English actor Tom Holland was 19 six years ago when he became the youngest actor to embody the role of Spider-Man in the Marvel cinematic universe. Since then, he has played the role in five films, four of which earned more than a billion dollars each. According to the magazine Gentlemen’s Quarterly, the now-25-year-old has risen to a level of fame few actors achieve, and rarely at such a young age.
In a big interview given to GQ, Tom shared stories from his personal life, including his “trick for dealing with nightmares.” The “trick” turned out to be lucid dreaming, and the technique he used was a reality check. During the day, the actor sets an alarm clock to ring every hour. When the alarm sounds, he turns around and sees, for example, a packet of pistachios. In reality the object remains stable; but in a dream, everything changes very quickly, as Holland notes. If you look at the object again, it will be different. If you do this all the time, you will repeat the habit in a dream and immediately understand: “Oh, I’m dreaming.” “And then you have free rein to do whatever you want,” Tom adds.
Thanks to such training, he has learned to control his dreams. “The last time it happened to me, I was flying around the Golden Gate Bridge. It was awesome,” the actor said.
He became interested in this practice due to sleep problems. Holland is a chronic sleepwalker: he even undresses in his sleep. “Four out of ten sleeps I wake up completely naked,” he says. Tom’s other problem is sleep paralysis, the term that describes the state when “you’re awake, but you can’t move.” Interestingly, the demons that appear in the actor’s sleep paralysis hallucinations are paparazzi. They loom over him, bulbs popping, and he is stuck in this nightmare, frozen and panicked. In such cases, he reminds himself that he is in his room, where there is no one else but him. Still, later, he sometimes checks the room for recording devices someone might have put in.
Fans of the actor are currently waiting for the release of two films with his participation: Spider-Man: No Way Home in December 2021 and Uncharted (a new version of Indiana Jones) in February 2022.
