Nobody told me how to sleep. Sleep was just something I did, generally when exhausted. The mantra of, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” was the anthem of my youth.

Sleep, as it happens, is pretty important. People say that, but they don’t always communicate why sleep is important. Getting older has forced me to come to terms with these things – things which I wouldn’t have paid attention to while I was younger and worked hours that were not as structured as the companies I worked for were.

They tell you you should sleep, but not at the price of their productivity.

Lately, I’ve been taking sleep more seriously, but as a side sleeper I am very particular about pillows. Most pillows I encounter don’t support my head properly, much less comfortably. At one point I had a pillow made at a custom pillow store somewhere in the U.S., and when I moved down I brought it with me. I spent $100 on that pillow, and when I returned to the U.S. I let an aunt have it because she was a particularly nice aunt. She loved it. She died, and the pillow disappeared.

Lately, I’ve been trying to sleep better – not necessarily more – and so I have had this pillow dilemma.

I was at a local store just some days ago and they were having a sale on some Sealy pillows which I couldn’t find on Amazon to link. I’ve spent decades buying crappy pillows in the hope that they would be good, and they are generally not even passable unless folded in half. They were having some special on Sealy memory foam cooling pillows…

But they were in boxes. I couldn’t poke them or press down on them. I’m not buying a pillow based on promises, and Sealy apparently thought that their name on the box would be sufficient to get people to buy a pillow.

No.

So I told the guy who was handling the sale that if he wanted to sell me a pillow, one of them had to come out of the box. Another man, about my age, backed me up. Before you knew it, we had a revolution on our hands to unbox the pillow, the salesperson relented – and as it happened, he sold me a pillow.

We had to free the pillow from the box, which should seem ridiculous because it is ridiculous. There are some things you simply don’t buy online unless you know what you’re ordering and they are much the same as buying something off the shelf that requires the same knowledge.

You’d think marketing and sales folks would understand this. They generally don’t. Clothing, beds, pillows… it’s so much better to buy in person so that you know what you’re getting.

I like the pillow. I’ll write more about my adventures with sleep in the near future.

Amusingly, there’s an Amazon affiliate link in here to Sealy pillows for the people who don’t understand this. 🙂