By PERDITA BUCHAN
Published: April 6, 2008

IF a fairy tale princess were to lie down on a stack of $5,000 pillowtop mattresses, would she still feel the pea? Maybe not. But were she a modern princess, she would certainly know if the sheets had only a 200 thread count, the duvet wasn’t baffle stitched or the pillow was wrong for her particular sleep style.

Thanks to plenty of admonitions from health gurus, it’s no news to anyone that we live in a sleep-deprived culture. Anxious and over-scheduled, we crave the solace of temporary oblivion that is the promise of sleep. But is the current cult of the bedroom excessive? Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, was content with a simple cave. There he drowsed on an ebony bed, apparently without the advantage of ionizing purifiers to keep the air from becoming stagnant.

We have air purifiers aplenty, as well as humidifiers and aromatherapy diffusers to fill our rooms with the calming scents of balsam and lavender and verbena. We have, it seems, internalized Hypnos, making sleep a kind of self-worship, and the bedroom, where we propitiate ourselves and our senses, its temple.

Which makes the bed an altar of sorts. The Greeks spared no expense creating those for their gods, so are you going to settle for a regular old mattress with 900 or so springs, or insist on a Dux bed, which has up to 3,700? Or maybe you should consider a Tempur-Pedic mattress, said to conform to your weight and body temperature.

The company that makes the Tempur material in Tempur-Pedic says it all began with NASA’s efforts to “relieve the tremendous g-forces experienced by astronauts,” possibly approximating the stress of your commute. Of course if you are sharing your altar, beds can be customized to make each side right for its sleeper. No compromise, no argument.

Still, for good measure, you may want to improve that carefully chosen bed with a wool or down-filled mattress pad, perhaps one with different amounts of filling for head, feet and torso, or just a plain old European featherbed of the kind that appears in fairy tales. Naturally, sheets, the layer next to your skin, must be silky soft. If 500-thread-count cotton is good, 1,000 is better, preferably Egyptian long staple.

To prevent the disruptive influence of stray chemicals, the cotton should be organic. Once available only in an authentic-looking off white, organic cotton now comes in nature-inspired colors and patterns created with low-impact dyes.

You can snuggle unencumbered under airy duvets in down or PrimaLoft or even silk. If you need the weight of blankets to feel cozy, you can choose merino, lamb’s-wool, alpaca, even cashmere, sort of a huge pashmina shawl in similarly glowing colors.

While Hypnos had the purling waters of the river Lethe and the fumes of poppies to keep him snoozing, we have machines that produce white noise, the sounds of ocean waves, summer rain, tropical rain forests (minus the shrieking parrots, I guess). And we can also spritz those high-thread-count sheets with scented water bottled especially for the purpose.

Once I scoffed at such niceties as just one more decadent example of narcissistic excess, but I think I might have succumbed again to the rabbit-fur jacket syndrome. On a trip to Prague one time, my daughter and I kept running into a cohort of young Italian girls wearing short rabbit fur jackets. For the first few days, we found those jackets beyond tacky, then they began to look good, and then we wondered where to get them.

Now, I press my nose against the window of the Dux bed showroom in Red Bank, and wander the aisles of department stores where heavenly clouds of duvets hover in their sateen-covered glory. Like any barbarian, I feel shame at my unenlightened past.

Oh, the beds I have slept in. Lumpy summer house beds with their familiar musty smell and creaking springs. My parents’ double bed, mine when I was 8 since it didn’t fit in the master bedroom of the rented farmhouse, with a comfy trough at its center. The secondhand double bed that my newly wed husband and I proudly bought from a motel that was going out of business — so much more adult than sleeping bags on the floor. And when I was renovating my house, I slept one whole summer on a narrow futon that converted into a chair, jabbed periodically by its metal frame.

I grew up with slippery sheets of polyester percale in their gloriously synthetic patterns and colors. They freed a generation from the chore of ironing and were usually paired with another labor saver, moth-defying acrylic blankets that sparked and crackled fiercely on cold winter nights. I am chagrined to recall how cheerfully I unrolled a thin cotton-sheet sleeping bag on the bunk beds of youth hostels before crawling under the rough, standard-issue blankets. I thought luxury was staying at my grandmother’s in England, where the sheets were soft, much-mended linen and things called eiderdowns slid off the bed in the night. But maybe it was really the early morning cups of tea.

I’m embarrassed now by my shabby (if organic) cotton sheets, the old duvet now losing its loft, the polyester mattress pads, the faded cotton and scratchy wool blankets collected casually along life’s way. Even my buckwheat pillow is a cheap one from a low-end mail-order catalog. I don’t have a diffuser, and scattering cotton balls soaked in lavender oil is messy and ineffective.

So why am I not sleeping on a Dux bed wrapped in Egyptian cotton and alpaca? There’s the expense, of course, but also a kind of inertia. Maybe a part of me still distrusts too much comfort. Or maybe I want to keep up the fiction that, as in my youth, I can sleep anywhere — even as my aging body whispers to me of feather beds and memory foam.