By Kris Frieswick

SLEEP IS my drug of choice. If I sleep well, life is a beautiful song, with me on lead vocals and backing harmonies from the Little River Band (1981 lineup). If I don't sleep well, I am grumpy, stupid, each individual vertebra aches, my arms are numb and my complexion resembles that of the Nazi officer in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" right before his face melts off.

Given this, you might assume I have invested lots of time and energy finding the perfect mattress. I have not. Instead, I viewed occasionally useless arms and a melting face as a less painful alternative to navigating the ever-expanding, impenetrable Mattress Industrial Complex $(MIC)$ with its countless stuffing options, firmness levels, delivery windows and gratuitous use of the word Avocado, an actual mattress brand, to refer to something you sleep on.

Then circumstances forced my hand. The Husband and I bought a house that required more mattresses than we owned. Determined to upgrade our own bed, too, we went to a mattress superstore, laid on 15, possibly 100, models for about 30 seconds each. We somberly reflected. Then we bought three of the model that had the prettiest cover and was expensive enough to imply quality.

Unsurprisingly, this mattress was awful. Too soft for me, too hard for him. Not only did it paralyze my arms nightly, but it rendered my neck stiffer than the late Queen's upper lip. The Husband started snoring like it was an Olympic demonstration sport.

If I wanted to go through my days as a non-zombie, we needed to confront the Mattress Industrial Complex more seriously. Now, I hate shopping even more than visiting my dentist, who's still hazy on the whole lidocaine thing. The Husband, meanwhile, can browse for so long that other customers ask him for help. He's never in a rush. I give up within minutes. We're not a great team for efficient mattress shopping. But my fear of being held back in life by rigor mortis drove me on.

We began researching our options. Which foundational material would prove wisest? Traditional innerspring, familiar to anyone over 45, is the Myspace of mattress tech. Too old-school. Memory foam, associated with Tempur-Pedic and home-delivery-in-a-box brands like Casper, claims to eliminate pressure points by molding to your body. But we'd heard it could be sweltering unless covered with a special, gel-infused topper. Hybrids promise to combine innerspring's coolness and foam's comfort, but, in my experience, multi-taskers do nothing well. Due to a firm surface and excellent "bounce back," latex is reportedly the choice of sexually adventurous couples. It also promised to deliver a cool night's sleep. These two qualities seemed mutually exclusive. Could anything promised by latex, a well-known libertine, really be believed?

As if picking the foundation wasn't hard enough, we'd then have to select a topping. And decide if we wanted it for pickup or delivery. It was like ordering a $5,000 pizza.

We spent days deliberating. Meanwhile, my arm numbness started lasting further into the day and my brain was so mushy from sleep deprivation and shopping overload that I couldn't remember whether my beloved River Band was Big or Little. So I tapped out: The Husband, esteemed shopper, would choose, and if his choice sucked, I could at least blame him. But when I saw his eyes glaze over, too, I knew that even he had met his shopping Waterloo.

So we took the easy way out. We'd spent many comfortable nights sleeping in a friend's guest bedroom on a memory foam mattress from Amerisleep, which is supposedly designed to help you sleep cooler, the Fonz of mattresses. Our friends slept infallibly on the same model, the price was right (about $1,500), and it could be delivered with a 100-night, money-back guarantee and free pickup should it prove fallible. We hit the "buy" button and gave mattresses not another nanosecond of our precious time.

Our new mattress is fine, not too soft, not too hard. It's comfortable but can still be hot. My arms rarely go numb, the Husband's snoring has become less Olympic, more amateur, and the mattress makes no noise at all when one of us shifts in the night. Despite our traumatic brush with the MIC, we'd found a brilliantly...adequate solution.

Then, this March, we took a trip up the Nile River that involved five days on a historic paddle boat, the S.S. Sudan. Our stateroom was paneled, classic and amazing. I made for the bed, anticipating a mattress experience rivaling that offered by the Savoir brand, whose queen-size models start at $7,800.

The thing was so hard I thought I bruised my sit bones. I knocked on it. It made a sort of wooden sound. "I'm screwed," I told The Husband.

Something miraculous happened, though. I don't know if it was crawling around inside pyramids all day, or the gods of Egypt smiling down on me, but that rock-hard mattress gave me the best night's sleep I'd had in years...five days in a row. The Husband didn't snore once.

Everyone's body is different. But if someone like me can sleep like I'm dead on a mattress as firm as a wooden table, maybe it's time to reconsider the value of all those foundational materials and toppers and gel beads and organic ticking. Do we really need the MIC? What if all we need for a good night's sleep is a blanket, a pillow and the floor?

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 28, 2022 15:15 ET (19:15 GMT)

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