“Something nameless hums us into sleep,” Mark Strand wrote in his bewitching ode to dreams — perhaps the same nameless something that has compelled us, for as long as the written record of human thought has existed, to seek an explanation for why we dream at all, what actually happens when we sleep, and how dreaming relates to our waking lives.

Nearly a century after Freud’s eccentric niece named Tom explored the fascination of dreams in a most unusual children’s book, no doubt influenced by her famous uncle’s foundational treatise on the subject, one of the finest children’s-book illustrators of our time tackles that alluring nameless something from a different and immeasurably delightful angle.

In Tell Me What to Dream About (public library), third-generation artist Giselle Potter — who has previously illustrated such treasures as Gertrude Stein’s posthumous alphabet book and Toni Morrison’s darkly philosophical allegory for freedom — offers a whimsical take on lucid dreaming, that irresistible longing to choose our own nocturnal adventures.

Potter tells the story of two sisters who, at bedtime, offer each other ideas for possible things to be dreamt that night — a tree-house town, a world where everything is furry, a fluffy world where clouds are worn as sweaters and eaten as treats, teeny-tiny animals feasting on teeny-tiny waffles. What emerges is a colorful celebration of children’s minds — that mecca of metaphor where the imagination is born.

Complement the wholly delightful Tell Me What to Dream About with Argentinian cartoonist Liniers’s darker but no less delightful pictorial exploration of nightmares. For a grownup primer on the subject, see the science of controlling your dreams and how dreaming regulates our negative emotions, then devour Strand’s magnificent poem “Dreams” and Freud’s 1922 gem David the Dreamer.