Awoke is the past tense of the verb awake, meaning to stop sleeping and become conscious. If you say “I awoke at seven o'clock this morning,” you're describing when you woke up. You might read in a story that a character awoke to find snow covering the ground, meaning they woke up and discovered the snow.

The word sometimes appears in a figurative sense too. Someone might say a protest movement awoke people to an important issue, meaning it made them aware and attentive to something they hadn't been paying attention to before, almost as if they'd been asleep to that reality.