One of my favourite studies into this is the original study of phobias by Dr Bandler – which basically says that a person was able to more or less instantly remove their own phobia when they “saw themselves” from a 3rd point of view.
Perspective therapy helps you get through a lot - basically realising how meaningless you really are in the scheme of things.
In deep meditation (with really not that much practice) you can arrive at a “sleeping state” where your body is asleep for all intents and purposes, but your mind is wide awake. But you literally cannot even more a finger… funky feeling let me tell you! 
This is my 6-8am time where I can get a few minutes here and there, it's really tough to hold onto, a delicate balance of awareness and unconsciousness. I'm getting better at it, you can start to feel yourself slipping back into autopilot, when that happens force yourself to look at your watch or discern something of a specific colour, simple things you can embed as commands which will remind you to stay un-asleep.
The other end of it is actually properly waking up, I find if I can keep my eyes closed there's half a chance I'll slip back under, but at that stage you can be really confused as you'll feel "awake" but like you're drunk. This is the precipice of the bit you mentioned where the body is asleep - it's here that the body is now awake and you can control it - but you want to get back to being where you're unable to move your body.
My specific interest with dreaming is our perception of time in dreams. Dreams that seem to go on for hours only last seconds in the “real world.”
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So the REALLY INTERESTING question is if we can “form long term memory” without the standard learning model of repetition via working and short-term memory, could we learn to, say, play piano, while dreaming simply by forming the long term memory of it… kinda cool if you ask me! 
Yep - this shit fascinates me - I've confirmed plenty of times that hours have "passed" between snooze button presses. Take that a step further, if you have the ability to properly control that time - and INTRODUCE new elements - the capacity for accelerated learning on a logarithmic scale is awesome...
"I know kung-fu"
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