There are a lot of ways to deepen yourself into the relaxed, receptive states that work best for navigating dreams. You may already have a favorite or familiar one, from your meditation practice or something similar.

But if you don’t have a method you love, or if you’re looking for new ones, I’ll collect a few possibilities here. Try them out, and see what works best and most reliably to drop you into the kind of state where you’re relaxed, alert, receptive, deepened, and open to intuition.

Then, during the practices that require you to drop into meditation at the beginning, use whichever method you’ve found works for you.

• Ten Points Practice from Dharma Ocean is one of my favorites, a somatic meditation exercise for deepening into the relaxation and presence of the body.
• Yoga Nidra/NSDR is always a good option to relax and deepen into your body. If you search either term on youtube, you’re sure to come up with hundreds of guided meditations like this one, helping you relax and deepen into your body.
• Self-Hypnosis techniques and/or recordings can be a great way in for many people — again, very easy to find tracks like this on youtube, or self-guided techniques online.
• Any kind of meditation can be a good start; I especially recommend open awareness or metta meditations. (The links are just examples, you can jump off from there to other versions that suit you better.)