How blessed we are to live in this century! Forget all the conveniences of cell phones, cars, and electricity-just consider the fact that you are not sharing a straw tick mattress with two or three other family members! Imagine, a couple of centuries ago, people were just deciding to move the contraption of logs and ropes that passed as a bed out of the kitchen or living room and into a private room designed only for sleeping. Just think of all the bad backs and cantankerousness! Getting a good night's sleep would have been impossible were people not slaving away eighteen hours a day.

Yes, we are fortunate to be able to retire for the night on a gracefully designed bed frame in a private bedroom on a real mattress. The exceptionally lucky ones enjoy the benefits of a memory foam mattress. Memory foam is a high tech material originally designed by NASA to protect astronauts during lift off. NASA, however, never put it to use.

In the public sector, for a long while its out of reach cost made memory foam accessible primarily to hospitals and nursing care facilities. Now it is regularly available in pillows, mattresses, mattress toppers, and seating, and the cost is becoming acceptable to the general population.

People are finding that a night on a memory foam mattress really does offer a different sleep experience. Though they may seem surprisingly hard at first, the warmth of your body soon causes the mattress to conform to your shape, firmly and evenly distributing your weight. This support inhibits restlessness and the stiffness people often feel after a night on an inferior mattress.

No one wants to go back to the days of the straw tick mattress, but if you are still sleeping on a traditional mattress and box springs, you are still stuck in the old days! For state of the art sleeping, nothing compares to a memory foam mattress.