Maintaining Awareness As You Fall Asleep

I have decided to begin reading again 'Astral Dynamics' by Robert Bruce. I read some of it before, but never really followed through with it enough to make real progress. Although I did successfully astral project one time, but that was just attempting what made sense to me while aware as falling asleep, independent of attempting to cultivate it through the book.
 
Anyways, as reading the theory section of the book, which I mostly skipped over when reading before, he says something so directly that I have always found to be so extremely important, but never seems to be directly said. He identifies the trance state with maintaining awareness as the body falls asleep. This is exactly right. Going to sleep really for a while was like my practice. To maintain awareness as I fall asleep, it is a meditation. It really requires maintaining a meditative state to do it successfully.
 
Generally I would consciously enter a dream through this consciously falling asleep, but there is a whole process which you experience in the transition. This is also how I successfully astrally projected the one time I did. Anyways, just the act of consciously entering a dream, and seeing how that process actually unfolds, is extremely illuminating to understanding the dream world.
 
So anyways, I think this is an important point, that should be more widely considered. I believe learning to maintain awareness while letting the body fall asleep is an important spiritual practice. It ties together meditation, lucid dreaming, and astral projection. I really think it contains the key to all of them. Doing this absolutely guarantees lucid dreaming, can be used to develop reliable astral projection, and truly is a powerful tool in developing your meditative abilities. I'm not sure if this is generally possible without having already gotten a few hours of sleep, though. I know I have done it at least once, but I know REM sleep normally starts at least a couple of hours after falling asleep, so I'm not sure if this was just some fluke, or if it can also be developed.

 

As for tips on how to do it, I actually did come up with a 'technique' to do it.
 
First of all, yes, get a few hours of sleep before you try. Either set an alarm, as mentioned, or not if you know that you pretty much always wake up before you actually want to be up. Now once you wake up, obviously you're going to lay back down to go back to sleep. Now, as you're laying down, just pick a part of some song you like, and repeat it in your head over and over. Like you're listening to it, but in your mind. Just keep repeating it, while simultaneously trying to relax and sleep. Now, this keeps your mind interested enough to stay aware, while the constant repetition also lacks stimulation in such a way that you can sleep.
 
I haven't actually done this in a while, mostly because daily smoking has rendered me incapable of remembering dreams, so my memory of the exact step by step process of what happens is a bit foggy. Basically, after feeling this intense, tangible sense of physical relaxation, images will start to appear. They'll at first be vague, difficult to distinguish from imagination. But they'll get more and more clear, and they'll develop more and more complexity. You may also hear things, and something that I always experience is that I feel like my body is being moved all around. Like I'm sliding around all over the place. This sometimes makes me feel like I'm going to fall off my bed, but I'm not actually moving. When you get to this point, you are very close to actually dreaming.
 
Now it's not clear in my head how exactly this goes, because it's been a while. But basically, these images will keep becoming more vivid, clear, and complex, until it will eventually turn into a whole 3D environment. It will probably take you a bit to really realize this, and you'll be like, wait, is that an actual environment? Can I move in it? And if you try, you'll be able to, and then you'll just be in a dream. It is actually possible to keep focusing on your physical body though, in which case you'll be in a dream, but yet you can still feel yourself in your body laying in bed. Now this is a weird, unique thing, that I haven't sufficiently explored enough to fully understand. Never really heard anyone else talk about it. But basically, I've discovered that the 'dream' is created, a complex multi-sensory environment, and then we choose to enter into it, and this is how dreaming happens. But we don't actually have to choose to enter it, we can just sort of watch the dream externally, from our bodies.
 
But also, instead of this, as you go deeper you can start to feel vibrations in your body. Focusing on these vibrations, and working with them, is the key to astral projection. These energies can get extremely intense, they're not just subtle little imaginings. But yes, I have not stayed entirely focused here. Basically, just keep focusing on repeating that part of the song. As the things that I here describe happen, it is telling you that you are near true sleep. Use that to re-invigorate you to definitely staying focused on that song. Soon enough, you will be in a dream, or whatever, and you'll still be repeating that part of the song, never having lost consciousness.

 

 
That would be amazing if it worked...if I could reliably induce sleep paralysis, I would think I could learn to astral project reliably. I'll probably just try the same technique I did last time, which I'm not aware of as being an 'official' technique, but it made sense to me and worked.
 
Which is basically. When you're in paralysis, and you feel the vibrations, you cycle the vibrations using your breath, in such a way that momentum is constantly being built, and so the energy keep intensifying. Then I try to 'throw' myself out of my body on an out-breath.

 

To control yourself or your environment and the people in it? I have found what seems to be the best way to control your dreams, working much better than what I used to think was the best way, which was trying to believe what you wanted to happen was going to happen. Anyways, as it turns out, simply imagining what you want is much more effective. Just visualize, intensely imagine, what you would like to happen, who you would like to appear, what you would like someone to say, etc. And then they will.

 

I've regularly lucid dreamed my whole life. This was essentially the method I came up with as a kid, if I particularly wanted a lucid that night, and it honestly at least used to always work. When I would be laying down to sleep, I would repeat 'I know this is a dream, I know this is a dream,' etc, until i fell asleep.