Canis, your structured approach is awesome! Your motivation is rubbing off on me

So, that awareness thing is definitely something I struggle with as well. However, I believe Ive been able to experience the awareness in small doses which seems to tell me that it is indeed possible.

My meditation practices really help me with this. Honestly, I don't think we are really training our conscious mind to be awake, rather, it seems that we are training the conscious mind to be aware of the unconscious.

Once that happens, we enter this entirely separate mind set wherein all experience is accepted as a singularity. That is to say, it is all a dream.
On the one hand, you have what seems to be a division between sleep and waking life. And on the other, your unconscious mind perceives all this reality as one.
I'll leave it there before I lose myself in my own rabbit hole, lol...