Thanks for initiating this thread Richard.

Essentially there's several points to make in terms of sleeping and what we may call conscious resting.

Generally people need to go fully to sleep because they're often not living in alignment with their soul which creates stress. So the soul practically vacates the body in order to get rest at a soul level and so the bodymind may achieve some degree of rest and recouperation. There are several problems with this: you don't necessary fully rest and rejuvenate; when the soul vacates the body (practically), other energies - like Opposing Consciousness - can come in. Implants are created and other distorting energy.

What I'm advocating is the movement towards deep consciousness resting. So basically when you go to bed, you spend your time moving consciousness around the body, giving yourself permission to let go and relax. And then to continually do this as long as you can - scanning for tightness, releasing and unwinding it.

This takes a lot of mastery, because you have to encounter things like boredom, and the challenge of simply falling asleep - going unconscious. Ultimately though, you become purely present, so time disappears and with that any boredom. It takes you into many deep states of consciousness - yes you can even enter delta states and yet still be fully conscious. Yoga nidra is a practice for this and also some particular Tibetan yoga practices.

When in these states, astral travel can really take off and lucid dreaming, where you're completely awake within the dream, which can be very healing and integrating for the soul.

I'm not saying this is easy by the way! And it will take years of practice to fully master. But there's great value in it. I'd say it's a natural state the soul yearns to move into at the right place on the path.

Namaste

Open