As much as I would have liked to hear this revelation from a nice young woman in the same bed as me, I instead found it out from my indignant sister, who happened to be sleeping in the room across the hall. She said that I was snoring so loudly that she crossed over to my bed and hit me with a pillow in an attempt to make me stop.
As a whole, I'm unaffected by snoring. I make it a point to sleep when I'm tired (as opposed to sleeping as part of a normal, everyday schedule), and therefore have been able to doze off sitting in front of the TV or under the glare of the reading light. On the other hand, snoring has become a bit of a fascination as a result: I'm all too willing to stay awake a few more minutes just to listen to the curious, sonorous sound, or wonder if it's going to persist once the snorer shifts position.
For that matter, I thought that I wasn't a snorer for the longest time. I'm usually the last person in my family to fall into slumber each night, so there's almost always nobody around to listen to my transgressions.
I do know that I talk in my sleep, though. So far, nobody has been able to directly interpret exactly what I've been talking about, but I like to think that it involves drafts for future pieces of fiction. Or synopses of strange dreams, if you like; I get a lot of strange dreams.
Yes, it's strange to receive a complaint regarding one's snoring when one hasn't run into any problems at all regarding years of sleep-talking. Maybe the latter is just more entertaining to listeners when it does occur.
Regardless of how inconvenient things may have turned out, it's still a lot less disconcerting than what I went through some decades ago. I had a really nasty sleepwalking habit when I was a child, and if the stories told by my parents are to be believed, then I probably did everything from jumping through hoops to writing masterpiece symphonies. (This seemed to be a family trait, by the way -- I've heard that a couple of cousins have had similar problems.)
And now I apparently snore. This is just one more item in the long laundry list that is my somnabulent history.
I used to believe that snoring was the result of an unfortunate physical characteristic -- perhaps the fact that one's nasal passages were below a certain length, or the presence of a narrow gap between the olfactory nerves and the central palate. While I don't think that I've gone through any physical changes in the last few years, it's altogether possible that my recent rash of colds might have unhinged something in my cranium somewhere. There's probably a forthcoming explanation out there somewhere.
Considering that I've now gone through sleepwalking, sleep-talking, lucid dreaming, a little bit of insomnia, and now snoring, I wonder what's left for me out there. The logical progression seems to imply that I'm going to run into narcolepsy next; It's not something to look forward to, I'll tell you that.
The alternatives, though, are too weird to imagine. So if I stay over at your house one day and you find that I'm tap-dancing in my sleep, feel free to wake me up so that you can make fun of my awkward situation.
Or, failing that, you can always sit back, grab a bag of popcorn, and enjoy the show. I won't mind.
4 comments:
If it makes you feel any better, a few nights ago, when my cold was at full force, my sister said it sounded like Darth Vader was sleeping in my bed. :p
Ailee: This is why I find the human snore to be morbidly fascinating at times -- you can describe any number of snores in any number of ways. I've noted descriptions that go all the way from "low growl" and "buzzsaw" to such anomalies as "motorcycle engine" and "sonic boom". This is the first time I've heard of a "Darth Vader" description, though. :)
At the risk of sounding like a spammer I feel I should tell you of an alternative remedy for your snoring. My snoring was a problem for the spouse. My wife would often wake me to stop. We found an unexpected solution that has stopped my snoring: The SquidFace and ComfyRest pillows. The snoring relief on my back was an unexpected benefit of an invention I patented for being able to lie facedown comfortably and breathe without turning my head to the side. Snoring relief and many additional pain relief benefits are on my website. www.SquidFace.com
Comfyrest: I thank you for being considerate about the "spammer" perceptions. I'll check out the site, although I fear that my sleeping situation is somewhat irredeemable already. All the tossing and turning I do tends to invalidate any easy solutions. :)
"SquidFace", by the way, strikes me as an odd name for a pillow. I'm wondering if there's any particular explanation for the name...
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