The perfect pillow

We have just invested considerable expense in a couple of 100% goose-down pillows. Having only slept one night using mine, the jury is still out on whether it will improve my lifestyle - but it had better!

One thing I noticed straight away was that it has no temperature control.

Since early childhood I have maintained that the perfect pillow should have a means to vary its temperature.  Particularly to make it colder than ambient. Am I alone? - and why is there no such pillow on the market?  There are products like here that claim to cool but their effect must only be short term as there is no refrigeration involved.

As a child my head would sometimes feel as if it were a huge sphere, tight and fit to burst, enormously heavy, and in urgent need of cooling. Doubtless caused by a fever, this feeling was recurrent to the point where I would dread it happening. The perfect pillow surely would have alleviated my suffering at those times.

Warring with my pillow whilst trying to sleep I realise how heavy my head is even when am I not running a fever. Apparently it is about 8% of my total body mass (good thing I am not overweight!). Any lumpiness results in spot pressure points which aggravate. Therefore the perfect pillow should also stay homogenous and easily conform to the shape of one's head so as to distribute its weight evenly.

I must also be able to mold the pillow so that it stays away from my mouth. My mouth is very particular about what it touches and, anyway, if I don't adjust the relative pressure inside my mouth so that it is slightly negative it can, when combined with the capillary action of an adjacent pillow, sometimes dribble. A wet pillow is not nice. Whilst on the subject of mouths I will note that, in ortder to sleep, I also have to consciously adjust my bite so as to minimise the pressure on my teeth. My teeth are very unreasonable in this respect.

Sometime I like my head a little higher, sometimes lower, and adding a second pillow goes too far, so the perfect pillow should also be adjustable in height.

I usually sleep on my side. Unless Ali is fast asleep this means on my right side, otherwise she claims that my breathing keeps her awake.  My body is apparently very inconsiderate in its insistence to continue breathing even when sleeping on my left side. If my stomach is acting up (sick feeling, or simply over-full) then I have to go into "I am sick" mode. This necessitates lying on my back with my head propped up on two pillows and no weight on my stomach. It would obviously be handier if, at a flip of a switch, a single pillow could accommodate this special requirement.

Sometimes, usually after the inevitable-now-I-am-older midnight loo-trip, I switch to being "arm sleeper" and have to mold the pillow accordingly.  The invention in the above picture is a good idea but I am hardly likely to want to switch pillows. Therefore the ideal pillow must accommodate one's arm with ease.

Why am I going on at such length about such a seemingly trivial subject?  Each of us spends almost a third of our lives snuggling my pillow. That's a good deal longer than I have ever snuggled anything else apart from, possibly, my computer mouse. Maybe if we gave more consideration to our pillows we would be better people.