Giving up on stretch-lying for now

I had a dream last night I was suffocating.  In it, I was trying to remove things from around my neck but couldn't.  Immediately afterwards, I woke up gasping for air and my heart was racing.

This was the last straw.  In my experience, stretch-lying is an all-or-nothing affair:

If I correct my pelvis and spine, then my neck DEMANDS to be more upright (or else I get terrible irritation in the front of my neck).  If I then try to adjust my neck (using techniques from both the book and the in-person course), the pain in my throat goes away but then I have to hold an awkward position I'm not used to.  Since this is too akward/burning/irritating to allow me to sleep, I end up re-tucking my pelvis and letting my spine curl up till my neck is happy.

In other words, I can't stretchlie "half-way" because a little good alignment in my back screws up my neck.  So I can't stretch-lie at all.

Usually I give up an after an hour.  But I'm making so little progress that last night I spent four hours trying to stretch-lie and fall asleep.  So then, miraculously, I do fall asleep with the adjusted neck, but then 30 minutes later I wake up with the nightmare. 

And my neck?  Instead of being curled forwards it was curled backwards.  The muscles gave out and my neck hinged backwards and basically choked me.  I went to sleep in the side-position and woke up choking in the back-position.

I've read many times here that "the neck is a slow-changing structure".  But how exactly?  Is it just the bones/disks?  Does my trachea have to reshape?  Does the cartilage in the front have to move around?  There's so many things going on in the neck and I'm quite nervous about the damage I might do while trying to make myself better.

So I'm basically giving up on this for now, but at the same time, I don't think I'm making much progress by sleeping curled every night.  How can my muscles/disks rebuild properly during sleep if I always have to sleep in a bad position?