Of course, we sleep because we are creatures. But trying to understand what sleep is all about has been one of the engines that has shaped our culture.

One of the stories that gave birth to western culture is Homer’s Odyssey, a work that continues to provide fodder for comic strips and popular culture almost three thousand years after it started to take shape—somewhat longer than the average life expectancy of books these days. Though Homer’s identity is lost in the shades of time (it’s possible that Homer is an amalgam of different people who contributed to an oral tradition), legend has long held that the visionary Homer who sang The Odyssey into life was blind. That may be why The Odyssey whispers in the dark.

At its root, The Odyssey is a book about getting home to bed. The hero, Odysseus, leaves the rocky island of Ithaca, where he is king, and goes off to fight the Trojan war. He makes an appearance in Homer’s prequel, The Iliad, where he has the clever idea of using a wooden horse to smuggle soldiers into the besieged city of Troy. Once the war is won, Odysseus has to get back home—and this is the plot of The Odyssey.

It takes him quite a while to find his way home; by the time he gets back to Ithaca, he has been away for twenty years. His queen, Penelope, has been waiting patiently all that time, beset by a pack of sleazy suitors who have wanted her to agree that her husband is dead and team up with one of them, a prospect she doesn’t relish. Like Odysseus, Penelope is in search of rest. For three of the years Odysseus is away, she uses her insomnia to keep the suitors at bay, telling them that she can’t possibly marry until she has completed the shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, which she works on every day, crafting a “great and growing web.” At night, she stays awake, undoing “by the light of torches” the work she has done on the shroud that day, in order to give herself an excuse for the work continuing the next day. (Perhaps even more effective than telling would-be suitors she was shampooing her hair.)

Penelope is more faithful than Odysseus, who, along the way, has been held for seven years by the nymph Calypso, who has forced him to have sex with her. The divine Circe also requires sex from Odysseus against his will and only lets him go on condition he visits the underworld, where he encounters his dead mother; it must have been a blow to Circe’s self-esteem that he accepted such terms. There is no account of Penelope being told these parts of the big adventure, and whoever Homer really was, it’s not hard to see a male hand at work in these fantasies. Being forced into sex by a goddess is at the risky end of the spectrum of excuses for being home late.

Odysseus survives endless experiences, some of which—like the story of how he tricked the one-eyed Cyclops, Polyphemus—are familiar even to children whose classical education depends on McDonald’s placemats. Eventually the king does turn up in Ithaca again, dressed in rags and looking like a beggar. Only his dog, Argos, recognizes him. Twenty years is long enough for a human but even longer for a dog. Argos used to be a fine hunting hound but is now a bag of bones. When he sees his master back home, he thumps his tale in anticipation. Sadly, the excitement is too much and the old pooch drops dead.

Odysseus will eventually clean out the suitors and be reunited with Penelope just in the nick of time. But the way the story is told, the point to which Odysseus returns is not his island, nor his throne nor his banquet hall nor his wealth nor his servants nor even his wife, although Penelope and Odysseus do have nice welcome-home sex. The point toward which Odysseus has been traveling through storm, disaster, bloodshed, and confusion has been his bed. When Penelope requires positive proof that this stranger is her husband, she asks, within Odysseus’s earshot, for their bed to be shifted. Only Odysseus would know that the request is impossible. He gets angry and says that of course their bed can’t be moved. The reason for this is that he himself carved it in situ from the stump of an old olive tree whose trunk had taken centuries to reach the width of a pillar, and he built the walls of their chamber around it. Clearly, Odysseus had never wanted his wife to waste time mucking round with the furniture.

The bed has roots deep in the earth. This is an evocative image, one which gives bedrock a literal meaning. Odysseus’s bed is part and parcel of the rocky soil on which he was born. The entire world of his travels is anchored to it.

A quick flick through a paperback version of The Odyssey soon shows how carefully the theme of sleep is incorporated into the bones and sinews of the poem.

Odysseus’s friend and guide among the gods, Athena, is the bringer of sleep. Odysseus gets into bother for sleeping in the wrong place, such as when he nods off within site of Ithaca itself but before his work is done—that is, without having made landfall. His sailors take the opportunity to look at his loot and untie the bag he has been given, which contains the four winds. The ship is blown back to square one and Odysseus must endure yet more suffering. But when the right moment comes and Odysseus does make final landfall, he immediately falls into a deep, delicious sleep on the sand, undisturbed by the memory of what he has been through.

Nevertheless, Odysseus’s moral stamina is seen in his ability to forego false luxury, to refuse beds that are not his rightful resting place. For example, on return to Ithaca he first seeks shelter from Eumaeus, an old swineherd who has remained loyal throughout the king’s absence. Eumaeus doesn’t know who the hell this stranger is but, a model of hospitality, still offers him his own bed. Odysseus refuses and sleeps outside. Along the way, there are many accounts of Odysseus finding sleep and often these are a foretaste of his ultimate homecoming. Hospitality, kindness to travelers, and offering refuge are the timbers from which Homer built The Odyssey, a ship that is anchored to the wanderer’s bed.

The point of The Odyssey is finding rest. It is curious that western storytelling, a treasure trove of restlessness, a vast anthology of itchy feet, begins with a tale whose substance is so different. Of course, there is a lot of seepage between the ideas of finding rest and death. But the hero of The Odyssey is a guy who has cheated death. He has come home not to die but to sleep. He has come home to bed.