Cuddledown Dreamstead 800FP Goose Pillow, King, Soft, White

An amazingly soft pillow

If you have any type of back or spinal issues, your bed and pillows will become more important than you ever thought possible. Gone are the days when a sleeping bag on the ground and your coat rolled up as a pillow are fun, or even possible! Having degenerative disc disease with a partially fused spine, there is not an area of my spine that doesn't hurt. The cervical spine was the first to go, so my experience finding the right pillow started 20 years ago. With that background, I think I am a very well informed pillow consumer. I have had $400.00 plus memory foam ones and inexpensive latex. Price does not always equate with comfort.In addition to a firmer pillow under my head, I have two different down ones, a soft one to squish and put where ever needed and a medium one which usually ends up under my legs or between the knees. The squishy pillow was one of the most expensive pillows I ever purchased and I have never regretted it. That being said, it was looking really sad between my elderly dog who loved to sneak on top of it to my own habit of having it under my arm in a chair where food, drink and junk have dropped onto it.On Black Friday, high quality down pillows was one of the things I was most hoping to find discounted. I had one in my cart online that I had picked from the Cuddledown catalog. I messaged them asking why the one on Amazon was lower priced and what the differences between the two were. To my delight, the only difference was that this one has a lower thread count cover. Don't get me wrong, thread count can be important, but here you are covering the cover up with a pillow case or in my case, with a protective zipped cover and then a pillowcase, so who cares that the thread count is 400 instead of 600 for example. Did I need to pay overr 35% more to have a higher thread count casing which would never touch my head? Nah, that would have been silly and a waste of money.I ordered the soft filled pillow.When it arrived in its own plastic zipped bag which had then been placed in a cardboard box for shipping, I took it out with a great deal of hope. No smell, absolutely none other than that new fabric smell which is most likely caused by the sizing on the cotton cover. A stinky down pillow is like sleeping with a wet dog. I have heard people say the smell gets better but I have a "great nose" which smells everything and when I purchased a stinky one in the past I immediately returned it.The other pillows I purchased came in a big plastic bag which did nothing to protect the pillow while in transit. Only Cuddledown boxed their pillows for shipping. How a company treats its products often speaks to the quality and cost to construct. There is just minimal protection with those huge plastic bags.Having passed the smell test, I then put the pillow flat on a table and walked my hands up and down it, pushing, squishing and rolling the pillow as I went along. Then flip it over and do it again. It passed the "quill" test. Cheap pillows will sneak in feathers with their down. The quills will with use, will start to poke through the pillow casing. It is like sleeping with a few tooth picks under your head. Plus it is gross when you turn the pillow and a feather comes floating out!Next test was the roll test, could I roll the pillow up without any problem? Yes I could. Then I squished it into weird shapes which I do to get a pillow where I need it and it squished without any difficulty. Only then did I put a protective cover over the down pillow and try it on the bed. It was just what I had been looking for, a pillow I could move around the bed and all around my body. It was just perfect.As the pillow was on sale the day I purchased it, the price was very reasonable. But quite honestly it would have been worth it at full retail.Of course there was also the comparison test to the two other new down pillows I had purchased elsewhere which was really unfair to the other pillows being tested. I had purchased a department store brand "firm" pillow made up of at least 80% European Goose down that had similar retail pricing and a third which was supposed to be soft but was dramatically less expensive to this one from another line the store carried. The firm pillow was to replace my foam one but was of very good construction. (I would have purchased the firm one from Cuddledown but by the time I started to put it in my cart, it had already sold out.) The other soft one, well lets just say that it is going back to the store. The difference between the two pillows was dramatic.I know everyone has their personal likes and dislikes in terms of firmness, type of pillow etc. but if you are in the market for a high end goose down pillow I would suggest one of these. In all aspects it was 5 stars. The problem may be that if you share your bed, get two or expect to have your pillow stolen out from your head on a nightly basis. Now I just have to wait until the next big sale so I can nab the Cuddledown pillow in firm. ........and well maybe a medium softness too!