Why don’t snorers wake themselves up?
They do, actually.
I don’t snore much, but sometimes I will wake myself up with a snort.
My wife is similar.
People with a serious problem, like sleep apnea, snore and stop breathing. They keep waking up very frequently, which means they never feel rested.
Because they’re asleep.
(dang, this “Reply to Thread” window took nearly 10 minutes to load.)
Ahem… on topic, there are two things that could wake a snorer: sound and lack of oxygen.
In the latter case, Aeschines is right, the snorer does wake. I share a hotel room at gaming conventions occasionally with a friend who has a horrid case of sleep apnea. His snoring is loud and raucous, and he regularly stops breathing altogether… waking himself by shaking his leg and gasping for air past his collapsed airway… it’s not pretty. His quality of sleep is terrible, and he is usually exhausted all day long.
Now, the other thing that could wake a snorer… the sound… appears to be ignored on a different level entirely. When I got to be about 30 years old, I started snoring slightly… not loud, but just a gentle buzzing. The first few weeks, I would wake myself as I drifted off. But I didn’t recognize myself as the source of the sound. I would be falling asleep and hear a distant, far off noise. “What’s that sound?” I would rouse myself… but the sound was gone.
It only took a month or so for me to completely ignore myself… but yet a rattle on the doorknob in the front room would still wake me from a deep sleep. I suspect that there’s some kind of feedback mechanism that tells the brain, “Ignore yourself,” so that you aren’t constantly depriving yourself from sleeping.