I don't generally sleep very well. I have a bit of insomnia, I get Jimmy leg on occasion, my feet get really hot even when it's cold, and the slightest noise usually wakes me up.
I like it cold and dark and quiet to get a half-decent sleep.
I also have to sleep with one eye open after the pillow incident a couple of years back where my wife claimed she was sleep walking and says I need to stop whining, because she didn't really put a whole lot of pressure on my face with pillow anyway.
The pillow on the face I can handle, snoring is another thing altogether.
And thankfully, although my wife may "sleepwalk" every so often and try to ease a pillow over my airways, she is not a snorer.
And that's what I wanted to talk about this week. Snorers. They drive me crazy. Maybe it's because of the sleep deprivation or the fact that I don't sleep well in the first place, so I really need all the sleep I get.
Maybe it all stems back to when I was younger sleeping in the same bedroom with my two brothers.
One was a major snorer and the other had the worst-smelling feet ever. Grass would wither and die under his feet when he went for a walk in the back fields and when buying him shoes we always looked for the ones with the built-in air fresheners.
Anyway, recently I was at a karate training seminar in Peachland and after an intense day of training we all retired to our cabins (roughly 20 people to a cabin) for a well-deserved sleep before getting up at five the next morning for training in the snow at 6.
After getting settled, and after the last person decided to turn the lights out, it was thankfully pitch black and I was ready for a good sleep.
However after getting to the stage of almost nodding off - the point where you sometimes jerk awake as you think you are falling - it started.
Someone in the next bed was having a little snore. Only this little snore was causing my bed to slowly move across the floor. It was absolutely horrendous. The next morning, after about 45 minutes of sleep, I explained to the snorer I thought there were two grizzlys outside the window gaining carnal knowledge of each other with all the noise I heard in the night. He didn't seem bothered as he had a good sleep and said he couldn't hear himself snoring.
Snorers drive me crazy. Partly because I can't sleep when I am within earshot of them - even if they are in the next room they can drive me nuts - but mostly because snorers know they snore, but generally refuse to do anything about it. They seem to think because they are sleeping it is the responsibility of the other people to deal with it. For some reason it is not up to them to wear nose strips, or a mouth guard or a snorkel where we could vent the snorkel and the noise through the chimney, so the rest of us can also get some sleep.
At one point I thought of taking a pair of ear plugs and shoving them in his nose.
Then I remembered how my older brother used to snore when I was younger.
It used to drive me mad. After a few minutes of it I would get out of bed and hold his nose. It only took a few seconds for his brain to compute that there was no oxygen coming in and it would force him to open his mouth to breath and the snoring would stop. But usually only temporarily.
After what would seem to be an eternity of this snoring, and after several more attempts at pinching his nose I would hit him as hard as I could with my pillow without ever leaving my bed.
The pillow would be retracted and under my head before he ever knew what had happened and this might take place several times throughout the night.
There would be peace in the universe for about 10 minutes until he fell asleep and the snoring started all over again.
And if it wasn't his snoring it was my other brother's feet. You could throw his socks at the wall and they would stick and often start crawling up toward the ceiling. I used to open the bedroom window in the middle of the night and throw his socks into the back garden. One morning we found two dead crows lying beside them.
But beating him with a pillow would not do anything about the funk, so after numerous attempts to get him to wash his feet or put the socks in the laundry I decided to take things into my own hands.
With some of his rancid socks lying on the floor at the end of his bed one afternoon - at this stage the socks were stiff like cardboard - I donned some industrial rubber gloves, opened up his pillow case and quickly stuffed the socks inside. I proceeded to rub them around before turning the pillow over and putting the socks into the other side. I left the socks inside the pillow case as I thought he might smell the funk then turn the pillow over.
It only took a few nights of this before he figured out what was going on and cleaned his act up.
It's a pity there isn't something as easy to do to prevent the snorers from polluting the room with their noise.
And so, until there is, I remain insomnia-filled and still sleeping with one eye open. You just never know when a family member might be found "sleepwalking" with a pillow.
