Creature Comforts That Lull You to Sleep

IF a fairy tale princess were to lie down on a stack of $5,000 pillowtop mattresses, would she still feel the pea? Maybe not. But were she a modern princess, she would certainly know if the sheets had only a 200 thread count, the duvet wasn’t baffle stitched or the pillow was wrong for her particular sleep style.

Matt Collins

In the Region

Thanks to plenty of admonitions from health gurus, it’s no news to anyone that we live in a sleep-deprived culture. Anxious and overscheduled, we crave the solace of temporary oblivion that is the promise of sleep. But is the current cult of the bedroom excessive? Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, was content with a simple cave. There he drowsed on an ebony bed, apparently without the advantage of ionizing purifiers to keep the air from becoming stagnant.

We have air purifiers aplenty, as well as humidifiers and aromatherapy diffusers to fill our rooms with the calming scents of balsam and lavender and verbena. We have, it seems, internalized Hypnos, making sleep a kind of self-worship, and the bedroom, where we propitiate ourselves and our senses, its temple.

Which makes the bed an altar of sorts. The Greeks spared no expense creating those for their gods, so are you going to settle for a regular old mattress with 900 or so springs, or insist on a Dux bed, which has up to 3,700? Or maybe you should consider a Tempur-Pedic mattress, said to conform to your weight and body temperature