I think your idea of consciousness is more like human/animal consciousness. Which is reasonable since that’s all we have to go off of, but I take it to mean any kind of experience, which might arise due to different types of optimisation algorithms and selective pressures.

I’m not sure I agree that everything is valence, unless I’m misunderstanding what you mean by valence. I guess it’s valence in the sense that sensory information is a specific quality with a magnitude.

I don’t think that colours, sounds and textures are somehow made out of pleasure and pain, or fear and desire. That just isn’t my subjective experience of them.

I do think that human consciousness is something like a waking dream, like how we hallucinate lots of our experiences rather than perceiving things verbatim. Perception is an active process much more than most people realise as we can see from various perceptual illusions. But I guess we’re getting more into cognition here.