My Mattress Adventure

By Madeleine Kando

I cannot sleep any more. I wake up in the middle of the night in a sweat, heart pounding, mind racing. I have a problem, you see. I don’t know what to sleep on. I am sleeping on a futon, but futons get old, like we do. After 15 years of faithful service mine feels more like a solid piece of rock so I have to retire it. I have been searching for the perfect replacement and this is where my mattress adventure begins.

If you are in the market for a new mattress, you better be forewarned. You are entering the world of mattress shopping at your own risk. I strongly recommend arming yourself with a good bullshit detector, a strong will to survive and above all be prepared to spend countless hours sifting through a veritable deluge of brands, combinations, hype, and mostly false information given by eager salesmen.

Two months ago, when I was still a rookie mattress shopper, I thought: ‘No sweat, I’ll just go get me a good mattress. I heard the name ‘memory foam’ mentioned frequently, so off I went to one of the showrooms and started to look around. Whoah! I couldn’t believe the price-tag on some of those suckers. $2,000 and up? Who on earth wants to sleep on $2,000? So, then I asked the salesman what it would cost to just buy a piece of the mattress. Like maybe the top two inches or so. I don’t really need a club-sandwich to sleep on, I said. That was not possible, he told me, since the whole enchilada is meticulously put together. And he started to explain the function of each layer: air circulation, comfort zones, anti-gravity this, anti-allergy that...

I left the store in a state of total confusion, but I did not give up on my vision of the perfect mattress. So I started to surf the net, looking for my perfect matttress soul mate. I looked at latex mattresses, foam mattresses, memory foam mattresses.. but one’s price was too high, the other’s density was too low and the third’s environmental footprint was too big.

The problem is I cannot decide what to buy. The adage: ‘the more you know, the less you know’ also applies to mattress shopping. I am starting to have nightmares about mattresses. Last night I dreamed that I floated away on a piece of memory foam never to be heard from again.

But I cannot help myself. It’s a curse. I have studied the in’s and out’s of mattresses ad nauseam. In fact I am seriously considering a career change. Maybe I should sell mattresses instead of teaching dance to little kids.

Two months later we are still sleeping on our old futon. My husband is very tolerant of my obsessive nature, but this morning he gave me an ultimatum: either I buy a mattress or he buys one for me. But that would be like forcing me into a pre-arranged marriage. I will never agree to that. After all we don’t live in some medieval society when people slept wherever there was a pile of straw.

Hey! Straw! I never thought of looking into that possibility. Mm, let me make a few phone calls.
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