'I Definitely Don't Think I Want To Be An Actor For The Rest Of My Life' : Tom Holland

Tom Holland was 19 when he first appeared as Spider-Man and became his generation’s biggest leading man. Now he holds the keys to the Marvel Cinematic Universe—that is, if he still wants them.

- Oliver Franklin-Wallis

This is going to sound like complete bullshit, but I swear to you that this is true,” Tom Holland says. “Have you ever heard of cognitive dreaming?”

We’ve been talking for a couple of hours at this point, and conversation—as it tends to, after long enough— has drifted onto the subject of dreams. I’ve been having nightmares lately, I tell him. Anxiety. This is something Tom Holland knows all about. He is a terrible sleeper; a sleepwalker; a sleep undresser, even. (“Four out of ten sleeps I wake up completely naked.”) As it happens, he has a trick for dealing with nightmares, and because Tom Holland is Tom Holland—the actor who put the friendly back into your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man and is just famously, energetically, irresistibly nice—of course he’s happy to help.

“Okay, so I’ll tell you how you do it. Essentially, when you’re asleep, your brain is working way faster than it is when it’s awake. Jon Watts [Holland’s director on three Spider-Man movies] told me this, and it has worked. If you’re in a dream and you read something, say, a stop sign, and you turn around, when you look back at the stop sign it will have changed. So what you do is—and this is where it sounds stupid—you set an alarm for every hour of the day when you’re awake. When the alarm goes off, you read something. So I’m reading—”