At last I have an excuse for not making the bed in the morning. ;-)

When my kids were tots and we took them to day care, the day care center had a collection of little beds for naps, which were some kind of durable fabric mesh stretched over a frame. I've often wondered how that would work as a general purpose mattress for adults, with little chance of festering over time.

As far as I know, any kind of hammock or suspension bed will ultimately suffer from uneven pressure points. Unless the frame is filled in, in the middle, which would make it a normal mattress, then your weight is going to be pushing back on you mostly laterally via the perimeter where the attachment of the mesh happens. Sleeping surfaces are meant to support the body from the bottom in an even fashion in order to minimize pressure points.

This is why memory foam is so effective - instead of having 1024 springs, add more add more!!! - we just get a porous composite material with 1000000 tiny nooks which basically act as springs. Latex on the other hand, if not in foam form, can be solid, and gains its "spring" properties just from its tensile chemistry alone. No nooks needed. But latex foam is sold..which is a marriage of the two ideas.

In any case, hammocks aren't gonna hurt you from sleeping on em occasionally, especially since the pressure points will mostly be your back as hammocks are often hung loosely, so that the attachment points can be much much higher than your actual body, therefore moving most of the force to a vertical pressure, instead of that lateral pressure we talked about.

You mean something like army cots[1]?

[1]http://armynavysuperstores.com/cots.htm

(Plenty functional, not that comfortable)

Yeah, that's pretty much it. I suppose toddlers don't weigh as much as adults, and can probably sleep on anything.

This is why it's hilarious that they offer return policies. You really think you're going to coax your mattress back into the box?

They send someone to pick it up. You don't have to get it back in the box. With most of them you get 100 days to try it out (some are up to 365 days). If you don't like it, you call them and they come and get it.

When I returned a Casper they sent a man&van to pick it up.