Mattress Mayhem

Mattress Mayhem: "

I’ve been dreaming of the perfect bed for a long time. For years I thought the foam mattress – you know, the one the astronauts slept on – might be cool. Motionless, foam conforms to your body, sounds like a dream, right? Then a few years ago while Darc and I were browsing around a furniture store, I sat on one and realized that foam was hard as a rock and required your body heat to soften it enough to make it conform to you. Which means that if you want to move during the night, you have to go through the warming process all over again. Scratch the foam one.

Then I thought, well maybe the glorified air mattress one with the cool device that lets you inflate or deflate would be cool. We stayed up one night watching an infomercial about it and Darc did some research and found out some less than pleasant things about that bed, so ditch that idea.

I used to have a waterbed, before I met Darc, but those things need to be heated – which is great for me but a nightmare for the human heater I’m married to, and apartments tend to frown on those anyway. Plus, I figure if I’m ever in a position to get any kind of bed I want, I won’t be living in a climate that requires a bed to be heated anyway.

So I’m left with the standard mattress, and I’m thinking about it because A) I like dreaming, and B) my back is killing me this weekend. I’m better now, but man, I was pretty much out of commission on Saturday and I can’t recall it ever being that bad before.

And I realized that I personally have never purchased a regular mattress before. Not for myself anyway. I don’t know about you, but I’d be leery of going to a bed store and getting one, because how do you know if it’s the right mattress for you without trying it out? I’m not going to sleep on it in the mattress store. And being half of a married couple, a mattress isn’t just for sleeping anymore and I’m not doing that in the mattress store either, if you know what I mean and I think you do. Plus, I really don’t think it’s fair to be expected to pay that kind of money for a product you can’t “try on” in any way.

So how do you go about finding the right mattress? What’s your favorite mattress? Do people even have one? Are there like diehard Sealy people out there? Is there like a match service out there, as in “If I want X kind of mattress, Brands D, F and J all offer what I’m looking for”? How do I find out these things?

Filed under: Thinking out loud Tagged: Mattress, Thinking "