BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Ann Ann Jagatia, and this is the Dreammakers.

We're going to explore an exciting new field of sleep science.

When the water recedes, finally, I climb down from the roof and walk across the street.

Fish are flopping on the glistening pavement.

All the cars lie upside down.

This is a dream.

It's pretty strange, as dreams often are.

The houses, the ones still standing, sag in the middle, waterlogged.

The sound of dripping and gurgling is almost deafening.

But this dream is particularly unusual, not because of its content, but because of where it came from.

As I climb over a downed tree, something catches my eye.

Dangling from a branch, a long, iridescent snake skin,

shimmers in the morning light.

I drape it around my neck, scarf-like, and keep walking.

These visions are from the mind of an artist called Will.

But they didn't simply come to him in the night.

Instead, before he went to sleep, he decided what he wanted to dream about.

He planted a seed inside his subconscious and let it flower in his mind.

My name is Will Dowd, and I am a writer and artist from the Boston area.

I would also say that at this point, I'm probably a quasi-professional dreamer.

I started to wonder if I could program my dreams with literature.

And so that was the experiment I did.

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