By Sharon Bouchard
Mattress mayhem

“To sleep, perchance to dream.” I believe that comes from Shakespeare.

Considering that during the Bard’s lifetime mattresses were basically cloth bags filled with straw, leaves, pine needles and other organic material, that quote takes on a less romantic sound.

The innerspring mattress, as we know it, did not exist in the 1500s, but mattress stuffing of organic materials that attracted various bugs, mice and other vermin did. I imagine a good night’s sleep was not that easy to come by. “Nightie night, don’t let the bedbugs bite,” was a quote of no laughing matter in the days of yore.

The quest for a good night’s sleep, however, still goes on. When you consider that we spend at least a third of our lives sleeping, or attempting to, the comfort of a mattress is pretty darn important.

Finding a comfortable mattress is a lot easier said than done. The stores that sell them don’t mind if you lay down on one to try it out, but they are a bit testy about letting you sleep over night until you find the right one. Not to mention that you might feel just a little bit exposed sleeping in the middle of a large showroom.

Recently there was a segment on The Today Show about sleep and the role that a good mattress plays in achieving that end. According to that show, enjoying sleep is today’s sex. Based on that I am certainly not getting enough.

Also, according to that show there are mattresses priced up as high as $60,000! I can’t imagine spending that kind of money on a mattress, and if I did I would certainly want to test it out for a few nights before I handed over two years of income.

At $60,000, I would want it to do more than just lay there. I would at least want it to give me a full body massage and sing me a lullaby, too. At $60,000, I would not only want a guarantee of a great night’s sleep, I’d want a guarantee that I would get up in the morning with no aches and pains and a significant weight loss to boot! That might be a mattress worth $60,000.

Zalmon Simmons didn’t charge $60,000 for his “Beautyrest” innerspring mattress; it was after all 1925 when he developed it. He did, however, price them at $39.50, which was more than double the price of the best hair-stuffed mattresses that were common at that time.

Zalmon, being the clever fellow that he was, didn’t market the mattress like other companies. He instead marketed “scientific sleep” and used such notables as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, H.G. Wells and Guglielmo Marconi in his advertising campaigns.

Sleep research was a relatively new field at that time, but apparently marketing sleep using famous people rather than just a mattress was a stroke of genius because by 1929 the “Beautyrest” mattress was the No. 1 seller in the U.S. and stuffed mattresses were being thrown out faster than the garbage collectors could collect them.

Now, 79 years later, with sleep being touted as the new sex and there are more types of mattresses than one could ever imagine.

There are, of course, conventional mattresses, including the “Beautyrest.” There are water-filled core mattresses that have replaced the once popular waterbed. The Memory Foam mattress that you can jump up and down on and not spill a glass of wine should you be inclined to drink wine in bed. There is the Sleep Number bed which allows you and your sleep partner to have different levels of firmness, and there is a $60,000 mattress.

I could use a new mattress, but it won’t be a $60,000 one I can assure you. I don’t know what type of mattress it will be because there are so many to choose from. I like the idea of the Memory Foam, assuming that it doesn’t loose its memory after a few years. You never know when I might want to have a glass of wine in bed and spend some time jumping up and down.

I do know that I don’t want to make a snap decision on something so important, so the way I see it, I would be better off to just “sleep on it” awhile before I actually make a purchase. I wonder if the local furniture store would let me spend the night in their bed department to do just that.