Ask HN: Sleep and meditation, any teachings on it?

Whenever I do breathing meditation in the evening, I tend to fall asleep. I am more aware of falling asleep since I am aware of not focusing on my breath anymore, so I wake myself up. This happens like 5 times as I meditate for an hour.

The thing is, I am an insomniac. Yet, at this particular hour I tend to fall asleep. I have been using this phenomenon to experientially learn more about the process of falling asleep. I have noticed a correlation between falling deeper asleep and the type of thought my mind seems to “automatigically” generate when I fall asleep.

I have just recently discovered this as an avenue to “practice falling asleep” (to the extent that there’s any merit to it, which remains to be seen). I can’t actually go to sleep since it’s too early and if I want it to work, it doesn’t 50% of the time.

So, is there anyone on here that has experience in meditation that is specifically related to sleep?

I once read a passage in a book of which I don’t remember the name that there was a person that could fall asleep while staying conscious and still overhear the conversations. When he was asked how he did what he did he mentioned that one needs to observe the process of falling asleep while falling asleep. This passage makes me believe that there might be some knowledge out there that could be helpful for falling asleep, especially since western science hasn’t investigated meditation that much compared to how many different forms are out there. It mostly seems to have researched breathing, mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation.

Meditations I currently do:

[1] breathing meditation/Anapana

[2] mindfulness/body scanning/Vipassana

[3] loving-kindness/metta

[4] Tonglen (doesn’t have an English name)

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[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anapanasati

[2] https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassana

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metta

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonglen