Often I think these will be my husband’s last words, carved on his gravestone under ‘Not Missed’. His death caused by being smothered with a pillow that has just a whiff of Tom Ford ‘Black Orchid’ on the cotton.

It is not just those words that hurt, but the nose pinching and elbow jabs to my ribs in his attempt to stop my noise. Noise he has compared to a ‘whispering whale’ and ‘the great Sow of Legend’. What legend I don’t know, as it is a made up insult especially for me. Of course I retaliate with some under the sheet kicking and “What about your grunting oh great Boar of Legend?’ He always answers that he did not know that he snored. Which sadly is true – he doesn’t snore. He is maddeningly quiet, so quiet that when we first got married I woke up in the night and thought he had died in his sleep. He woke up to find me holding his small shaving mirror over his mouth to see if he had a breath left in him before telephoning a doctor. Oliver is also the human ice block, to add to his death-like slumber. I found a note in an early diary where in a moment of bleak humour I had declared that I would call my autobiography, in years to come, ‘I slept with a corpse and other Extraordinary Moments in my Life’.

Of course I am embarrassed about my snoring and dare not snooze on a long train journey because I might go right off into a deep sleep and start doing hog impersonations. I worry the same as a passenger in a car and bite my lip and push my fingernails into my palms to make me stay awake.

I have tried everything to stop snoring, some of it good - like quitting smoking and losing weight. But it made no difference and I snored on. Other things I have tried out of desperation and the firm belief that there must be a cure, have included wearing woollen gloves in bed and walking widdshins three times around the bed. I have slept on my back, front, left side and right side. Worn nose clips, chewed gum of every flavour, swallowed sweets and tablets, rubbed creams, oils and jelly’s into my skin, all over my face and body as well as ointments that would smell better in a vet’s surgery than smeared over my chest. I’ve sniffed the vapours of some obnoxious recipes, practiced Tai Chi and other exercises before going to bed, read poetry, listened to music of every kind through headphones as well as every soft and smooth-voiced New Age and self-help Guru I could find. Hypnosis has failed, Reiki has failed, Yoga has failed and moving the bed around to the dictates of Feng Shui has failed. Not forgetting trying hot chocolate and every bedtime drink known including a stiff shot of whiskey. The last things I tried meant me giving up all dairy products and burning Tibetan Joss sticks. Of all of it the incense at least made the bedroom smell nice, Oliver not known for having good bedroom manners.

Anthropologists claim snoring is a throwback to our ancient ancestors making fierce noises in their sleep to scare away any sabre tooth tiger from entering the tribal cave. The animal fearing the grunting snores are the vocals of some bigger and fiercer predator rather than puny people asleep.

As for psychologists, well snoring is all about guilt and the burdens leftover from childhood or a need to be noticed and heard. Oliver certainly notices me. I have read up on the pathophysiology of snoring; know all about inspiratory pharyngeal narrowing as well as the Bernouli Principle. The medical profession on the whole though do their usual scaremongering that people that snore do not live as long as people who don’t. The regular MD cop-out answer - for everyone from age six to ninety-six, for every aliment known to humanity and livestock – it is because of your age.

As for solving the problem, the only solution appears to be, other than the new laser treatment, that we sleep in separate rooms, which in practice mean Oliver sleeping on the sofa bed downstairs Monday to Friday. He has consented that he will put up with my snoring over weekends and Bank holidays. The Great Boar of Legend is so considerate that way.

The real problem is his new job, earlier starts and later finishes with further to travel. All he wants to do when he gets home is sleep, sleep, sleep and sleep some more. No thought that my job is equally demanding. That argument though does not solve the problem – I don’t like being a snorer, the Great Sow of Legend. In fact I don’t think I snore all the time, I did have a few very serious relationships before I married Oliver and I had no complaints from them about my snoring. Thinking more deeply about my dilemma it has occurred that it is only certain nights in the month when I roar out. Oh and it is loud, I have woken myself up, because of the self-decibel barrage. 

These honking nights do not take place on a regular date or time like the second Tuesday or 25th of any month, they happen when I dream of darkness, darkness with a red edge, a crimson tinting.

In this dream I always feel safe and never alone – in fact I know that people are near me. The blackness is that dark warmth you feel when you shut your eyes and relax to drift into a deep sleep. Not quite sure what a dream about sleeping means – I know it is bad Feng Shui to sleep near a mirror that holds the reflection of you asleep. Not a problem in my bedroom.

In the dream I am comfortable and have a sense of well-being and for an odd reason I sense that I am very brave and strong. This makes me happy and I start to sing – but I am not singing, but shouting – roaring. By the time I get to this part of the dream Oliver is angrily poking me with a fingertip against my temple having failed with tweaking my nose, jabbing me in the ribs and blowing in my face. And he is shouting – equalling the shouting in my dream only I am answering him with snores.

*

It has come to sleeping separately and that is not working either. On my bad snore nights Oliver claims he can hear me through the floor, in fact to his ’sensitive ears and frame’ downstairs my snoring is like a movie special effect for an earthquake. He claims my noise is vibrating through the house and he is sure that the sofa bed jumped. For two days we have not spoken, for two nights I have cried and tried to sleep with one of Oliver’s socks in my mouth and almost choked to death.

I don’t know what to do other than go back to live with my parents, make an appointment with a Relate counsellor or see a solicitor about getting a divorce. Embarrassment stops me doing any of those things. Snoring as mental cruelty to both of us, I am sure would not be taken seriously.

Oliver came home early, for him; I had not been in long myself. He found me in the bedroom hanging my work suit in the wardrobe after changing. I just looked at him as he meekly shuffled inside the room and stood near the bed head. As usual he looked dishevelled and tired; his gaze fixed firmly on the bed rather than me. Unlike the thin mattress of the sofa bed he now slept on, before him lay a king size bed with a deep mattress covered in a plush, soft duvet, with matching plump feather pillows. 

In his hand he held a black plastic bag with gold lettering proclaiming ‘Something Curious’ with the Ourobros symbol of the tail-swallowing snake printed underneath. A hard-edged, square object bulged from inside the carrier.

I did an Am-Dram Lady Plentiful stage clearing of the throat that broke his trance. He looked at me, offering a weak smile mainly lit by his eyes rather than his face, before offering me the plastic bag. I took it and he stepped back; then moved a little to the side, getting nearer to the bed.

The large cardboard box slid easily out of the bag, which I let fall to the floor. After making space on my dressing table I laid the black and gold box down and lifted off the lid. With my free hand I brushed aside the red tissue paper and made a ‘tut’ which did not make a good vocal mix with the rage on my face. I spun around to face Oliver and caught him starting to lower himself to sit on the bed.

“What the hell is this?” I had the mask in one hand and the box lid in the other; neither seemed hurtfully heavy enough to throw at my husband.

Startled he jumped up straight.

“A Swiss Dream MaskMask – very rare”

“It looks like a pig – perhaps in the likeness of the Great Sow of Legend”

“No – no. It is a sleep maskmask – to stop you snoring”

“You mean I have to wear it?”

“Only in bed”           

**

   I have allowed it – I am laid in bed wearing a hundred and fifty year old mask which smells older. Still Oliver is next to me, though I am suspicious of him and for three nights thought he might just be pretending to sleep. Waiting for me to drop off so he can take a picture of me with his camera phone and send it to all our friends.

Once I had got over what I thought had been an insult, the piggy image on the mask started to look more like that of a chubby, pink, faced boy, a herder out on the mountain meadows blowing his long horn for the cows to come home to be milked.

Oliver said in Olde Switzerland the mask represented Alpine Jack or Alpine Jacque as they would have called him, a kind of local Mr Sandman. He had come across the maskmask by chance seeing it in the window of the Collectors shop with the odd claim written on a card in front of it. ‘Traditional Swiss Guarantee for restful slumber without snoring’. Enquiring inside he discovered the wooden mask had been carved and used in the Lotschental in Canton Valais.

It is a spooky thing to wear because it has eyelids like a ventriloquist dummy; the eyes themselves are painted on, chocolate brown in colour and pierced with a small hole in each giving the wearer limited vision. The fat eyelids have soft lashes that feel like spiders legs to touch. As soon as I laid my head back on the pillow they rolled shut, panicking me the first time. The lips of the mask are painted on, and the snout of a nose, sculpted with nostrils to let me breathe. The thing is held on my face by a thin piece of cord, dirty with age. Oliver had to tighten it up to hold fast at the back of my head.

It is no fun sleeping with something on your face; I tossed and turned, kept waking up in the night and sometimes I felt so claustrophobic that I had to sit up and push Dreaming Jack onto the top of my head to get some air. The carving also made me hot and I am sure by the end of night two wearing the monstrosity had started off a couple of pimples on my cheeks. Of course Oliver slept quietly through it all.

Night four of wearing the mask I fell into the darkness dream.  As always a world of red tinged blackness, only this time I realised that I was surrounded by the dying glow of a fire flickering its light over what are in fact cave walls.  Gone is the normal sense of wellbeing. I do not feel brave, nor want to sing. I am frightened and want to scream. In the dream I feel my hands clutching at my face – but know, even though I am asleep that I am trying to get the mask off my face back in the real world.

The dream quickly turns into a nightmare. Another shadow joins those made by the dying blaze. A moving shape, something crawling – no on all fours, then something pokes me in the ribs. Oliver is next to me in the dream. He is naked and laid on the ground; tossing and turning, struggling to wake, arms thrashing the air. I want to speak – want to let out a yell – a great roar to wake him up – only I can’t, the power of the mask is stopping me – stopping me roar.

The shade of the beast grows larger on the cave wall and the voice of my dream-mind tells me it is a giant wolverine. It does not help that my subconscious interrupts my sleeping thoughts to remind me that, one, this is just a dream and two, that a wolverine is just a large weasel.

I continue to pull at my face knowing my only chance is to persuade my tucked up in bed self to rip the mask off.

The wolverine is near, I can see its shape blacker than the darkness, sat a short distance away. It’s waiting for the fire to completely go out before it attacks us. Through the pinprick vision of the mask, the creature looks the size of a full-grown grizzly bear.  Oliver continues to fight the sleep that holds him prisoner and rolls on the ground as if in a fit.

Complete darkness, the fire is dead the Wolverine cautiously moves forward I hear its claws scrape on the stone floor. Then the sound vanishes as I roar and roar like a wild beast myself and when I stop to gulp a breathe I hear those claws again, only they are in retreat, running away out of the cave.

My snoring wakes me with a jolt. The bedside light is on and Oliver is sat up in bed looking like death.

“Thank goodness your snoring woke me up – what a nightmare – what a nightmare…” He is half asleep and soon fully asleep. Before I turn off the light, I see the Dream MaskMask lying on the carpet floor. I had just got the thing off in time.

Oliver does not seem to hear me snore any more, our shared nightmare never mentioned and I am sure it is completely forgotten by him. My dark dream has returned to a comfortable place and the Dream MaskMask hangs as a curiosity in the bathroom. Perhaps the anthropologists have got it right. All your snoring partner is trying to do is protect you from the wolverines.