Meditation Into A Dream State Does anyone know if one can fall asleep into a dream while in the process of mindful insight practice and still maintain mindfulness and concentration? This would be different than establishing mindfulness while dreaming.
Before I became Buddhist I did a lot of random "spiritual" practices, including "astral travel". The later is when you try to retain "waking" consciousness as you fall asleep.

I only had mixed success with the various techniques for achieving that, but the one that worked more or less well was to relax the body and completely refrain from any movement until you lose all bodily sensations. So effectively you let the body "fall asleep" while keeping the mind awaken. 

The major difficulty for me was (to avoid) getting overexcited at the moment the body falls asleep - which (overexcitement) resulted in hyperventilation and loss of control.

Eventually I realized that establishing lucid mind inside the dream was easier for me than carrying it over from the waking state, and so I dropped that frustrating practice.

Another related technique I had better success with was doing the Four Immeasurables type meditation at that same moment of falling asleep. This works better as you don't have to artificially restrict body movements, which seems to go counter to deep meditation in my experience.