Memory Foam

It’s on a long concrete strip next to the highway, always stifling hot on the bitumen, surrounded like all mattress shops by other mattress shops. The showroom is small and high tech with a central machine kind of like an MRI inside of which you would lie later on, once the sales team have talked you through your preferred process and model. 

They prefer clients to visit by appointment but they are of course glad for your custom if you’re prepared to wait for their one machine. They are not cheap mattresses but nor, somehow, are they the most expensive option. You pay for the process, they say, which has required decades of research and development and then sales. 

How the sales process works is:

First, ideally you book your appointment. If you walk in, they’ll fit you in but there are one-star reviews of the service online that suggest you might be liable to wait from the early morning until the end of the day so they can fit you in last thing, right before everyone goes home. At that appointment they’ll sit you down at a small table to the left hand side of the showroom with only two seats.

Second, they’ll ask how you slept last night, how you’re sleeping lately. Size of your current bed, its composition, its arrangement in the room, its age. How long you’ve shared it. Whether it’s known people before you both together or — as they’ll intuit through the smallest hesitation — whether there have been others since the start of the sharing. They’ll write these answers into a customer file that’s just a plain document sort of like this that will get useful later. 

Next, they’ll ask you for the preferred specifications of your new mattress. This is the part of the experience that you’ll get at any other reputable mattress store. You might have practiced this part many times in your mattress shopping journey because a purchase that will last the next ten years is an arduous one, especially if you are sensitive on price relative to the product. But here you won’t remember much about the budget negotiation.

Fourth, they’ll get the meat of the thing. They’ll ask then what you’d like to imprint on the inside of your latex mattress, woven into the fibres, which memories will help you best sleep and dream and rejuvenate. These they’ll type into an addendum of that original document, an addendum that can run longer than its prefix, and this paperwork they’ll print in triplicate to get you to read all over again during the fifth, most crucial step.

Fifth, they’ll slide you into the bed under the MRI-like machine on your preferred side — with occasional swaps if the sleep-consultant-sales-person believes you’re undermining your sleep with a poor placement or a reluctant arrangement by one party or an inadequate bedroom layout as per your own reporting. Once you’re in bed with your head on a pillow of your preferred hardness, your preferred temperature, you’ll be tucked in beneath and upon the bedding just like the set you’d like to have most — details they ask you during the process of booking your appointment; details that make walk-ins time-consuming but still worthwhile for the simple trade of an afternoon for a decades’ perfect sleep. They’ll send you home with this bedding for later on. Free of charge for now. No one reneges.

Under the arc of the machine they’ll hand you your printed-in-triplicate paperwork and have you read back through it as the lights dim and a soft yellow LED strip in the machine turns on so you can recall what you’ve said, what you desire. You read this in the quiet, in silence even as the machine works beneath you. You can feel it in a tickle of electricity along your spine, across your shoulders, at the base of your neck, like a soft scratch at your scalp with long, thin, metal fingers. You can’t see it but the machine reads your reading, captures your brainwaves as you reminisce what’s explicitly stated but the true secret, the true strength, of the machine is that it reads too what’s not written down. It will read the first time you had sex together; the sleep in on the morning after your longest, most tiredest night; the last time the children slept in bed beside you. 

It will take you as you are, as you have been, and as you want to be, and it will weave into your mattress a portrait on your side, your partner’s portrait on the other side, and in the middle a composite. You can keep the paperwork if you like. They’ll not rush you out but they’ll endeavour to be timely for their next appointment, and you’ll expect to receive your mattress with free shipping and hand delivery to your bed frame in three to four weeks. 

When it does, you’ll find your dreams are latent and lucid and alternative between true and curious and you’ll sleep so well that you’ll have forgotten the price tag — a memory which the great MRI machine can find and target and excise, a technology the mattress company is looking to package separately and sell to anyone who can keep their customers still long enough to be scanned. They’re rated 4.8 stars on Google, rated down for their appointments, but unanimous five-stars for the quality of the mattress.

By virtue of the central composite fibres, every single couple tells our reporters that they’ve ‘never slept better.’ Even when I slept in someone else’s bed, upon someone’s else memory foam mattress, I must say that I felt both outside of myself but exhausted in a moment, spent, on the verge of a deep sleep instantly that took me far away into unfamiliar dreams that were surely, journaling the morning after, someone else’s.