Tom Holland on Lucid Dreaming and Sleep Paralysis

There’s a sensation that comes with sleep paralysis — you’re jolted awake, heart hammering so hard that you can’t breathe, and you just can’t move. It’s scary and stressful. It makes you not want to fall back asleep.

What can you do about sleep paralysis though? For starters, before reaching for that sleep medicine, try lucid dreaming instead, like actor Tom Holland did.

That’s right. Your friendly neighborhood Spiderman uses lucid dreaming (or cognitive dreaming, as Tom refers to it in an interview in GQ). It’s his trick for dealing with stress and anxiety, which often leads to nighttime afflictions, including nightmares, sleepwalking, and sleep paralysis.

Now, when it comes to sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming, here’s what you should know:

• What Is Sleep Paralysis?
• How Does Sleep Paralysis Affect Your Health?
• How Can Lucid Dreaming Help With Sleep Paralysis?
• 3 Steps to Lucid Dreaming
• Dare to (Lucid) Dream

Let’s dive in.

What Is Sleep Paralysis?

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Sleep paralysis is a type of parasomnia — abnormal behaviors during sleep. Although you ‘wake up’ and remain aware, you lose the ability to move your physical body.

This sleep disorder can happen after falling asleep or waking up. And quite often, it involves hallucinations and the feeling of suffocation.

Little is known about this phenomenon and its exact cause is yet to be identified, but there are a number of factors that may provoke it:

• Obstructive sleep apnea, which is repeated lapses in breathing while sleeping. One study found that 38% of the participants with this condition experienced sleep paralysis.

• Insomnia or excessive sleepiness. Somnolence is one thing, but not getting enough quality sleep is another. When your circadian rhythms aren’t aligned, that’s when you start experiencing sleep cycle problems, like sleep paralysis.

• Mental health conditions. Those with mental health conditions, especially in the cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and panic disorder, are at a higher risk of this type of parasomnia.

In the GQ interview, Tom describes his own experience with sleep paralysis — his bedroom is filled with paparazzi, incessantly clicking away and filling the room with bursts of white flashes. And where’s Tom in all this madness? He’s panicking… and frozen.

It’s no surprise, though, considering the level of stress and anxiety that comes hand-in-hand with fame. (With great power comes great responsibility, after all.) That kind of trauma can seriously turn anyone — even a superhero — into a terrible sleeper.

How Does Sleep Paralysis Affect Your Health?

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For most parts, sleep paralysis doesn’t happen often enough to cause serious damage to your health. However, the trouble comes when it becomes chronic.

“An estimated 10% of people have more recurrent or bothersome episodes that make sleep paralysis especially depressing,” according to Sleep Foundation. That can lead to:

• Developing negative thoughts about going to bed
• Revenge bedtime procrastination
• Sleep deprivation

The longer this goes on, the more consequences there will be on your overall health. And this is where lucid dreaming can swoop in like Spiderman and help.

How Can Lucid Dreaming Help With Sleep Paralysis?

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Chalk it up to Hollywood to turn lucid dreaming into genius works of art. Movies like Inception, Dr. Strange, and The Good Night have truly exposed us to the curious world of lucidity. But what is it exactly?

Lucid dreaming, to put it simply, is being fully aware — a.k.a. lucid — during a dream. And there are incredible benefits to actively participating in the sleep world.

“Many of our dreams are used as mediums for psychological integrations and play a vital role in our mental healthiness,” explains Charlie Morley, lucid dreaming expert and trainer of Mindvalley’s Experience Lucid Dreaming Quest. It can transform stress into deep and restorative sleep you may so desperately seek.

So when it comes to sleep paralysis, here are three ways lucid dreaming can help:

1. Trauma integration. Charlie has taught lucid dreaming to hundreds of people suffering from PTSD, from war veterans to child abuse victims. He’s seen first hand the power it has in healing pain and illness as well as overcoming fears and emotional trauma.

   Additionally, a 2009 European Science Foundation workshop found “similarities in brain activity during lucid dreaming and psychosis.” This suggests that lucid dreaming can be used as a powerful tool to treat PTSD and other mental health issues.

2. Shadow integration. “The shadow is made up of all that we hide from others,” explains Charlie. This includes our shame, fears, wounds as well as our divine light, blinding beauty, and hidden talents.

   Your shadow is a great source of power and creativity. But until you allow yourself to bring it to light, it will remain untapped and your full potential will stay unreached.

3. Getting answers to big questions. Lack of clarity not only brings about anxiety, but also causes apathy and makes you feel stuck in life. It leads to question after question — should you take that job? Or date that person? How do your choices affect your life?

   This is not a game of 21 questions. So take a load off and access your inner intelligence to get the answers you need. 

3 Steps to Lucid Dreaming

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If you’re curious to know what it’s like to be in this dreaming state, here are three basic steps — what Charlie calls “The 3 D’s” — you can start off with:

#1: Dream recall

“If you think you don’t dream, you don’t try to remember,” says Charlie. But the fact is, everyone dreams.

So here’s how you can recall what happens when you fall into REM (rapid eye movement) — the state where lucid dreams happen:

1. Before bedtime, set the intention to remember your dream.

2. “Tonight, I remember my dreams. I have excellent dream recall.” Repeat this to yourself 21 times as you fall into the hypnagogic state — the period of drowsiness before you fall asleep.

It’s also important to keep a notebook or notepad next to your bed, so you can download your experience into your dream journal.

#2: Dream journal

One of the best ways to keep track of your dreams is by dream journaling. It helps bridge your conscious and unconscious mind.

Journaling will also enable you to explore different parts of your mind, maybe even places you didn’t know existed. It may also help you get insight into hidden parts of yourself, a.k.a your shadows (scroll back up to “shadow integration”).

Charlie suggests writing down your vivid dreams whenever you wake up from them, even if it’s in the middle of the night. Oftentimes, when we wait until the morning, we may not remember all the details. He says, “the reason we write down our dreams is not only to solidify the memory but also to spot patterns.”

#3: Dream signs

Tom Holland explains in GQ, “sometimes, if I’m having a really bad dream, I’ll look at a sign and go, ‘Oh, I’m dreaming.’”

What’s a dream sign, you may ask. It’s reality testing, in a sense — something, anything in your dream that can reliably indicate to you that you’re dreaming. They are things that aren’t part of your everyday life, like talking animals, ninja babies, or in Charlie’s case, Beyoncé.

So when you see these things, you can set them as lucidity triggers by acknowledging they’re signs in your dreams. Then you know you’re in a dream state.

Dare to (Lucid) Dream

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Sleep is such an integral part of your health. So much so a 2021 study found that one night of less than six hours of sleep “significantly hurts mental and physical wellbeing.”

And when you throw in nighttime afflictions like sleep paralysis… Well, it may feel a little like “you’re flying out of the darkness to fight ghosts.”

There are so many things you can do with lucid dreaming; understanding your sleep paralysis is just one of them. If you’re curious as to how you can use your dreams to influence your real life, Mindvalley has what you’re looking for.

As a Member, you’ll have full access to quests, like Experiencing Lucid Dreaming and The Art of Astral Projection, as well as being front and center in interviews with transformational growth experts like Charlie.

And when you put effort into something you deem valuable, the value it offers in return will increase naturally. You see this in self-love, relationships, money… and this goes for sleep, too.