I Sleep on a Japanese Futon

I sleep on the floor, and I love it. 

My sophomore year of college, I went on a two week long rock climbing trip with some climbing club friends. It was the longest I'd ever slept in a tent continuously. When I came back home, I flopped into my bed the first night and immediately felt uncomfortable. For the last 14 days I had been sleeping on a 1/2" thick Thermarest camping pad on packed dirt, and that was what my body wanted now I guess. I brought the Thermarest into my room and slept on the floor next to my bed that night. I continued that for the rest of the summer. 

That was 8 years ago, and since then I've experimented with different setups, from just the Thermarest pad to a 4" foam trifold mattress. I've now settled on a 4" Japanese futon which I totally love. To address what you are no doubt currently thinking, yes, surprisingly, three women in those 8 years actually put up with my floor sleeping setups.. and that was all I needed to keep going with it. Still, I did switch back to a bed a few times in this period just so I could share the bed. It was such a conflict trying to reconcile these two incompatible realities. I love sleeping on the futon, but most women will most likely will not be down for this. I mean, I get it. There is probably like 10 people in the United States deliberately sleeping on the floor out of preference. Most people like cushy things overall. But at the same time, any woman I truly get along with will probably be more likely to consider it since they'll naturally be a bit crazy like me.

 

........Or I'll just be alone the rest of my life. It could go either way ;) Maybe I'm just hoping I'll start a big enough trend here so I don't have to suffer that fate. 

Honestly, I'll never go back to a regular bed unless a significant other forces me to. But she would have to be a keeper.

                    My floor sleeping setup with a queen size japanese-style futon. It's just a canvas outer filled with four inches of cotton. 

I sleep on the floor because it's just plain comfortable to me. I love the feeling of the ground pushing back up at me. It's hard to explain. I just crave the firmness. A mattress is too sinky for me, too bouncy and shifty. I think of it like a full body sling. A sling holds your arm in place and does the work of stability so that your arm doesn't have to. In a similar way, a soft bed molds you in a certain position, supporting every little joint like they're each their own dainty little Disney princess. I mean the old school Disney princesses though, because the new ones could beat us all up. 

And then when you wake up your plushy sleep machine is too succulently pleasureful for you to get out of, so you lay there like "ughhh I don't wannaa get uUup". Dude, get your lazy ass up. Be like Moana and go freaking murder a volcano.

With a futon it's not like that. Your joints have to do more of the work of supporting your weight themselves. You get stronger. Yes, that's right, in my experience you can get stronger at sleeping. When you move and roll over, you don't sink, and the floor pushes right back on your movement. You feel your body more on a firmer surface, and once you're adjusted to floor sleeping, the pressure on your body actually feels great. in fact, every time you adjust or roll over, it's kind of like a free massage. You get certain pressures on parts of your body you don't normally get which I believe can be good for muscles and joints.

Another reason I'm a big floor sleeping advocate is because you go through reps of getting up and down off the floor, which is a skill older people seem to lose if they stop doing it. A normal bed is so  p e r f e c t l y elevated that you don't have to bend your knees past 90 degrees to get in. So you get up effortlessly, then you go eat breakfast in a chair, then you go to the office and sit in a goddamn chair. Then you go home and flop in your perfectly thigh-high bed, and the whole day you never did a single freaking squat. I'm exaggerating but hey, some people live like this. The point is, sleeping on the floor is a great built-in way to add a little more mobility into your day. And in a modern environment where we never need to bend our knees past 90 degrees, I think this is pretty valuable. 

Here's some more benefits of floor sleeping:

- Cooler in the summer, since the coolest air in your room will be near the floor. 

- I honestly just like the way it looks. You could say its a ~vibe~. It also makes my small-ish room look and feel bigger. 

- Less mattress deformity. A futon doesn't develop as deep of body impressions overtime as a traditional mattress. My old foam mattress quickly deformed where I typically laid, and I couldn't stand it because I like nice flat surfaces. I don't even like sleeping in hammocks for this reason. All mattresses will form body impressions, even futons. The difference is a futon simply has less material to actually compress.

- More space. My room is on the smaller side, and you can see from the photo that the corner of the bed sort of blocks the way to the other side of the room. Since my bed is so low, I can really just walk over it if I want. Sometimes I even do morning/evening stretching right on top of the bed as if its open floor. 

Some cons:

- Colder in the winter. But honestly, I use fleece sheets in the winter so I've never been too cold. 

- No under-the-bed storage space. But there's no reason you can't put your futon up on a platform frame if that's a problem for you. In fact, I'm sure your odds of having a sex life increases proportionately with the number of inches you sleep off the ground haha...:') Regardless, the main reason I don't do this is because, something, something, something, 90-degree knee bends.

Alright. 

Thats my take on sleep. I'm currently experimenting with phasing my pillow out slowly. I have no hot takes on this yet, but I'm just curious if I can do it. I like the idea of being able to sleep without a pillow, especially for very light-packing camping trips. It's always a hassle to try and find a comfortable stack of clothes to put under my head and I think it'd be cool to not need a pillow. 

Thanks for reading. Let me know if you can relate to any of this. And once again, Merry, Merry Christmas, you elevated, cushy-sleeping normies ;) ... And have fun actually having a sex life.