I have been experimenting with lucid dreaming, and found myself lucid (awake) when the body is in light sleep (basically I have meditated myself into sleep paralysis).

I heard that it's possible to be lucid, awake, while the mind and body are in deep sleep, has anyone done this?

A book I have by Charlie Morley (tibetan buddhist practitioner and lucid dream teacher) says it is doable by staying meditating for the 90 minutes it takes or so for the mind and body to go from sleep into deep sleep.

Has anyone done this in any way, maybe by accident? I heard it described as a total void of sensation....

Does being awake during deep sleep relate in any way to the arupa jhana - nothingness?

Does anyone have experience of both?

Thanks

I've had quite a few lucid dream over the years, mostly I'm flying ,pretty cool. I haven't seen an increase in lucid dreams since starting meditating. If you want to lucid dream more start writing down anything you can remember about any dreams you can remember each morning. Keep a diary and pen by your bed. I did it for a while because I hadn't had a lucid dream in a few years. A little more than a week later I had a lucid dream! I didn't keep up with the diary work. Apparently if you keep doing it your dream recall gets better and better and you also have more lucid dreams.

Also there is a few forums dedicated to lucid dreaming you can find easy enough.

There is something called tibetan dream yoga can't remember much now but its basically something to do with meditation and lucid dreams, few books about it on amazon.
Good Luck!

Actually now that I think about it I remember reading somewhere on this site about people on longer retreats becoming lucid while asleep and meditating which is pretty cool!!

On my 10 day Goenka retreat I would continue to have awareness and attention while asleep and dreaming. Part of me would be meditating and watching the dreams happen and notice what was happening in the dream. I did not interact with the dream or turn it lucid, I just observed it.
The same retreat I also awoke from a sleep state into the 7th jhana of nothingness. It was like waking up in a hotel room and having no idea where you are except there is no you or hotel room. I reacted with fear at first then slipped back into sleep, woke back to nothingness and recognized the "quality" of the mind state as familiar and was much more calm then popped out to wakefulness.
~D

I've been lucid during relatively light sleep for about half an hour. My mind changes in a way that I'm not sure how to describe and my body started to become paralyzed. Things start to dissolve and at some point the sleep becomes too deep and I lose awareness. Most of the time I'm not able to do it at all, though my ability increases when I have a lot of time to meditate.

I found doing a kind of choiceless awareness practice with a deliberate focus on my body helped me maintain awareness while sleeping.

Yeah, I have done this by accident, years ago. I think I had been smoking called Blue Lotus (Nymphaea Caerulea) - a very very mild, harmless psychoactive (as in more psychoactive than a cup of tea, but less psychoactive than a cup of coffee - though not all like caffeine - at the time I used it occasionally as trailer wheels for quieting down old monkeymind and subtly vivifying awareness). I sat for an hour or two, smoked some more, went to bed and continued to practice as I 'drifted off'....

...and dissolved into an effervescent flow of transparent "energy" in a void-like space... dissipated... very lucid & clear - had no idea who/where/what I was (and no idea that I had no idea), it was just bright clear empty space with an occasional fine mist of "energy" like a very very fine wisp of cloud in a blue sky - although there certainly was no sense of objects in space or observers and observed, all very nondual-like eh. Quite pleasant. Pretty decent time-dilation - simultaneously seemed like "I" was only there for a few minutes, but also for untold years.
Woke up, two hours had passed. The whole experience seemed very very casual, ordinary and plain (but vastly pleasant and refreshing) - my identity had seamlessly, invisibly dissolved into that space and re-crystalised back into "me lying in bed".
One thing I was sure of was that there had been no break in my stream of consciousness, no gap of unconsciousness in either falling asleep or waking up - which is what I usually get when I have lucid dreams or sleep paralysis.

"Lucid Dreamless Sleep" is what Alan Wallace calls being awake in deep sleep. It is an area I would like to explore in more depth and really get down to a repeatable practice space - but I haven't gotten round to it, and on the few occasions I have attempted to recreate that accident I've either just fallen asleep, or I've woken up in sleep paralysis (which has its own uses), or if I'm lucky have a particularly vivid or lucid dream.

Maybe you're thinking of The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche?
Cool book.
That Charlie Morley book is pretty decent too - pretty fresh and practical in a deeper sense - rather than just regurgitating Stephen Laberge's core text in a lesser form which is what many other Lucid dreaming books/programs I've seen seem to do.
Alan Wallace is also quite enthusiastic and knowledgeable on the subject - I got his week-long dream-yoga retreat on CD and did that a few years ago - was good fun.

I'm like you j m m in that I usually only have lucid dreams when I'm keeping a diary. The one time I had the dilligence to keep up my dream diary for about 8 months I got up to remembering about 6 pages of dreams a night (when usually I probably only vaguely remember a couple of dreams a week). Voice recorders which you can later transcribe are really handy for those of us with a slippery memory or bad handwriting ;)

This begs the question, what is deep sleep? Is it a state? Could one experience this and maintain the sense of an observer at the same time?

The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep

Very good book

I would second the question of if we know what deep sleep is and are we assuming there is only one type of experience of it.  I believe scientists categorize sleep states by brainwave patterns.  But assuming one is not hooked up to a machine, how would one know if one is experiencing deep sleep or some other type of sleep?  Also, there may be more than one type of thing that happens in deep sleep.  Sleep paralysis seems to happen to many people and typically involves feeling like you've woken up but your body won't move.  This experience is typically combines with a feeling fear and/or impending doom or attack by mysteries forces or entities.  I had a short period in my life where I had some of those.  I did find that if I could get past the fear part, then I could wake up and move after that.  But that state typically happens just after sleep or in the mornign before waking and is not considered deep sleep typically.    

IME, there also can be multiple level experiences seeming to happen at the same time.  Like I once had a lucid dream where I was sitting watching a movie on a screen, and then my awareness shifted to another me watching the me watching the movie, and then that watching me became aware that there was another kind of creature watching that me as I watched the other me.  The other creature did not seem to be me but the whole thing had a feel of multiple levels.  There's also been the typical situation of becoming lucid in a regular seeming dream.  I've also had lucidity occasionally in what did not seem like a dream but had feelings of electricity or misc strangeness that does not translate to English well.  I don't know if it's true, but I have had the feeling those latter experiences are part of what goes in during deep sleep.  They are the hardest to remember and the hardest to understand much about.  I suspect also that we are often lucid during sleep, ie at least as awake and aware as 'waking' life, but that we don't always remember later in 'waking' life.  However, I have never gotten to lucid dreaming via meditation, it just happens in regular sleep sometimes.

It's happened to me on a Goenka retreat too. I was going through a couple of days of intense fear symptoms while awake.  I had a dream one of those nights that was turning fearful - novel in itself since I hadn't had a bad dream in years though I used to have them all the time a long while ago.

I found myself inside the dream while the dream continued. I wasn't awake, I was in the dream observing the dream rationally while the dream continued, it was hyper-real as if I was there, yet I was aware it was a dream. I am used to waking up from bad dreams the moment I realize it is just a dream. So I also knew immediately this time was unique since I stayed asleep and dreaming.

I knew something changed as a result of the observation, I had a sense of progress.

I have since found myself observing interesting dreams as they occur. The observation has never been as hyper-real as the first time, or maybe I've got used to it.

I have induced many lucid dreams over the years by awakening after about 5 or 6 hours of sleep and returning to light sleep.  Lucid dreaming is a scientifically validated hybrid state between waking and dreaming and has some of the characteristics of both.  I don't see how it is possible to lucid dream in a deep sleep delta state, but I haven't read Charlie Morley's book and perhaps it really is possible although it seems contradictory to me.  Now that I am meditating and no longer putting the work into inducing lucid dreams, my hope is to encounter the possibility of experiencing this state again around the 4th Jhana where I understand one can encounter a lot of astral and bardo experiences.   I am somewhere now between Jhana 1 and 2, so I can't verify this yet.