I'd like to add - depending on how philosophical you get, "consciousness" is very hard to define. It's the sort of word where you'll get different definitions depending on who you ask. Actually, Dan's response exemplifies this.
In contrast, "awareness" is more straightforward. Generally, to say that somebody is "aware of something" is to say that that person knows that the mentioned thing exists, is true, etc. For example, if I say "He was not aware of the elephant in the room", it's another way of phrasing that "he did not know that the elephant was in the room".