Great questions Sophia B.! As far as I can determine, yes, I still get all the benefits from sleep. At least the research on long term meditators indicates that they need a bit less sleep than age matched controls. You can imagine the difficulty in demonstrating awareness during deep sleep since the EEG shows mostly only sleep. Finer detailed analyses are required and scientists currently are working on it. As to your first questions, my eyes are closed, and I am aware of both my immediate environment and my sleep simultaneously. It’s hard to describe. The awareness is like that of a lucid dream but there are no images, no storylines, just awareness.