LUCID DREAMS.
Metacognition is the awareness of your own thought processes—to think about thinking, to know about knowing.
Exercising it allows you to plan and take stock of your life, granting you an unprecedented degree of control over it. You are able to recognize patterns of action and consequence, coordinate and audit your thought processes and behavior, and adapt and recalibrate them to suit your future needs.
If life were a video game, then metacognition would be a cheat code. It would be realizing that you are not the avatar in the simulation, but the player itself.
Becoming metacognitive is like taking the pill in Limitless, or the red pill in The Matrix. By developing this greater level of awareness, you snap out of living life on autopilot and become the conscious creator of your reality.
The best example of this is lucid dreaming. Typically, you conduct yourself in a dream as though it were your waking life. However, by becoming aware that you are dreaming, you instantly realize that you can do anything.
There is an elegance in the simplicity of the fact that the key to access lucidity is to become conscious of the nature of the reality you are experiencing.
When you dream, anything is possible—you can defy physics and create new worlds in the sandbox of your mind. However, you cannot act on this knowledge until you know you are dreaming. Therefore, one single act of metacognition becomes a revelation of divine significance—that the dream is created in your own mind, and that in it, you can effectively play God.
If this is what is possible when you become lucid in a dream, what is possible when you become lucid in life?
Ask yourself: what could you do if you freed yourself from the constraints of your mind, and became conscious of your consciousness?
By becoming metacognitive, in a similar fashion, you could make your dreams a reality.
So open your mind up to the breakthrough that you are awake and alive, living the grand tradition of the human experience, and that you can control what you do with it.
Wake up.
Have a eureka moment.
To become limitless—to go lucid—in real life, heed the words of Descartes: “cogito ergo sum,” Latin for “I think, therefore I am.”