There is only one essential difference between consciousness and dreaming, and that is sensory input. Your experience is a dream, so is my experience. This stuff about how the frontal cortext is repressed during dreaming. Lucid dreaming presents an obvious contradiction to it. The only difference is sensory input.

Lucid dreaming lets you make use of the dream state that comes to you every night to have a stimulating reality.

We dream every night, all the time.

The consciousness of lucid dreaming is a cultural evolution. It's something that we are talking about and learning about, not biological evolution.

From early childhood, I was interested in understanding how the world worked, and assumed I would be some kind of physical scientist or chemist. But the truth was, I didn't know there was another kind of world, the inner world, that was just as interesting, if not more relevant, than what was going on in the outside world.

In most of our dreams, our inner eye of reflection is shut and we sleep within our sleep. The exception takes place when we seem to awake within our dreams, without disturbing or ending the dream state, and learn to recognize that we are dreaming while the dream is still happening.

Our brain simulates reality. So, our everyday experiences are a form of dreaming, which is to say, they are mental models, simulations, not the things they appear to be.