on falling asleep and utilizing sleep:

Sometimes it’s good to use postures such as sitting without back support or standing, in order to avoid falling asleep (see the posture section for more postures and thoughts on postures). But, it can be extremely profitable to meditate while curled up comfortably in bed both while falling asleep for the night, right upon waking up (without even opening one’s eyes), and also during the day. One can drift in and out of meditation, sleep, and reverie (sleep and reverie could be conceived as falling under the surrender portion of p2 but don’t have to be.).

One could imagine that meditating in liminal states could lead to "bad form" or meditating incorrectly. But, I have found this to not be the case, at least empirically. It seems to be the case that this protocol is specified both precisely enough and generally enough that meditating and drifting (reverie) and sleeping seems to be extremely valuable, especially when often, sometimes, or eventually mixed with meditation in other postures. (Update: It can be a bit of an additional challenge to "go back and get or work with" previous stuff you did in near-sleep, but it may be that most people will have to kind of hang out in near-sleep, in more awake altered state, anyway.)

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[This could be its own section or a more prominent note; plus could maybe use a crosslink to posture and ("altered") states and synaptic renormalization section:] Separately, it's very powerful to drift in and out of sleep while meditating, e.g. across a lazy morning, and to start meditating, to go straight into meditating, right when one wakes up without first opening one's eyes. Something about darkness or low light, and not immediately exposing oneself to light, does seem helpful re some kind of endogenous "flexibility." cf. perhaps lingering REM factors or something. And sleeping can "recharge" diminishing slack (when that type of "recharge" is an available one. So sometimes going to sleep early (and so then waking up early but not getting out of bed, and then doing the meditating in and out of sleep thing) can be very strategic. Other times it makes much more sense to get up and take a walk in the sun or to go make money, and so on and so on and so on. Just depends on current "meditative regime." [Search phrases: nap, naps, napping]

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Re dream yoga and "constant consciousness" and stuff like that--I haven't particularly bothered with any of it. None of it has seemed necessary. It can be fun to meditate in lucid dreams (and in non-lucid dreams) but it doesn't seem especially critical. Intuitively speaking, I don't particularly recommend trying to have more lucid dreams (some people eventually find it exhausting and can't turn it off), but it's of course fine to have fun when they do happen. I figure if some kind of constant consciousness (i.e. subtle tacit awareness even through deep dreamless sleep) is nice to have or is part and parcel of the thing then it'll develop pretty naturally on its own. My impression is that this can only develop over 10-30 years.*

*[[[It's interesting to think about what this degree of "flexibility" means neurologically, cf. learning; sleep; consciousness; the apparent "unity" of consciousness in a philosophical, phenomenological, technical sense; synaptic renormalization; thalamus; brainstem; delta waves in waking and deep, dreamless sleep...]]]

Note that metaphysically speaking, for what it's worth, I'm aware of at least one third-hand report of someone claiming constant consciousness who still self-reported having a time skip when undergoing general anesthesia for surgery, so I don't particularly expect anything particularly non-neurological or extra-physically-supramundane to happen by this route. But if you're curious to see for yourself, go for it! Provisionality! Please set aside anything that feels curtailing to wonder, exploration, experimentation. Weird non-local stuff? Maybe! "True psi"? Maybe! It's very important, all things being equal to hold things loosely and to be open to strangeness. (But be very, very careful with respect to contexts and people who would profit from your openness--see culture appendix.) In any case, plenty of "supramundane" stuff to be had, still (see "far reaches of meditation" section) and plenty of other weirdness and coolness (see "subtle interaction" section). I just think at least 99% of it is (sometimes counterintuitively) low-key physical / classical / neurological / normal-biophysical / exquisite multi-sensory fusion, with a dash of clever hans, sociological factors, and confirmation bias at the edges in the worst-best case; and in any case "natural" but still meaningful, profound, cool, and sometimes profoundly gratitude-inspiring. (And of course, at the time of this writing, science doesn't understand consciousness as such, the standard model of physics is incomplete, and neuroscience is in its infancy. But still we can kinda rule out perpetual motion machines, etc., etc.)