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According to numerous sources on the internet, you cannot snore and dream at the same time.

Source 1

  1. If you are snoring, then you cannot be dreaming. This fact is repeated all over the Internet, but I’m a bit suspicious whether it’s really true as I haven’t found any scientific evidence to support it.

Source 2 (which is more credible).

Source 3 (Yahoo Answers).

A quick google search yields pages of sites that claim that this is a "fact". Could this possibly be true from a physiological/psychological perspective, and is the claim backed up by any scientific evidence whatsoever?

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  • 1
    I understand that a question concerning the same subject (although slightly edited) could also be on Biology SE. Let me know what I can do to improve the question for this site, or if it should be migrated.
    – LanceLafontaine
    Commented May 12, 2012 at 15:17
  • 9
    According to this paper snoring happens throughout all sleep stages.
    – Oliver_C
    Commented May 12, 2012 at 15:29
  • 2
    Oliver, make that an answer instead of a comment.
    – Wertilq
    Commented Apr 5, 2013 at 17:56
  • Especially since that link is dead now...
    – Sean Duggan
    Commented Jan 30, 2020 at 13:26

1 Answer 1

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A comment by @Oliver_C mentioned a study that found snoring to occur during all stages of sleep. The original link had gone stale over time, but I could recover the study he was referring to:

Hoffstein, V., J. H. Mateika, and S. Mateika. 1991. Snoring and sleep architecture. American Review of Respiratory Disease 143(1). 92–96.

Unfortunately, the article is paywalled, so I can only quote from the abstract (my emphasis):

We found that even the self-confessed nonsnorers snored lightly, with significantly smaller frequency and index than the heavy snorers. Sleep architecture was similar in both groups. Distribution of snoring among the sleep stages differed for light and heavy snorers: light snorers snored uniformly throughout all sleep stages, whereas heavy snorers tended to snore more during slow-wave and REM sleep.

This finding is difficult to explain if the claim that "you cannot snore and dream at the same time" was true. If snoring occurs during every sleep stage, including the REM stage which is strongly associated with dreaming, it seems unlikely that dreaming and snoring are mutually exclusive. Yet, note that based on the abstract, the study doesn't seem to measure explicitly the co-occurrence of active dreaming and snoring, so it presents only indirect evidence against the claim.

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