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The time was 3.31am when songstress Delta Goodrem woke in bed drenched in sweat after a vivid dream.
“I basically had a nightmare and… a very dark figure came to me on a grave with a note,” the star told the Begin Again podcast in August 2025.
“At 3:31, I woke up drenched. I was head to toe, like I’d been in the ocean, and I was frozen with fear, completely frozen,” she shared.
Worried by the experience, Delta told her mum and product manager who arranged for her to go to hospital.
It was 2003 and that very week Delta would celebrate having her third number one single in the UK. Shortly after, she would also be given devastating news: that she had Hodgkin lymphoma – a type of blood cancer – a diagnosis she felt at the time was a “death sentence”.
More than two decades on, Delta’s story is one of hope. Her cancer was treatable, and she recovered from her health battle – crediting it for making her the person she is today.
“I wouldn’t say that I came back to myself until many years later,” she admitted to podcast host Davina McCall in her 2025 interview.
“It’s like a bomb goes off in the house. A lot of shrapnel gets hit, families are impacted, people’s lives change.”
But she added, “’I can’t actually imagine being where I am without that moment.”
Now, beloved Kath & Kim star Magda Szubanski has shared new details about how she too experienced a nighttime premonition before her own devastating cancer diagnosis upended her life.
Magda’s dream woke her on a warm night in February 2025.
She told The Australian Women’s Weekly that in her dream she was at Sydney’s Clovelly beach to remember a friend – the writer Ruth Hessey – who had died.
Magda recalled seeing Ruth there at the beach.
“I went over to her and said, ‘Have you come to get me?’ And she said, ‘I’m here for you,’ which could either mean, ‘I’m here to support you’ or ‘I’m here for you’,” the star reflected, shaking her head.
The beach dream wasn’t the only dream. Magda had recurring nightmares from which she woke with words running over and over in her mind.
“There’s something wrong,” they told her at first. Later, the words were, “You’re dying; you’re dying.”
“The body was literally waking me up in the middle of the night, sending me a message,” she told The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Like Delta, the star would go on to be diagnosed with a type of blood cancer. But in Magda’s case, it was the rare and aggressive Mantle Cell Lymphoma.
When the 65-year-old appeared on 60 Minutes in September 2026, she conceded that while her cancer was now “at bay” it was “an incurable relapsing” cancer, which means “it’s almost sure that it will come back”.
“It’s a question of ‘when’ and then ‘how bad’,” she told the program candidly.
“The median survival rate is eight-and-a-half years. So, I could go less, or I could go more.”
With Magda and Delta’s cancer experiences linked by what some might call a nighttime premonition, it begs the question: should we all be paying more attention to our dreams?
In a 2021 interview with Discover magazine, Canadian sleep expert Tore Nielsen described dreams and nightmares as “dipsticks” into your unconscious.
“In general terms, if you’re having bad dreams and nightmares, and if these are upsetting you, then that’s something you should do something about,” he told the outlet.
“They can tell you something needs attention.”
It’s an outlook shared by dream researcher Deirdre Leigh Barrett who told Discover, “I think dreams can access anything in our body or our mind, in the broadest sense, including things we’re not at all conscious of.”
Barrett had heard anecdotes from people whose dreams alerted them to spots on their bodies which turned out to be cancerous.
“I think that dreams sometimes tell people about an illness that they’re not already aware of, and [before] any very obvious clinical symptom,” she added.
With Magda’s nighttime horrors behind her for now, the star – who recently released her powerful memoir I Can’t Tell You But I Will – is determined to make the most of her second chance at life.
“I do have a very strong spiritual sense,” she told The Australian Women’s Weekly, “and with the cancer, I feel it’s become stronger.”
“I might never come back to full strength, but I feel my spirit’s very strong,” she added. “I can feel that in myself.”
