Did Billie Eilish have sleep paralysis? All about her song Bury A Friend inspired by nightmares

Billie Eilish is known for combining dark, violent lyrics with her soothing voice to make songs that stay with her fans for a long time. The single bury a friend from the Ocean Eyes singer's debut studio album, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?, is a song that truly captures this essence.

What most Billie Eilish fans don't know is that the track isn't merely creative genius but an outcome of the Grammy-winner's struggle with sleep paralysis. In a 2022 interview with V Magazine, Eilish opened up about having sleep paralysis and nightmares a few years ago, saying:

"I was having really, really unbelievably terrible nightmares."

The Cleveland Clinic defines sleep paralysis as a condition where you're aware of your surroundings in your sleep but cannot speak or move. A sleep paralysis episode lasts anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. Many people experience hallucinations during these episodes, which makes it even scarier.

---

Billie Eilish admitted that bury a friend was a product of her sleep paralysis

Talking to V Magazine in 2022, Billie Eilish discussed how her sleep paralysis was impacting both her mental health and her sleep schedule poorly, saying:

"I was having a weird sleep paralysis. It was just not a good period for my brain. I couldn't sleep. I would go to bed at like four in the morning and wake up at one in the afternoon."

It was around that period of her life that the What Was I Made For? singer first started using a meditation app, which helped her calm down and take a break from her dark thoughts.

"I would listen to that meditation app every single time I needed to breathe and not think about the horrors that were going on in my mind."

In a 2020 interview with OK! Magazine, Eilish first hinted at having night terrors and spoke of the inextricable connection between her struggles and her music. Pointing towards bury a friend in the interview, the singer-songwriter said:

"I probably wouldn't have made that song the way it is if I hadn't had sleep paralysis and nightmares."

Billie's bury a friend was co-written by her brother, Finneas, and her and produced solely by the former. The song peaked on the US Billboard Hot 100 at No. 14 soon after its release and has 1,013,003,216 streams on Spotify (at the time of writing this).

According to When The Horn Blows, Eilish describes the song as being from the perspective of a monster under her bed and confesses that she is in fact the monster under the bed and her own worst enemy.

Bury a friend is one of those songs in which both the lyrics and video are equally captivating. The video starts in a dark room with a lone bed on which a sleeping Mehki Raine wakes up from a nightmare briefly, only to go back to sleep, while Billie Eilish, who is under the bed, slowly gets up to watch him sleep.

Eilish then gets out of the room and walks strangely in the corridors, where multiple hands covered in black latex gloves try to grab and pull at her. The singer then attempts to run as the hands inject her with syringes in her back, before ultimately giving in and falling to her knees. In the end, with her eyes turned completely black, Eilish is back under the bed and ends the song with the title of her album: When we all fall asleep, where do we go?

The video of bury a friend was uploaded on Billie Eilish's YouTube on January 30, 2019, and has since amassed 472 million views and over 8 million likes.