Entering dream state directly from waking state during meditation.

Here's what I experience during meditation:

  1. Close my eyes.
  2. See darkness.
  3. Realize it's not quite dark, there is some static like on a television. Phosphenes.
  4. Notice a pattern to the phosphenes... usually starts with a central point with rays coming out from it.
  5. Turns into tunnels and other geometrical patterns. Moving gears, various psychedelia.
  6. Notice there is something in the background or foreground...
  7. Realize that it is a face or an eye or a hand or clouds or something. Like noticing shapes in clouds.
  8. Start to see that there is a scene taking place.
  9. Go completely into the scene.
  10. The background which was black with static now fills in with full color and I am completely within a lucid dream / vision.

Awesome right? Only problem is, unless I am actually asleep or on the border of sleep I can only stay in this other world for a second or 2. Specifically, when this happens during meditation I lose it as soon as I recognize it is happening and then struggle to make it happen again.

Some tricks I have found to make it happen:

  1. Imagine that what I am looking at is actually deep space... Hence why it starts out so dark. Morph it into a 3D space I am in.
  2. Notice some motion and attempt to overlay imagined object on it. Occasionally what I am seeing with my visual mind and what I am imagining will merge and then colorize, triggering the background to colorize and fill in and put me in that world.

Can anyone familiar with these kinds of things help me? Is there a name for what I am doing? Is there a way to get better at it or other tricks I can use? What I want is to be able to close my eyes and enter into a completely imagined other world at any time of my choosing and have it feel like when I close my eyes I am really opening my eyes into another world.

Thank you.