Sleep - The Final Frontier...

Dear God in Heaven, when did buying a new mattress become so complicated!?
I have spent a good part of this weekend trolling around the bed/mattress shops in my area, rolling and bouncing around and feeling like a complete deviant as the salesperson stands over me, watching, and says "And how does this one feel?"
There are so many bloody options and brands and settings and... things! And forgive me for sounding like an old lady but when did beds become so expensive?
Instead of just somewhere to deck out at night they seem to have become an investment for the future, health supplement and masseuse alternative all in one!

My current mattress is what I would generously refer to as an 'antique' but what most people would call 'old'.
I inherited it from my grandmother's house where it had done roughly 10 years long service as the guest bed after about a 10 year stint as my grandmother's bed before she got one of those fancy bed-goes-up-bed-goes-down beds.
Captivated by the fact that it would be my first double bed and hypnotised by the fah-bulous Queen Anne (or Queen Somebody) style wooden bed-head and bed-end with the scrolly bits, I was completely oblivious to the um... generous amount of give in the mattress.
Now that I have had it for a while the novelty of sliding into the depression in the centre of the mattress, spending the night in the foetal position and then having to mountaineer my way out in the mornings has worn off.
So I figured I'd go for a shop around.
And what a wonderland of information and helpful 'tell you those things that other folk won't tell you' salespeople I found!

There were beds with sprung bases, beds with solid bases, beds with frames instead of bases and that was just the bottom half!
Your mattress could be full of springs, made of latex, full of springs with a latex 'pillowtop' or be made of a special kind of foam of a type that doesn't suck and will not eventually turn into a fine powder.
Some of the salespeople insisted that a sprung base would increase the life of your mattress by a third, other salespeople insisted this was a lie made up to sell more bases because bases bring in a sweet profit margin. I was inclined to believe the salespeople in the second camp - because who doesn't trust people who try to save them money? - until I became a little suspicious that I might have been tricked into looking at some of the more expensive mattresses to celebrate all the money I saved by buying a frame instead of a base...

I got to lay on the bed equivalent of those pressure pads they use at shoe shops to figure out how you distribute your weight and ended up with a pretty print-out of how far my bum sinks into the mattress. I desperately wanted them to offer me a cross-trainer bed with air-support at this stage but they didn't, though the shop did have a full-height inflatable double-bed complete with tiny automatic pump that all fits into a backpack.
Now that's how to crash at a friend's in style!
"Sleep on your shitty couch with the acupuncture springs? No thanks, mate, I've got an inflatable bed in my backpack!" *foom*

The long and the short of it is that I spent almost all day laying down, rolling onto my side, onto my stomach and trying to work out exactly what a bed that hasn't turned into a sinkhole should feel like... and now I've got a sore back.
I mean how?
I suspect about 5 years of sleeping in a somewhat shitty bed has something to do with it. I'm probably a little out of whack but all these brand spanking new beds with their nano-pillow technology, kryptonite springs and anti-grav dust-mite resistant weave shouldn't give you upper back pain should they? And if so how? Exactly how broken have I already become?

In the end I've found a mattress/frame ensemble I think I'd be happy with, to be honest I think I'd like to marry the mattress and have soft cushion-y children with it but I've decided to be all grown up and restrained about it and just double-check that my dream mattress is not in fact the one that is sending me into unexpected first-time ever unwelcome back twinges.
I just don't think our love could survive that kind of betrayal.
That and the fact the whole kitten kaboodle is going to wind up costing about AU$2,000 !
That would be the most money I have ever spent on anything that wasn't an airline ticket!*
The fact that the bed is supposed to last in this amazing never-deteriorating condition for at least 20 years is only a slight consolation as I guess it can then be divided down to costing AU$100 a year but you can understand my desire to rethink before I get bamboozled by exciting jargon and seductive talk about German engineered spring systems and the like.

Also I really had to get out of there before I was sent into an epileptic fit by all the brightly coloured cover sets for your doona/eiderdown/counterpane/whatever you call the big floofy warm down-filled blanket thingy on top of your bed. Some people have obviously found their drug habits a touch too costly these days and have swapped to trying to replicate the sensation with psychedelic themed bedrooms. Yeesh!

PS. Yes, I am totally going to buy the accompanying flamingo statue in the picture. What bedroom would be complete without it?


*I don't own a car. I'm... um... an environmentalist *coff coff* Or possibly I'm very bad at making choices on big expensive things that might get broken down or rear-ended by retards.