About a month ago I got an email from a nice gentleman named Kevin who was representing a company called Prone Cushion. He said that he had determined that my site’s readers were the perfect audience for his company’s product– a cushion (“pillow” isn’t quite the right word, as we’ll get to in a bit) that was specifically designed to aid someone lying on their stomach while they read or fiddled with their phones. He was wondering if I had any interest in receiving one so that I could review it for my site.

I’ll be honest; I figured he was either a bot or he’d sent identical emails to twenty thousand websites, and I posted about it, and not in the most polite of tones. He replied, pointing out that he’d seen the post, and further pointing out that I was a) an author and b) a reader who c) frequently reviewed books, and as such it was not unreasonable that my site was frequented by readers— his product’s target demographic. So, uh, most likely human, and quite possibly smarter than my dumb ass to boot.

Chastened, I apologized and provided a street address and picked a color– I went with midnight blue, but it’s also available in “dawn beige” and a “luxury edition,” which is brown and two-tone, with some added piping along the seams and a leatherette fabric. (*)

Let’s start with positives: the build quality of this thing is actually pretty impressive. The fabric is plush and soft, and even at my rather higher-than-average human mass I didn’t feel like there was any risk of the skeleton of the thing deforming or breaking underneath me. There is a little set of risers underneath it that swings out to give you a few levels of elevation; those also have the fabric on them (the boy is using them in the picture above) so it’s not immediately apparent that they’re being used, but they’re solid as well– looking at them, I felt like they’d be a pivot point, but the cushion isn’t going to move when you’re laying on it.

All three of us tested it out. My wife laid on it for a few minutes and pronounced it acceptable, and liked it a bit more with some height added to it, but said that she couldn’t quite find a position where she felt like her chin and her elbows were both in the right place at the same time. My problem? I generally don’t lie on my stomach for any reason any longer; I used to be a stomach sleeper but this isn’t really something I can see anyone falling asleep on, and when I’m reading I lie on my back or my side.(**) And the problem with lying on the floor is that you have to get up from the floor, which … let’s just say that I go to rather extreme lengths to avoid ever having to be on the floor. And for me, personally, that’s a real hindrance to using this product– it might make lying on the floor a lot more comfortable than just sticking a regular pillow underneath you, and it does, but I still have to beached-whale my heavy ass off the ground afterwards, and I’m waiting for the day when one of my leg bones just snaps the hell in half while I’m trying to stand up. In theory, you could use this in bed as well, but if I’m already in bed I may as well just use my regular pillows rather than one that I’ll just end up putting on the floor anyway when I’m ready to sleep.

My son? My son loves it. It comes with a manual that suggests a handful of alternate use positions other than just laying on it, including putting it behind your back while sitting on the floor, say, to play video games or something, and I’ve caught him using it several times on his own, when he has access to our entire sofa plus a couple of recliners and a beanbag and a lot of the time there’s an air mattress in the room with him as well. It’s also occurred to me that if I end up taking this thing to school, it’ll get used all the time— my 8th graders will absolutely love it, and they’re always looking for any excuse to lie on the floor anyway. They’ll fight over it; I have no doubt in my mind about it.

And if it was priced in such a way to make it reasonable to buy one for a kid, or a handful of them for a classroom, I’d be giving this thing a full-throated endorsement, because not everybody is me, and while this particular thing isn’t going to be great for me I can imagine any number of, uh, I’ll say higher-mobility individuals enjoying it. However, that high build quality I was praising earlier comes with a price tag of $189 for midnight blue or dawn beige, and the premium luxury edition is $229. That’s grown-up money. It’s “Dude, I already bought you a bean bag” money. I have reason to believe I might have access to discount codes, and I’ll update if I do, but I don’t really think anyone is going to be picking up a few of these on a teacher’s salary. So forgive me for offering, shall we say, a somewhat nuanced opinion here, but if it’s intriguing to you and the cost isn’t an issue, I’d say go ahead and scratch that itch and pick it up. It’s not going to be something for everyone, I think, but the people who like it are going to like it a lot.

(*) So, yeah, this is a “product provided free in return for a fair review” scenario. They actually have an affiliate program that I can join but I don’t plan to, and while if it comes up organically I’ll happily refer people to this post, I’m not going to be sneaking Prone Cushion references into my Monthly Reads posts or anything.

(**) worth pointing out that if you sort of shove the cushion under your armpit, you can lie on your side on it as well. I did not test out this position but I’ve seen my son doing it that way. There are pictures on the website if you can’t quite visualize what I’m describing.