This is so-o-o-o-o 70s but the most comfortable bed I slept in was my girlfriend’s California king waterbed. You would get a slight sinking sensation when settling down but only momentarily, not like the several seconds worth in a memory foam bed. The pressure was so evenly distributed I would often wake up in the morning in exactly the same position I’d fallen asleep.
The biggest drawback was that she’d bought it used from some guy who’d gotten divorced so it was from the early, early days of waterbeds. It had no internal baffles so it was a big bag of water with a mind of its own. When we were… playing, we’d have to adjust our rhythms to that of the bed or risk getting thrown out, especially when changing positions.
My wife, Pepper Mill, hates Memory Foam mattresses with the Heat of a Thousand Suns.
Which is apparently what she feels when she sinks into one. They form-fit and retain heat.
My wife and I laid on a floor model memory foam mattress with a gel top. We thought “hey this thing feels good”. After sleeping on it overnight though, the foam was stiff as a board and super hot. Not a pleasant experience. If you like soft mattresses, memory should be crossed off your list.
It definitely took some getting used to, but now I like it okay. In fact, when we sleep on our pillow-top mattress at our 2nd home, it feels awesome sinking into it, but then we always wake up with backaches.
I’ve never slept on a memory foam mattress, but I did buy a memory foam pillow once. It advertised that it would stay cool, and that sounded like what I wanted for the summertime.
In reality, it just felt uncomfortably clammy. I kept waking up and thinking that I was sleeping in a pool of cold drool. I chucked it after a couple of nights and went back to my old pillows.
We recently bought a mattress at Mattress Firm, and from what they tell me it’s very difficult to find a high-quality mattress that doesn’t have at least some memory foam in it. The only exceptions, they told me, were really cheap mattresses that I wasn’t really in the market for. They had a couple of those.
But I agree that memory foam is far from perfect. As I type this, my wife being away visiting family, I am sitting along the center line of the mattress, and I will be sleeping there tonight as well. As the Mattress Firm people told me, it’s a good idea to bear weight down the center, to remedy the dual “pits” that appear in memory foam when two people sleep on it. Or sometimes when we’re both here I use my kettlebells to tamp down the center. It’s something you have to do occasionally through the life of the mattress. Another thing they recommended was rotating the mattress 180 degrees every week or so.
Slept on one in a hotel once, never slept on another. I won’t if I can help it, I felt like I was laying on the soft side of an oversized scotch-brite sponge. Made me overheat as well. Hate memory foam. I’ll take a [firm] spring mattress any time. I honestly think the dislike comes from it being overly soft and the texture of the material even with sheets on it.
I prefer memory foam and my husband hates it. He wouldn’t listen to my suggestion to get 2 XL twins instead of a king mattress, insisting he’d be OK on the foam mattress. He wasn’t. But I read a suggestion that you use an area rug over the mattress to make it feel firmer, and it’s worked. We got one that fits on his side of the bed and gives him the support he likes, and I get the comfort I like.
I am a Sleep Number girl. I love love love the adjustability that permits me to get exactly the firmness/softness I need on any given night. Memory foam, on the other hand is both too hot and too constricting for my tastes.
I HATE foam rubber mattresses, too. They are hot and uncomfortable; you sink into them, and in 2 years, the one we got became lumpy with hills and vales. I’m tired of being uncomfortably hot every night, which never happened with the coil spring beds we had before. But now, every place we go, the mattress stores only sell foam rubber mattresses, like they are the best thing ever, which they are NOT! They all claim that memory foam is so wonderful, but it is just foam rubber with a fancy name. We have looked for months, and we cannot find any mattress store that has beds for sale that are not foam rubber. Is there any place that sells mattresses the way they used to make them?
all of you poor souls out there lost in the wilderness of the memory-foam jungle…
I’ve tried a couple of varieties of foam mattress, and either they were too firm or too soft. I’m lucky in that locally, we have a mattress store that custom builds mattresses right in the store. Apparently you can get innerspring mattresses that pretty closely mimic foam mattresses of whatever variety for not as much money as I expected for a custom made mattress.
FWIW, we recently stayed at a hotel where our room had a king size bed with conventional mattress. Since we have a queen at home the extra room was nice. But there was also the unmistakable beginning of the dreaded “pit” that conventional mattresses get after lengthy use. As aggravating as memory foam can be, I don’t think I could ever go back to the old kind.