The Big Snore

Let me start off by saying that I have slept with more people than most people I know. Before you begin to raise your eyebrows and go ‘hmmm’, the keyword here is ‘slept’ and for the purposes of this post, no more than that. Which makes me wonder when it was that ‘sleeping’ with someone began to mean ‘having sex’. But that’s a topic for another day.  

Recently I travelled to Ladakh with a friend whose name begins with the letter ’N’. Our first night was spent at the Ibis Airport Hotel in New Delhi since we had a ridiculously early morning flight to catch. A few minutes after we went to bed, our room began to shake with N’s snoring. For those of you that haven’t stayed at an Ibis, they have small, efficient, capsule like rooms which allow snoring sounds to bounce off of every close wall. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep for a moment the entire night and just to get back at N, I woke up at 2:30 am, turned on the lights, banged on doors and took a shower. Yeah dude, I’m going to punish you by being clean early in the morning.  

The next night wasn’t much better, after which I decided that if I didn’t get my own room and a proper night’s sleep, N would probably not make it out of Ladakh alive.

Save your sympathies for now because I’ve been on the other side, driving my sleeping partner crazy. Eight of us had once gone to Dehradun, where we were staying in a fabulously charming bungalow with enormous bedrooms, 4 poster beds, sunken baths, definitely one of the warmest and most tastefully done up places I have ever stayed at. There were 4 bedrooms with 2 of us sharing each one. The first night apparently went off okay because my roomie didn’t complain. The next two nights however, my snoring was so loud that he had to sleep on a daybed in one of the other bedrooms. Which actually worked out pretty nicely for me as I could spread myself across that king size piece of antique. 

The funniest snoring story though brings me to when I was living in Chicago and was driving to the Smokey Mountains with my friends Mike and Elsa. We began our journey at around 8 pm with the idea that we would drive for a few hours, spend the night at a hotel and continue on in the morning. Except that when we were ready to call it a night, there were no rooms available at any of the hotels we were stopping at. We were pretty much in the middle of nowhere, there weren’t a lot of hotels to choose from in the first place and apparently a movie was being shot so for miles and miles everything was booked.

Finally at about 4 am we got to a Howard Johnson and the three of us, tired but still nutty and goofy, got off our car in our sunglasses (don’t ask) and walked over to the reception desk. Elsa was in the middle with her arms around Mike and I. She looked at the lady at the front desk and asked in her most serious tone, “honey, do you have a room we could use for a couple of hours?”

Of course the 3 of us burst out laughing and at that unearthly hour, our laughter sounded really, really loud. Anyway, a few minutes later we got ourselves a room, Mike had brought a sleeping bag and Elsa and I got the bed. I don’t remember how long we had slept but all of a sudden every light in the room had been turned on and Mike was standing at the foot of our bed going, “would you guys just knock it off with your snoring?”

How exactly does one do that since a sleeping person has no idea that he/she is creating havoc? 

The good news is that the last few people I have slept with during my travels have not complained about my snoring keeping them up. It’s probably because I now have a relaxed life and get (more than) adequate sleep. So if at some point you’re thinking of sleeping with me, it’s pretty likely that you won’t be disturbed. 

Oh and by the way, how many people have you slept with?