A vast majority of snorers are in fact men, and may be waking up hundreds of times a night without remembering it in the morning.
Snoring in its worst form is a symptom of obstructive sleep apnea, in which a person’s breathing passage is blocked in the relaxation of sleep, so that he cannot breathe and sleep at the same time.
His oxygen levels go down, which would soon be fatal, but then he starts to wake up and breathe again.
Sufferers, who are men by a margin of twenty to one, may bounce between light sleep and something that is not quite wakefulness.
They may repeat this cycle an exhausting six hundred to eight hundred times a night without ever getting into the deepest stage of sleep but may remember almost nothing.
A garden-variety benign snorer may also have a lot of sleep disruption that he does not remember.
This also means that most people who snore don’t know that they’re snoring.
