I have eight pillows on my bed.  I'm not counting decorative or throw pillows.  (There are two of those.)  In our master bedroom, there are eight bed pillows on the bed. 

In one Seinfeld episode, Jerry gets totally fed up with all the pillows his former girlfriend put on the bed.  After taking them off the bed a few nights himself, and then replacing them every morning, he decides, with help from Elaine, to terminate the pillows.  These pillows will never torment him again.  Out came the scissors and the pillows are history.  

Why could I possibly want eight pillows on my bed?  I don't want eight pillows. I have eight pillows on my bed because I am searching for the perfect pillow.  Two of them are king-sized numbers that fill the king-sized shams that match the comforter.  (My 89-year-old mother still can't figure out what happened to the popularity of the bedspread.  But the addition of shams into our American bedding repertoires enables companies to charge half again whatever the comforter or quilt or bedspread cost to increase the sale 50%.)   Neither of these sham pillows turned out to be the perfect pillow, so they stay in the shams.  The other six pillows have all had various trials under my oh-so-sensitive neck and shoulders.  None have made the grade.  

Fortunately, my husband is easy-going in the pillow department.  He wants two under his head, period.  He's pretty flexible about the depth, material content, givability, etc., of these two pillows.  Night after night, he blissfully snoozes away on my rejects. 

Near by is the princess-and-the-pea reenactor:  me.  I cycle through the four pillows left, the ones that have come closest to providing me a pain and stiffness free wake-up, with no particular rhyme or reason.  When I get totally fed up with one, I'll grab another, memory foam, regular foam, polyester fill, down, or a hybrid mix, whichever appeals to my neck at the moment.  I've tried adding a neck pillow (that's one of the decorator pillows on my bed).  I've tried the buckwheat pillows.  (Ack.)  I've tried rolling up a towel (chiropractor suggestion) and putting it under my neck below the pillow, beneath the pillow, and tucked inside the pillow case. In the pillow case works pretty well on occasion, but this is short lived.  After one or two nights, the towel is too compacted, and too hard.  Time to get a new towel, or usually, with the memory of the hard towel in my mind, I cycle on to a whole new arrangement for awhile. 

I think many people must share this pillow-fickleness.  Hotels now seem to offer at least two types of pillows on the beds, sometimes three.  I don't have as much trouble sleeping on pillows in hotels.  Hmmmm.  On vacation, less stress, less tension, less pillow problem? Maybe, but I don't think I can move into a hotel for a permanent vacation.  I do, however, know what my perfect pillow would be.  I've designed it in my head.  I've never seen it for sale.  I could make it, taking materials from my current stock on my bed.  Home manufacturing this pillow would be imperfect and with my dinosaur sewing machine, would take awhile, but I may attempt production some day.  In the meantime, my dream pillow exists only in my daydreams...