My dog Trinkett has been making a lot of noise at night... whimpers, snorts, snuffles, lipsmacking, etc. Enough to wake me up, which is hard! My friends have commented that I could sleep through a train. Some of it is definitely dreaming... I can see her little paws twitching and the running movements. And at first I thought that the non-dreaming sounds were either an indication that she needed to go out, or else an attempt to get my attention. But the last few nights, I have noticed that she is perfectly still when she does it, and if I get up she doesn't even seem to notice me. I don't want to turn the light on and check if I don't have to, but I have petted her with no response. So mostly I just go back to bed after doing that.

So... is this just a strange dream affect? Any thoughts on why it seems to have started up now, and not in her first few weeks at my place? Or did I just not notice it before? Seems to me that I would have noticed it then, and gotten used to it by now, and not the other way around.

I don't know there is much to do about that. You could drag her into the vet, but I doubt it would turn up much. I am not sure how she would take to sleeping someplace else. Our dogs sleep downstairs in their crates, while we sleep in peace upstairs.

I recently read Patricia McConell's The Other End of the Leash. She makes a big point in the book about how we are hard wired to nurture our young and transfer it to other species. That could be why she is waking you while a train might not. My wife and I are both very sound sleepers. I was a little concerned when we had children that out neighbors would end up knocking on our door in the middle of the night. It never happened. There is no sleeping through a crying baby.

I am so happy I have found a way to eliminate the ghastly crying, the puppy's first night by itself.

My puppy does the same thing. Last time I was at the Vet I asked her about it. She said there are many possible answers. The smacking I noticed in my puppy was similar to a sucking kind of thing (like she was drinking milk from her mother) the Vet said that a lot of puppies will do that in their sleep.

And the snoring/wheezing sounds could just be a minor allergy or some grass she may have eaten accidentally through the day. The Vet didn't seem to be concerned at all by it so neither am I. I think you will get used to it and sleep better when you know it's perfectly normal. :)

True... I do notice it more on nights when she hasn't been to the bathroom right before bedtime.

Froggy, it just may be that she is relaxing a lot more now and is falling into a more sound sleep. My dog still makes the smacking, wheezing, crying, yelping, snoring, running in the sleep noises. She does have allergies and sometimes gets into a cycle of inverted sneezes in her sleep. I have to wake her up and distract her because she can't breathe when this happens. This is all normal for her. So, I think that all this stuff that is happening is perfectly normal for her, having her doggy dreams and as Luv suggests, could be allergies on top of it all. If you feel that walking her right before bedtime helps relieve the noisiness, then go that route.