take a sudden, sharp breath as though his body was panicking (which I suppose it probably was).
It is the fight or flight response of suffocation. Put your head underwater for a minute straight and see how your body reacts. Now imagine doing that while asleep and without the rational involvement of doing it intentionally.
It's probably a stretch to apply this to sleep apnea, but have any of you with sleep problems tried melatonin?
Different concept. There are two types of sleep apnea: obstructive and central. Obstructive is simply that your esophagus closes off and you can't get air through. Central is a disruption of the unconscious cognitive signal to breathe. Neither one is a function of the inability to
get to sleep. Both are functions of the inability to sustain breathing while sleeping.