It's Coming From Inside the House

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799), Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

I was about three years old when this happened. I woke up during the night, and I could hear some kind of wild animal snarling, growling, and snuffling in the darkness. Frightened, I called out for my mother. She sat on the edge of the bed and asked me what was wrong.

"There's a bear in the house!" I told her. "I can hear it."

"That's not a bear," she said. "It's just your father, snoring."

I learned to sleep with the bedroom door closed.

It has always mystified me that people are usually not awakened by their own snoring. All that noise is right there, inside their heads, and they sleep right through it. In Dad's case, it seemed particularly ironic, in that he was very bothered by noise of any kind. Loud conversations, popular music, distant train whistles -- any sound the world produced set his nerves on edge, especially at night. In his youth, the sound of crickets chirping became so maddening that one night he went outside with a hammer in his hand, determined to smash them, one by one. It was a hopeless quest.

To preserve his sanity and get some rest, Dad wore earplugs to bed. Decades later, Mom, airing yet another grievance, said that she thought he did it on purpose so that he wouldn't have to get up and take care of a crying baby (or, perhaps, a toddler who heard bears).

I once asked Mom how she could possibly sleep next to someone who made that much noise. "It's easy," she told me. "I just fall asleep before he does." Mom was a deep sleeper.