Maintaining that half-asleep, high-awareness state

So I wasn't sure where to post this, because it's only tangentially related to sleep and dreams, but close enough!

Sometimes (rarely), usually in the morning, I find myself awake/aware, but still in enough of a half-sleep state that when I close my eyes, I have a SUPER easy time visualizing. Like, it's effortlessly vivid. But if I focus in on the images I create, I start to go deeper towards sleep, and the familiar WILD-like symptoms start to appear, at which point it usually wakes me up fully.

My goal is to be able to induce and maintain that state where I can visualize/hallucinate vividly. I don't think I necessarily have to do it in the morning, just that I'm closer to the right state then. I'd like to know if anyone here is able to achieve that while meditating, and if there are specific techniques I can use to do it.

I'd like to be able to do this while meditating, and maybe eventually, even get a slightly milder version going during the waking day.

My goal with this is to do "change work" which ranges from self-suggestion to various visual NLP techniques (I am having a LOT of difficulty with noticing submodalities of images when I'm going for some of that stuff in my regular waking state).

I've also got some pretty neat brainwave entrainment equipment that I can play with (including a programmable one that does both audio and visual entrainment), so tips there would work too.