How I Tried Stop Snoring

I wanted a quick fix, even if it meant strapping a glorified bike pump to my face

- Jordan Foisy

I think of myself as a good sleeper. Give me a large book and a horizontal position, and I could fall asleep strapped to the top of a bullet train. Sleep has been a constant ally, a friend. When I was a teen, it was a refuge. I used to pray for sleep; its temporary oblivion was a welcome respite from anxiety and obsessive thoughts. It was a pause-not a death, but close enough to it. Every time I fell asleep, there was a chance of resurrection, to wake up new.

My girlfriend, Allison, however, does not think I'm a good sleeper. She knows the truth. At night, I thrash around and scream. Occasionally, it sounds like my breathing stops. Worst of all for her, I snore. Badly. She's shown me a video of it, and it's horrifying: My thin, wheezing inhalations are interrupted by a wrenching tear of a noise, like someone ripping a carpet inside a cave.

We sometimes get into little fights when I wake up. She's had a terrible sleep and is justifiably annoyed. She can't stay mad for long, though, because who is she mad at? Certainly, it was my body, not me, that was snoring; my lungs moving the air, my soft tissues. Those are the guilty parties. When Allison is flipping my sleeping body over and plugging its nose, or occasionally smothering my face with a pillow, who is she smothering? How unimportant is the self to our life when we are sleeping-something we spend a third of our life doing-that it can be completely absent?

I TRIED TREATING MY SNORING with the junk-drawer solution of buying every anti-snoring device I could: nose strips, mouth guards, nasal spray-anything that promised snoring absolution. Nothing worked. Every time, there would be a glimmer of hope, when we would try to convince ourselves my snoring wasn't as bad. But, every time, it soon became clear the only difference was that the top of my mouth was now shredded from the cheap plastic of a so-called snore guard.