Celia Green
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Green's parents were both primary school teachers, who together authored a series of geography textbooks which became known as The Green Geographies. Green completed a B.A., M.A., and B. Litt. from Oxford University. She studied psychical research at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1958 to 1960.
From 1957 to 1962, Green held the post of Research Secretary at the Society for Psychical Research in London. In 1961, Green founded and became the Director of the Institute of Psychophysical Research. The Institute's areas of interest were initially listed as philosophy, psychology, theoretical physics, and ESP. However, its principal work during the sixties and seventies concerned hallucinations and other quasi-perceptual experiences. In 1982, while Green was the director, the Institute investigated psychokinetic phenomena.
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Writing
In 1968 Green published Lucid Dreams, a study of a phenomenon described by Green as when a dreamer consciously changes the content of their dreams. The possibility of conscious insight during dreams had previously been treated with scepticism by some philosophers and psychologists and scientific skepticism continued after her book was published.
Green collated both previously published first-hand accounts and the results of longitudinal studies of four subjects of her own. In Lucid Dreams, she proposed a correlation between lucid dreams and the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep. In 1968, Green also published a collection of 400 first-hand accounts of out-of-body experiences for the benefit of scientists interested in studying the phenomena.
With Charles McCreery, Green co-authored the 1975 book Apparitions and the 1994 book Lucid Dreaming: The Paradox of Consciousness During Sleep. Apparitions is a taxonomy of 'apparitions', or hallucinations in which the viewpoint of the subject was not ostensibly displaced, based on a collection of 1500 first-hand accounts. A 1976 Kirkus Reviews review of Apparitions states, "It's hard to imagine anyone being converted by this [Institute for Psychophysical Research] product: an endless sequence of supposed apparitions [...] There are minimal efforts at objective classification by type of experience and attendant phenomena—visual and auditory effects, collective apparitions, out-of-body experiences—but none whatever at verification."
Aphorisms
Her aphorisms have been published in The Decline and Fall of Science and Advice to Clever Children. Ten are included in the Penguin Dictionary of Epigrams, and three in the Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations.
CDs
The CD titled Lucid Dreams 0096, which includes parts of the book Lucid Dreams narrated by Green for the label Em:t, was released in 1995. Earlier Green had contributed a nine-minute track to a compilation CD put out by the same recording label. The track was entitled "In the Extreme" and consisted of readings by the author from her books, The Human Evasion, and Advice to Clever Children.