How to increase level of consciousness in dreams

Hello everyone, I've been using dreamviews for a while and I have to thank the community for all the helpful
little tricks and tips that have been given regarding lucid dreams. Now onto my question. I recently started
to meditate on the mind after a couple years of meditating on my breath. This was definitely a whole new level of awareness
for me. I started to fully realize what consciousness is. This has been slowly seeping into my dreams now. Over the course
of this week all my dreams have this underlining notion of very base consciousness. I realize in about 80% of the dreams that I am dreaming.
In the other 20% I don't fully realize it but I display signs of realizing it, for example in a very recent dream I didn't outright think that I am dreaming
yet I knew that I would come back to life if I died or that I could simply reset the situation if it got too bad. In the dreams where I do realize I am dreaming
I become sort of conscious but it is still base and not full. For example I had a dream where I was with my wife (Pam from The Office) and we were outside our
house which was a little shack. This guy came up to us and my wife recognized him. They talked for a little bit and decided to go inside the shack together with my wife telling
me I should stay outside. I was obviously troubled at this so I was thinking of ways to see what was going on inside. Just by thinking about this I became aware that I was dreaming
or (and I'm pretty sure this is what happened) it could have even been that I knew I was dreaming but I didn't have any use for that knowledge till now. So , realizing I am dreaming, I decided to use magic to see what was going on inside. I drew a pentagram on the door and tried to stick my fingers through to create a hole so I could see. This didn't work and I spent at least a good 10 minutes doing this. When I woke up I was very puzzled because even though I realized I was dreaming I was still only concerned about this fake dream scenario then actually realizing I am dreaming.
If I was fully conscious then I would have started doing other things like trying to jump to space or pick up a mountain or something. Even if I was fully conscious and still wanted to see what was going on inside
I could have done any number of things. I could have turned myself into a fly and gone in through the window, I could have yelled the walls of the house down, I could have
simply phased through the walls and yet I did none of these creative things.I was simply focused on this one thing, and even after it didn't work I just kept trying it not even pausing to think about other alternatives like I normally would have done. This brings me to my main question. How do I increase my level of consciousness in a dream?
If I have some kind of method that could increase my awareness that I am dreaming then I could use it on practically all my dreams. I realize I am dreaming in most of my dreams
yet I am not fully conscious enough to take advantage of that fact.
In my dreams

Have a plan each night for what you want to accomplish when you become lucid. Make a list of things that you want to do and write them down. Each night, pick one and remind yourself of it before going to bed and again during any mid-night awakenings. Develop the intention that, when you become lucid, the first thing you will do is recall your goal and then do it. You'll see here on DV that many people have personal lists of tasks, there are threads suggesting things to do, and the monthly challenge suggested by the staff.

What's happening behind the scenes is that you are activating more parts of your brain. You are "waking up" you faculties of prospective memory, planning, and reasoning. It may seem limiting to merely think of a plan and do it. But actually, it's more than that. Once you've engaged these higher mental faculties, you'll have greater "consciousness" and you can start to use even higher tools like creativity, curiosity, and improvisation.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sisyphus

Have a plan each night for what you want to accomplish when you become lucid. Make a list of things that you want to do and write them down. Each night, pick one and remind yourself of it before going to bed and again during any mid-night awakenings. Develop the intention that, when you become lucid, the first thing you will do is recall your goal and then do it. You'll see here on DV that many people have personal lists of tasks, there are threads suggesting things to do, and the monthly challenge suggested by the staff.

What's happening behind the scenes is that you are activating more parts of your brain. You are "waking up" you faculties of prospective memory, planning, and reasoning. It may seem limiting to merely think of a plan and do it. But actually, it's more than that. Once you've engaged these higher mental faculties, you'll have greater "consciousness" and you can start to use even higher tools like creativity, curiosity, and improvisation.

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Ahh, that sounds like a great idea. I didn't really correlate more brain activity with being more conscious but it seems obvious. I see why the list thing would work and I am going
to try that out. If activating more of your brain is all you need to do then wouldn't doing some basic math also do the same? 6x+7 = 47 something like that isn't challenging
but you would still have to think about it.