About three or four years ago (roughly), I used to do a lot of meditation on consciousness, in a rather desperate attempt to astral project. Seemed like a real starry, magical experience to me (much like lucid dreaming). Though I've long since stopped in an effort to pursue a more meaningful spiritual bounty, I recall that this prolonged, if occasionally real-life interspersed effort at conscious sleep (one can obviously go either way once this state has been achieved) had a rather intriguing, though somewhat obvious, effect on my sleep states, expounded somewhat already by you in the post above.

Rather than directly influenced by anything I was doing in my day-to-day life, I found that my dreams more and more encompassed those aspects of existence whose energies I was delving into. So when I meditated on the nature of the third eye, or space, I had a lot more dreams, often semi-lucid (by this I mean I was able to half-consciously control my own actions in the dream like I would in real life, and kinda knew it was a dream, but still couldn't control everything else in it, which meant that physics was still guided by nature and not by myself), that involved travel to different places I'd never been to, or meeting exotic lifeforms no inquisitive scientist could hope to find on our plane of existence. Or if I meditated on my past lives and what I might potentially have experienced, glimpses of both past and future lives (since they're all relative to where we are) came to me in sleep, with less control from exerted over the past and comparatively more in future lives).

The most profound however, was when I meditated on people or characters from real life or mass media (i.e, a classmate or Harley Quinn from Batman), in an attempt to read more into the subtler energies that their compositions either from birth or their design conception might have had a role to play in shaping them into who they became later on, and how the effect may have occurred. Strangely enough, this actually worked better with the characters than the real people, and when they showed in my dreams, for reasons I cannot fully fathom, my interactions with otherwise non-existent characters were actually more detailed, engaging, 'lifelike', and realistic (within the environments they were usually found in, that is), than with people I've met in this reality.

Anyway, that was just something I thought I'd share.

Cool post, friend :)
Enjoyed the read...might try some of that sometime, if I take any sort of hiatus or hit a wall on my current pursuit.