MY older son asked for an iPhone for his bar mitzvah. My younger son, Gabriel, will be celebrating his in about a month and wants a Tempur-Pedic mattress.

This may not be as odd as it sounds. Gabriel has been interested in mattresses for a long time, and we bought him a new one a few years ago when he complained his old one was lumpy and he couldn’t sleep.

But somehow, it wasn’t enough. Although to me he seems to sleep just fine, he is convinced that the perfect mattress will make his nights blissful.

In this, he is not alone. Judging just by the many commercials and advertisements, there are a lot of Americans out there looking to buy a great night’s sleep. Companies offer a heady array of mattresses, sleeping pills and even soothing noise machines to usher us into the land of nod.