July 2025
A case study on a known lucid dreamer, artist Dave Green, indicates that the ability to dream lucidly might also enhance the extra-sensory capability of precognition.
ILLUSTRATION: Canva
A lucid dream is one in which the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming. In that state, the dreamer is able to more or less control the ‘dream story’. It is an unusual dreaming skill, but some people have it spontaneously. It is also possible to train.
Another intriguing variety are precognitive dreams, dreams about seemingly unpredictable future events that seem to be predicted by the dreams. Precognition is considered an extra-sensory capability.
Are lucid dreamers better than others also at precognitive dreaming? This is what an international group of researchers wanted to find out. Their results can be found in a new paper in the International Journal of Dream Research at Heidelberg University in Germany.
Green, who creates artwork from what he sees in lucid dreams, teamed with neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge for the research. She has done extensive research on precognition.
The experiment involved a lucid dreamer (Green) receiving information about randomly selected future events (“targets”) during the lucid dream state and reported the information after waking. While staying in the dream state, Green made an intention to look at his smartphone or computer (in the dream) and to see the target that he would receive the next day from the person who was assigned to provide it. Thereafter, the similarity between dream and target was assessed by skilled human judges, unskilled human judges and AI models.
In one example, Green dreamt of women playing backgammon in a large stadium filled with people watching. This was seen by the judges as very clearly matching the target for the next day, which was about Iranian women’s rugby.
Mossbridge engaged open-minded sceptics Chris French and Alan Pickering to assist with conducting the experiment and to examine the judging protocol and analyses, and with cognitive scientist Damon Abraham to test the newly developed AI judging method.
The experiment consisted of two sets of five trials. In the collected data, the research group found “weak but encouraging evidence for the possibility that our case study participant and co-author Dave Green is a precognitive lucid dreamer”. The trials using AI scoring gave the strongest results.
But, the authors say, “a confirmatory experiment is required before drawing firm conclusions”. It also remains to be determined whether a lucid dreamer can learn precognitive dreaming.
Anders Bolling
