A new experiment is probing lucid dreamers on their supposed ability to sense the future.
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
- A new experiment is testing high-level lucid dreamers for an ability to dream the future, essentially precognition.
- A small group of experimental psychologists and neuroscientists are investigating the idea that the body and brain may show subtle physiological changes before unpredictable future events occur.
- Most scientists say “future-feeling” dreams are just the brain rehearsing threats, a direct result of how the brain processes memory, emotion, and coincidence.
Ten days before Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, he confessed a disturbing dream to an aide. He was wandering through the White House when he suddenly heard people weeping. When he followed the sound to the East Room, he came across a casket guarded by soldiers. “Who died?” he asked. “The president,” a voice replied. On April 14, 1865, Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre. Since then, his dream has entered American folklore as the quintessential example of what it means to have a fatal premonition.
Dreams of acute prophetic insight go back a long way, from ancient Greek texts to medieval Christian mystics and Enlightenment dream manuals. Before modern experimental science, they were unformalized but legitimate objects of scholarship. However, the modern scientific concept of precognition—the idea that the mind can access specific information about events that have not yet occurred—entered the realm of fringe science in the early twentieth century.
But now, a Cambridge-backed experiment spearheaded by David Luke, PhD, an associate professor at the University of Greenwich and a Perrott–Warrick Senior Researcher at Trinity College, Cambridge, is forcing precognition into the lab.
According to early details of the project Luke shared with Popular Mechanics, the study has volunteers keep detailed dream logs—sometimes experienced while lucid, sometimes during ordinary sleep—after setting an intention to dream about an unknown “future target.” The target can be a randomly chosen image, symbol, or piece of data that does not yet exist when the dream is recorded. After participants journal their dreams, a true-random number generator selects the target, a process Luke describes as “technically unpredictable by conventional means.” Researchers then compare each dream report with the randomly generated target to see whether any matches exceed what chance alone would predict.
“There has not been a great deal of controlled research conducted on precognition specifically,” Luke says. What’s more, none has focused on lucid dreamers, who, he notes, have “heightened awareness in dreams and better dream recall than ordinary dreamers.”
The project is in the early stages of a multi-year program of research and is just preparing to begin data collection. Still, Luke expects that lucid dreamers will show stronger correspondence with future targets if dream-based precognition exists at all. If a window for detecting future information exists anywhere inside the mind, lucid dreaming may be the state most likely to open it. And if this scenario takes shape, it could challenge one of science’s deepest assumptions, that time flows only one way, and that the present is all the mind can perceive.
Luke is not completely alone in reopening the once-taboo question of precognition. Over the past two decades, a small group of experimental psychologists and neuroscientists have been probing what they call “presentiment,” the idea that the body and brain may show subtle physiological changes before unpredictable future events occur. Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem triggered international controversy in 2011 when he reported statistical evidence for “anomalous anticipatory effects” in laboratory tests. More recently, cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge and colleagues have published meta-analyses suggesting that human nervous systems sometimes show measurable changes seconds before random future stimuli reveal themselves. These results remain hotly debated but are persistently reproducible enough to stand their ground within peer-reviewed journals.
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