15 ms·
The Squishiest, Sweetest Sleep
- type-2 8y agoI actually cannot sleep in a soft squishy bed. I almost prefer a hard one, probably because I grew up in them. Once I got a really nice memory foam mattress and it is like sleeping in a cloud, but I found out that I don't like sleeping in cloud.
- therein 8y agoYeah the mattress industry is a great example of another industry where cloud is overrated. :)
- knodi123 8y agoyeah, the future of the bedroom is containers
- somebodythere 8y agoI'm partial to bare-metal myself.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- alexanderdmitri 8y agoRecently migrated all my sleep cycles to bedless infrastructure. (I know it's not really "bedless", but whatever, at least I'm feeling better rested lately)
- grawprog 8y agoI'm with you. Same for pillows. I can't handle big soft fluffy pillows and soft beds. Especially memory foam. It hurts my back. I've actually gotten up in the middle of the night to sleep on the floor before when the bed's been too soft.
- wil421 8y agoHow do you sleep? I don’t mind a firm bed. I’m a side sleeping and my arms and legs will hurt in it’s too firm. The floor would make me numb.
- grawprog 8y agoSide or back usually. I dunno I've camped a lot in my life and slept in odd places and always had sort of shitty beds. I think i've just gotten used to it over the years. I still prefer to have something underneath me. You're right sleeping directly on the floor sucks. I meant more on the floor with a blanket or some foam or something underneath me as opposed to a soft sinking type bed.
- xur17 8y ago> It hurts my back. I've actually gotten up in the middle of the night to sleep on the floor before when the bed's been too soft. I have an old memory foam mattress that is getting less and less firm. After waking up with a sore back at 3am 2 nights in a row I flipped it over and slept on the bottom, much firmer side. Has been working perfectly for the past week while I wait for my new mattress.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoIn particular, too soft makes my back hurt. (I side sleep; the softer the bed, the more my back is curved from side to side.)
- emerongi 8y agoI had to stay at my parents' place for a few months where the bed has a soft mattress and I downgraded to the floor after a month because my back started hurting really bad. It took more than two weeks of back excercises and sleeping on the floor to fix that.
- r00fus 8y agoSleeping on the floor can be great for fixing back issues. A good part of the world sleeps on the floor even today (with matting/blankets/etc).
- pmoriarty 8y ago"Sleeping on the floor can be great for fixing back issues." I can vouch for this. I've recently started sleeping on the floor, and at first my back hurt some, but after a couple of days I got used to it and now it's feeling so much better. I have really poor posture and constantly slouch when I'm sitting in my chair, and so usually have back issues. Sleeping on the floor has worked wonders. Even when I'm not sleeping on the floor, I prefer firm mattresses, as soft ones are horrible for my back.
- Double_a_92 8y agoBtw the softness can also come from a bad slatted bad base. If you just put the mattress on the floor, or use a hard board as bed base you can hava a similar "hard" experience, while still having a soft surface.
- ggm 8y agoSlept in one once. It was very very wierd. With two of you, its a bit more dynamic when one rolls over, than I think I like. I had a metric french tonne of lucid dreams (no, not that kind)
- bitwize 8y agoFun fact: East-coast furniture magnate Bob Kaufman (Bob's Discount Furniture) got his start selling waterbeds in Connecticut after he'd used one to help recover from a motorcycle accident, and branched out into other kinds of furniture as the waterbed faded in popularity.
- seymour333 8y ago“It’s like salmon,” he said. “They’ll return to the place where they were spawned.”
- mikestew 8y agoMeh, the water bed's time kind of came and went, IMO. I bought them because they were generally cheap, and I did like sleeping on them. Get a mattress with some baffles in it, and it gets rid of the sloshing. TFA raises the question of sex, and my experience and those reported to me say it doesn't diminish it at a minimum, and greatly enhances it for some. Without baffles, it can be a bit of a rodeo ride, though. That said, they use electricity (you will not sleep long on an unheated water bed), take a small bit of maintenance, and keep the dogs and cats off it. I'm happy with our memory foam mattress.
- pmoriarty 8y agoHow safe are they? An electrically heated water bed sounds like a recipe for disaster.
- mikestew 8y agoIn the 35 years since I bought my first one, I’ve never heard of anyone getting electrocuted. That would be quite a feat. First, the vinyl bladder has to leak. The electrical insulation of the heater has to have worn through to bare metal. That’s a trick because the heater lies pressed down by a few hundred kg of water. Finally, the vinyl “tub” the mattress sits in (in case the mattress leaks) has to have leaked, too, in order for water to get to the heater. Even then I think the odds are slim because it’s just a big resistive element. I suppose if both wires some how got exposed. Did I mention the several hundred kgs of water lying on it? IOW, file it under “Things I Worry About When I am Done Worry About Killer Bee Attack’s”. It ain’t gonna happen.
- pmoriarty 8y ago"The electrical insulation of the heater has to have worn through to bare metal" I'm less worried about vinyl wearing through than I am about punctures, tears and shoddy manufacturing.
- BenjiWiebe 8y agoI grew up sleeping in a water bed for a number of years. Pretty nice, though it does take some getting used to. And the phrase talking about it being a microclimate is spot on. Turn the temperature down in the summer, turn it up in the winter.
- m-i-l 8y agoI wish there was a good way to try mattresses properly before buying them. Not just lie down on it for a few minutes in a shop, but sleep the whole night on it. Like a bed shop teaming up with a hotel chain to let you choose which bed and/or mattress you want to try for a night. The ones in the article start at US$1995 - I wouldn't want to spend that much money on something so important without trying it, and would consider spending 5-10% of that to try it in a hotel room for a night. I know they say they'll have a "100-night guarantee with a full refund, as Casper does", but it is a huge hassle getting that sort of thing delivered and then returning it.
- tmoravec 8y agoHere in the Czech Republic, and I believe it's similar in most of Europe, several months of no-questions-asked guarantees for mattresses are very common. This is different from warranty (common to be 25 years).
- snazz 8y ago25 year warranties?! In the US, mattress companies run ad campaigns to convince people that mattresses are consumables that last eight to ten years. Funny how that works.
- agumonkey 8y agowhat price though ? here they say it's pricey because it's a 20 year investment.
- slv77 8y agoThe US consumers prefer spring mattress while European consumers prefer mattresses made from latex foam. Over time springs degrade faster than foam and so US mattresses have a shorter lifespan.
- SeanLuke 8y agoMy experience in Italy strongly suggests spring mattresses are the norm.
- duskwuff 8y agoAn interesting aside not mentioned in the article: an initial patent application for the waterbed was rejected due to prior art by Robert Heinlein. He described a (fictional) waterbed in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land.
- andrew_ 8y agoI will never forget the sensation of being sucked into the wavy vortex that was my parents' mid-80s waterbed.
- Groxx 8y agoI generally liked my waterbed while growing up. There was one significant downside though: If the heater broke, you were in for miserable nights until it was fixed. Sleeping on top of multiple layers of blankets, if you even have that many (try fitting them in a small apt) only partially mitigates it - your bed will suck the heat right out of you.