As a chronic stomach sleeper with constant back and neck pain and a habit of intermittently waking through the night, I had nothing to lose when I was presented with the offer to test a new adjustable bed frame and mattress from DreamCloud—a bed that offers a “zero gravity” feature supposedly simulating the sleep position of astronauts in space. Space nerd aside, I couldn’t have kicked my hand-me-down IKEA mattress to the curb faster for the Faustian exchange of a decent night’s sleep. And thus began my next three weeks of sleep on a bed frame and mattress that promised to take me to the “future of sleep.”
The full-size mattress and frame arrived in a cardboard box—like a Casper—and two delivery men came to put it together for me. (I should mention here that, no, this is not an ad, but white-glove delivery service might just be the way to my heart.) Altogether, the bed was no bulkier than my old bed frame and actually had a surprising amount of storage beneath the frame.
After it was all set up and made, I plugged it in—yes, it plugs into an outlet in the wall—so that I could adjust the incline of the head and foot areas of the bed with the remote (it’s the future, people). My sleep experiment was officially ready for liftoff.
The first change I noticed almost immediately was that I was could read at night without giving myself a serious neck crick. In addition to my day job, I’m getting an MBA part-time, so the majority of my bedtime routine consists of catching up on school reading. With a textbook on my lap, I used the remote to incline the top of the bed just enough to sit up in a comfy reading position, then lower it back down when the dense paragraphs on marginal cost curves started to blur together. I’d never really thought about how reading in bed affected my sleep before, but the smooth transition from sleepy reading to bedtime was actually really relaxing—as opposed to adjusting a bajillion times before dozing off.
