THIS is a different form of sleep walking. A walk where you discover what happens in your sleep, all five stages of it each night, on a tour that transposes a map of your dreams’ pathways on to the streets, ginnels and snickelways of York.

Away from the night’s ghost tour trade on Monday, Dr Claire Hind, senior lecturer in theatre at York St John University, and Ilkley artist and fellow dream researcher Gary Winters, weave through the city’s darker, less frequented passageways in gorilla suits.

Their heads bear LED lights to assist them in reading out passages of text: thoughts, psychoanalysis, science and snippets of dreams gathered from the York public at four dream drop-in centres. We hear of the woman who dreamt the highest tower detached itself from the Minster; the man who dreamt he kissed his brother; Stephen Fry playing dead in another dream.

Go with the flow, let the dreams enter your waking, walking world as Dr Hind plays the Guide to Winters’ Fool from King Lear, moving from snickelway to snickelway to the accompaniment of looped music: Kate Bush’s Army Dreamers; The Mamas And The Papas’ Dream A Little Dream, The Monkees’ Daydream Believer; Roy Orbison’s In Dreams.

As the walk passes through each stage of sleep, the Dream Yards tour mirrors the way dreams jump back and forth by taking the audience backwards and forwards through the ginnels that link Shambles to Newgate Market. You might find that maddening on a ghost walk but here it is a clever, physical way of showing you what happens to your mind at night.

In Dream Yards, the ever curious Fool asks the questions and the Guide unravels the world of dreams without slipping into the murky waters of dream interpretation. Instead, at one point, pieces of rubbish by parked cars behind Fibbers are gathered up to denote parts of the brain and their role in dreams.

Twice we encounter figures in huge heads conjured by Hind and Winters’ dream world, once by the River Foss, which draws a goose into territorial behaviour in a clash with nature’s world.

To dream is healthy, asserts Dr Hind, and to walk is healthy too, and this hour-long journey into “desire’s passageways” links the two together most intriguingly.

We need to dream to sleep to dream to sleep to dream, goes the elliptical mantra. Without dreams we cannot sleep, says Dr Hind, suddenly noting that “Mrs Thatcher never slept”. She leaves that thought hanging in the night air, no political comment necessary.

Time for bed, fellow walkers, the walk is over; a chance to dream again.

Dream Yards, The Walking Tour; meet at Precentor’s Court, next to The Hole In The Wall, High Petergate, York, April 22, May 13 and May 20, 8pm on the dot. Admission free