The Magical Mystery Snore
I’m one of the worst snorers in the world. But my old attitude used to be: God help anyone else snore in my presence.
When beginning life as a working actor, you must prepare for many occasions. You train, you educate, you practice, all to be the absolute best you can for the job at hand. But they don’t prepare you for other actors snoring.
For me, life on tour has mostly been as part small scale school tours. The usual situation here is three to five people in a cast driving from show to show in a van with a load of set, costume and tech in the back. Starting a tour like this is a true Big Brother situation (sadly I refer to the reality show and not the Orwellian masterpiece). You meet new people that you will work and live with for the next few months. Many issues can come from touring at this scale, particularly when sharing a room. What if they are the type to stay up till late? What if you want to get up earlier before call time? What if they’re a professional gamer that puts on their equipment to record their latest exploits but then accidentally fall asleep and are completely out for the count and you’re too polite to wake them and you have to try and sleep whilst the room is lit up like its daytime with recording equipment whirring in the distance? [That really happened!]
Many problems like this can easily be resolved before they become anything big, but one thing that’s always been an issue is snoring. We’ve all been there — you’re just settling down, that feeling of sleep is just about to resonate…and you’re awoken by a sound so loud, you look to see there’s a nearby lighthouse guiding a ship to shore.
As I stated at the start of this piece — I am a snorer. However, during much of my touring life, it was not so bad. I was often told by roommates that I had a light snore or that they were a heavy sleeper, so could sleep through it. I was not so fortunate. When I had another snorer in the room, they really REALLY snored. How to handle it can be tricky. I’m a sensitive soul and so if someone mentions to me that I’d snored, I used to take umbrage, as if they were suggesting I was doing it on purpose. I assumed everyone I mentioned it to would feel the same, so I set about a couple of ways of getting through the nights.
1: Earphones. Plug in your personal music player, set up some relaxing music, set a sleep timer and of you go. Main issue — if you sleep on your side, will the earphones ever come out? If they get stuck, that’s the next day’s show kinda screwed (not to mention your hearing).
2: Earplugs. Simple, right? Except that at the time I was working these tours, getting a comfy pair of earplugs was exceedingly rare. Always fell out of my ears, no good for me.
3: Wake up the snorer without making it obvious. I tried so hard with this method: Loudly whispering “turn over”; clapping my hands together; trying to snore louder than them; all followed by pretending to be fast asleep so that, if they did wake or stir, they would think it was a dream. Anything to stop the inevitable explosive noise of me shouting at them to stop snoring.
Between these examples and sleeping on the communal sofa, there’s no certain way of dealing with snorers. If they are not willing to use remedies themselves, then you just have to put up with it.
These days, the joke is rather on me. Due to my snoring getting louder, I went to my GP and after some tests I was diagnosed with Obstructive Sleep Apnoea. Maybe I should have learned to just embrace the snorers.
I’ll chat more about the apnoea in a future blog.
What are your snoring experiences? Any sure-fire ways to cope with touring sleep issues? Let me know in the comments. Please share and thanks for reading.
