To Sleep or Not to Sleep

My wife and I have had the same mattress now for about 10 years and it’s seen better days. It’s a tired mattress, which coincidentally causes us to be tired most of the time too. We joke about how when we lay in it, we really lay in it. It’s like laying in two hammocks but with a nice soft ridge in between. Let’s call it an armrest and then it’s a ‘feature’. We have to climb up this hill in between us in order to cuddle.

Basically, the springs have long since retired.

We finally decided to take the plunge and get a new mattress, but were immediately overwhelmed with the choices. Buy in a store or online? Why do the same brands not sell the same models in different stores? What kind? Spring? Latex? Memory Foam? Air? We agonized over this for a few weeks and settled on going the same route we did before (Rooms-to-Go with their financing with no interest plan that would literally allow you to finance into 2023), or just paying for it outright and buying one (cheaper) online. Originally I was hesitant about an online mattress purchase, but after thinking about it, I realized that 3 minutes in a showroom floor isn’t going to tell me one thing about the mattress that will be accurate 30 days into owning it. With that in mind, and knowing the return policy and reputation of the online seller we had chosen was very good, we went the online route, and chose a latex mattress. It’s much springier than memory foam, and you don’t feel like you sink into it at all.

I often use Amazon as a gauge of products I’m purchasing, even if I don’t purchase at Amazon. Amazon sells a lot of mattresses, and one of the highest rated ones they sell are the ones from Dreamfoam Bedding. They consistently have nearly 5 stars and very positive reviews. We asked plenty of questions to their customer service, which for some strange reason is represented by a single rep named ‘Chuck’. Either that or they are extremely discriminatory in their hiring practices and only hire those named Chuck. Regardless, when you talk to customer service, you talk to Chuck.

Chuck was patient and answered all our questions and guided us toward the right firmness based on our sleeping habits. Or at least our desired sleeping habits, since for the last couple years those habits were basically laying in a fake-hammock-wannabe. We placed the order through their site (since we got a 10% off if we did so, rather than Amazon), and awaited our bed’s arrival in the mail.

Less than a week later, a heavy box arrived on our porch, hefted there by a burly FedEx driver with a hand truck.

Yep. A cardboard box.

It was big, but it definitely wasn’t mattress-sized, as you can see from our bed frame in the background. Was this some joke? Did they somehow mistake the order of a king for a twin? For that matter, it didn’t really look like a twin could fit either.

Opening the box, we discovered a bedroll. Kinda like a large sleeping bag. But in plastic. And incredibly heavy.

It was wrapped in heavy duty plastic wrap. Admittedly, unrolling it was kinda fun, but I’m weird like that. After unwrapping the industrial quality Saran Wrap, we were still fairly unconvinced that this was a king-sized bed. There was another layer of plastic, and this was heavy duty, and had to be cut off.

Very carefully.

Seriously – look at it! There’s no way that’s a king…and then after unwrapping, it just…was. A king bed. No clue what kind of sorcery they used to fit a king bed in a box like that, but I’m pretty sure it involved a magic wand…a vacuum wand that is.

So we’ve slept on it now for about a week, and I have to say, it’s pretty amazing. The interesting thing is that even on nights that I’m getting less than 6 hours of sleep, I still feel very rested when I wake up…something I never used to feel. I’m awake and ready to go, which usually required a shower before. It’s a nice feeling.

To the ultimate question of ‘to sleep or not to sleep’, I enthusiastically say ‘sleep’. Good night.