"I like memory foam mattresses. A minority of people really don't."

I tried a memory foam mattress - the Tempurpedic Cloud Supreme, queen size. This is a $3000 bed. It felt amazingly soft in the store. But when I tried it at home, it was unbearable, for 2 reasons:

• I don't roll over in my sleep. Doctors don't believe me, but I don't. Memory foam is very good insulation. So I would wake up around 3AM, drenched in sweat, because the foam underneath me was about a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, then roll over to a cold part of the bed, then wake up 3 hours later when that part got hot.

• People talk about getting back support from a bed. You don't want back support. At least, not when we're talking about the small of your back. With soft memory foam, the heaviest parts of your body - your torso and your butt - sink deeply into the foam over time. The small of your back does not. Pretty soon your body is in an upside-down-U shape, with torso and butt sinking down into the bed, while between them the small of your back is bent over a lump of memory foam that it isn't heavy enough to squash. Painful.

Before that, I had a semi-wave waterbed, a very cheap one (for a waterbed). It was a terrible hassle to move (you could never drain out all the water, so it still weighed about 150 pounds empty), but wonderful to sleep on. In the summer, I didn't need air conditioning at night; I controlled my temperature by how many blankets I put between me and the water. In the winter, heating the bed was probably cheaper than heating the house.