Follow up: I realised there’s a very nice chart shared in one of Michael Raduga’s video classes on astral travel/lucid dreaming/tgs/journeying.
He described the “direct” method of getting into a journey, that state between waking and sleeping, which is simply when you do this before sleeping at night.
He calls it “the Phase”.
You can see it, you get deeper and deeper into trance, the trick is to stay in the Phase and not fall further into full sleep. Preferably sitting up in circle 