I have been doing observations of it and haven't noticed any substantial brightening. I have thin cloud tonight which is supposed to thicken, so I can't do a measurement. AAVSO's V band measurements have increased maybe 0.1 magnitude (brighter) over the past week. It is going to have get a whole lot brighter before there is an indication of an actual nova. It is just hitting another of its cyclic peaks from what I see, although any one of these could be "the straw that broke the camel's back."
The system has some brightening when it is accreting mass at a higher than normal rate. That is what the long active state was about that preceded the dip.. From what I gathered in the literature, the mass accumulation rates during these events are several times normal. There is some critical mass required for a thick enough layer on the white dwarf to kick off the thermonuclear runaway (hydrogen shell flash.) When it reaches that point the rise in nova is very rapid, as is the decline. I doubt we will get much warning.
If anything it looks like it is going into wider range peak to valley; this is the 4th or 5th cycle which began with the dip. It looks like the overall accretion rate might be somewhat lower than the more active state in the years before the dip (back to ~2016). But that is just looking at visual band, so it might not be a good proxy for mass accretion since it can be attenuated various ways.
FWIW: Not that it matters for the trend, since it is the set value used for comparison and will end up baked in to the averages, but the 9.8 mag star may or may not be 9.8 mag. AAVSO's field photometry lists seems to show it as 10.061 V--but the list contains mixed sources and I don't see any actual APASS values for it. Visually it looks closer to 10 to me when I compare to other stars measured in the field.
