At any moment, you can wake up. Any situation can awaken you. Existence is an exercise where you create ways to feel more alive. Being awake is feeling into knowing what matters. Sometimes small life changes enable you to feel more awake, more present. Even splashing water on the face can help. How much sleep do you need to be awake to what matters?
To be awake is to recognize it was a dream that created the sense of distance between who you are and what you think you want. Dreaming is the distance. For dreaming to feel real, sleeping is necessary. From the moment you are awake sleep disappears along with the world of dreams and the impulse to dream.
Being awake is being here now and accepting what you already are. Awakening cannot be made a goal. All goals are dreaming like all achievements and pursuits to them are dreaming. He who is asleep cannot dream his way to enlightenment. Whatever you imagine is not the same as being what you are already.
It is assumed that a process exists for everything and so process is dreamed into being. It is imagined you must follow a path to reach a destination, take training to become qualified with a certain skill, literally travel from place to place, when the starting point and destination are the same. That is, you convince yourself you are less than you are in order to think you must earn the reward of a desired experience. Being awake to what matters is accepting everything is instantaneous.
Similarly, it is often assumed a person moves through dreaming and waking states to wakefulness and then to that which has no name. Everything but the last state takes you away from yourself. In reality, you do not go anywhere but life and experience looks different in the imagination. You think you must lose yourself to become whole, do something to merit entry into paradise. When you truly lose the self, your false identity or sense of separation from who you are, you cannot come back to it and for desire and ego cease to exist.
Get this: Paradise is here now. Being awake to what matters is knowing no-thing you think exists. Yet, the point of it all is enjoying every step of the imagined journey, appreciating every experience, and loving everything you encounter along the way back to where you never leave. Love is the answer. All of existence points toward it and is it.