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One person in eight snores during a good part of each night. This disorder produces a variety of buzzes, snorts, grunts, or gurgles that range in volume from the tones of normal conversation (forty decibels) almost to the noise level of a pneumatic drill (seventy decibels and up) (4). The sounds are generated for the most part by the vibrations of soft structures in the nose and throat that accompany mouth breathing during sleep. Occasionally some form of nasal blockage (polyps, a deviated septum) is found to be the root of the disorder. More commonly however medical examination is negative and such general factors as fatigue, heavy smoking, obesity, and ill health are invoked as contributing causes (5). The fact that more than three hundred snore-curtailing devices are patented in the United States alone attests to the size of the problem, as well as to the lack of specific treatment.
Strangely, the snorer himself is rarely distressed by the havoc he causes. Rather it is the victimized spouse, the 'sleepy, disgruntled person with the bloodshot eyes', who leads a sheepish patient into the doctor's office (6).
Perhaps it is this combination of the general prevalence of the symptom, the indifference of the offending person, and the tendency to treat it as a topic for comedy that has caused psychiatrists and analysts to pay little attention to snoring as a disorder. In a literature rich in studies of somnambulism, bruxism, enuresis, and night terrors, to say nothing of the great volume of writing on the subject of dreams, not a single reference to snoring is found as other than a 'benign concomitant of sleep'.