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.

Fever

One's literacy tastes mature with age, they say, but there are several books that make the same impact when I read them now as they did when I first read them. One that I have already mentioned in a post is Kipling's Jungle Book. Another is Laurie Lee's autobiographical "Cider with Rosie" which was a set book in the early years of secondary school. Laurie Lee's way of expression strikes a chord with me and I find myself identifying with him. Whilst I cannot claim to have suffered such childhood illness as he did, nevertheless much of what he described tallies with my own childhood illness experiences:

"With the fever still fresh …by nightfall I was usually raving. My limbs went first, splintering like logs, so that I seemed to grow dozens of arms. Then the bed no longer had limits to it and became a desert of hot wet sand. I began to talk to a second head laid on the pillow, my own head once removed… Such a night of fever slowed everything down as though hot rugs had been stuffed in a clock… Between this sleeping and waking I lived ten generations and grew weak on my long careers, but when I surfaced at last from its endless delirium the real world seemed suddenly dear. While I slept it had been washed of fever and sweetened, and now wrapped me like a bell of glass. For a while, refreshed, I heard its faintest sounds: streams running, trees stirring, birds folding their wings, a hill-sheep’s cough, a far gate swinging, the breath of a horse in a field. Below me the kitchen made cosy murmurs, footsteps went up the road, a voice said Good-night, a door creaked and closed – or a boy suddenly hollered, animal-clear in the dark, and was answered far off by another. I lay moved to stupidity by these precious sounds as though I’d just got back from the dead."

I can remember laying in bed and considering the proposition of my head, as if it were outside of me, a great spherical ball immensely heavy and dense and with a frightening pressure inside as if it should explode. And the eventual recuperation, painted so well by Lee: the first taste of dry cream-cracker and Ribena (I can still hardly allow myself to drink Ribena unless I am sick) and, later, the first proper meal of boiled fish, so soft, so good.

And so I find myself writing from bed - I am suffering (along with several others here) from a particularly virulent cold that brought with it about 24 hours of fever now more or less subsided. I still have the thick-head-feeling and head-ache that reminds me of those times. Ali told me to stay in bed so I obediently obeyed. And so here I am...