Let me tell you about something you can do that is very cool. Did you know you can activate the portion of your brain that creates dreams while your are still awake? I always called this a dream trance while studying dream yoga, but I like the term lucid day dream more. For those of you who do not know, you can learn to visualize most of your senses to a point where you can actually perceive the thing you are visualizing to some degree. Look through the Dream Yoga course and read about visualization skills and creating a sense of motion. When you have developed these skills you also enhance the portion of your brain that can create dream imagery. What you are wanting to do is sit comfortably and focus on some internal imagery you have gotten good at. One that works very well is feeling energy flow which you can learn in one of the lessons. For me I do kundalini which is a energy manipulation involving feeling energy move through you. It is possible to simply feel energy because you are good at visualization or if wanted expand this into actually controlling energy. I do not discuss kundalini openly in this class, but in terms of raw visualization I will feel energy course up my spine and then spread out into angel wings. I then feel them spread and slowly fan the air. Much simpler internal visualizations will work, so as soon as you can do any of the basic ones you can try this Lucid Day Dream technique.
What you are going to do is use the lesson suppressing emerging thought to ignore the world around you. Basically keep your mind internal and not thinking about stuff that is external. You sit comfortably and start visualizing something like a triangle, which if you have practiced you should get some degree of mild imagery, or you do a tactile visualization such as trying to feel an imaginary hand move, or as stated above visualize energy flow. What you are doing is getting the brain to actually be interested in what it is experiencing when it looks internally. If you succeed at this stuff you will start to have almost no focus on your real body or surroundings.
As you relax into this internal world of visualization you start to allow yourself to imagine something simple such as walking down a street. If you are advancing in your skills you should actually kind of feel as if you are in a dream and walking despite the limited visuals. When you have reached such a point you simply start to daydream. By daydream I mean allow your inner fanciful self to imagine things. Imagine you have walked down to the river perhaps. Imagine you see some birds. If you do this correctly visuals will start to form "in your minds eye." By this I mean much more than simply imagining but a clear step down from a dream in full REM. You can get quiet caught up in an internal fantasy where you do have dream like experiences such as feeling yourself flying and seeing vague images that add to the experience. The visuals, with practice can reach the level of simple animation. The tactile sense of action and motion can be fairly impressive, and if you go deep enough the day dream may even take on a life of its own creating random events for you to react to.
This state can be as good as a lucid dream with the exception of the graphics being only about 20% of what a REM dream can create. You can use this state to learn dream control skills and in fact the very act of doing these Lucid Daydreams will increase your ability to use dream control with in a true lucid dream. You can in fact forget all about the world around you but in a sense you are still awake. You can stay upright for instance and if someone tries to get your attention you will hear them.