Coming October 6, 2026
The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires
A dream machine. Recordings of dead poets. And twenty stories smuggled out of sleep.
Advanced Praise
“Will Dowd writes beautifully. These stories are whimsical, sometimes comic, and wonderfully creative.”
“An original work whose sensuality and wildness compels rereading. A radiant success.”
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“This book, the result of an extraordinary experiment, is extraordinarily good.”
“Lovely, strange, hilarious stories...Not just a fascinating experiment, but a triumph.”
“Like the swift undertow of a dream’s current, these stories tugged me into a world much more vivid than that of my everyday life.”
Will's dream experiment was featured in the BBC World Service documentary The Dream Makers
I directed my own dreams with an MIT device and wrote what came back…
When a vision disorder stole his ability to read, Will Dowd found himself exiled from the world of books—until he discovered an unusual path back through the landscape of dreams. Armed with an experimental dream-inception device from MIT, Dowd embarked on a yearlong odyssey into his own unconscious.
The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires chronicles twenty extraordinary dream narratives born from this first-of-its-kind experiment. A service dog navigates grief after his owner's death. A time-travel tour guide loses tourists across centuries. An alien researcher falls in love with Earth despite himself. The stories in this collection emerge from a mind at its most unguarded, each one intimate, strange, and deeply human.
Part literary experiment, part exploration of consciousness, The Taste of Rain in Buenos Aires reveals how dreams, like books, can become portals to other worlds—wild, untamable places where the impossible is married to the everyday and even exile can become a form of homecoming.
WILL DOWD is a writer and artist based outside Boston. His debut book, Areas of Fog, was named a Massachusetts Book Award "Must Read." He is an editorial cartoonist for The Boston Globe, a poetry editor at Post Road Magazine, and author of the widely read newsletter The Lunar Dispatch.