Consciousness retains the sense of a gathering, of a being with, a consensus. At the very least it is a doubling of mind, an incomplete or imperfect doubling. Being consciousness is to be presence, but presence out of what? Presence is transitivity. There is a something that precedes presence that can only read as dreamless sleep, passivity, as absence. When you wake up you know that it is you waking up, so what have you woken from? Consciousness is a field of will as much as it is a field of awareness. The awareness is always out in front of you, across a transparent gap of no-consciousness, which is why it can't catch mind; will is continuous whether active or not, like a servant at hand, needing to be doing something, to intervene in a prior reality, to form thoughts or dreams in which you can be placed, posited. And it is riddled with blindspots where the changes it reports are introduced; waking, the successions of thought, of feeling, of sense, emotion. It could not produce the illusion of transparency, of being transparent to itself, if there wasn't this opacity at its heart - not the opacity it knows, that it calls object, but the opacity it doesn't know - a sleight of hand so simple as to beggar belief. Will and awareness are two aspects of the same event, the tag-team of your world dream.