Intuition is the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning. Different people give the word “intuition” a variety of different meanings, ranging from direct access to unconscious knowledge, unconscious cognition, inner sensing, inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition and the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.

Most of us believe that we are rationalists, we insist on logical conclusions for almost everything in life. But, not everything in life is logical and rationale.  A naturalist is somebody who assumes that everything which occurs in the world has an explanation in terms of natural causes. Rationalists put this point another way: everything which happens has a rational explanation. For lack of a better word, there are laws of being and there are laws of nature, and it is impossible for anything to act in ways that are fundamentally exact and are logically explained. At times some instances in our life are illogical, absurd, or aberrant.

Intuition is a gift that each of us possesses, trust me, it’s a biggest gift of all abilities and all talents. It’s famous that Henry Ford used to follow his intuitions and gut feelings. When the automobile sector started experiencing falling demand for his cars and high worker turnover, in 1914, he did something that probably made other barons of industry go pale: he doubled his employees’ wages. Many felt he’s gone crazy. Well, within a year, turnover dropped by a factor of more than 20 while productivity nearly doubled, and demand for Ford cars boomed because Ford’s own workers could now afford the product they were making!

Another example is:  In 1954, Ray Kroc, a seller of Prince Castle brand Multi-mixer milkshake machines, learned that the McDonald brothers were using eight of his machines in their San Bernardino restaurant. He became very curious and he went to take a look at the restaurant. Ray Kroc suggested McDonald brothers to franchise their business throughout the country. He didn’t stop after suggesting; Kroc offered to take the major responsibility for setting up the new franchises elsewhere. Kroc’s lawyer cautioned him, but he ignored his lawyer’s advice, just because of his gut feeling at that moment. He borrowed $2.7 million to buy out the modest fast-food franchise he helped build. Rest is history.

When we don’t work on our intuition it goes waste. Intuition is for real and whether you believe it or not, it does not change the fact that it exists. Explore the amazing depth and power of your intuition. In 1965, Paul McCartney hears a tune in a dream “the most magic thing!” He thinks a lot about where he has heard this song………but it’s so unlike anything he’s written, he worries that he’s recalling someone else’s song. McCartney plays it for anyone who will listen, but no one can identify it. So the Beatles record the track and title it “Yesterday.” It became super duper hit! Often, intuitions appear in our dreams.

Another interesting example of human intuition comes from Jose Silva, founder of the Silva method, which is aimed at attuning individuals to their unconscious mind to solve their daily problems. In a dream, Jose saw two sets of numbers, 3-4-3 and 3-7-3. Then, he saw the image of Christ and the book “One Solitary Life” which is an essay detailing the effects of Jesus Christ on humanity. He asked himself what exactly did these numbers mean that appeared to him in the dream? He started looking for license plates, telephone numbers on the telephone book, home addresses, etc. but there wasn’t any relationship of these with the sets of numbers he dreamed of. He became restless, and kept questioning himself the relevance of the numbers he saw in dream. That night, his wife asked him to go to the store to get a bottle of wine. On the way to the store he met a friend and told him about the whole experience. His friend suggested that maybe that number belonged to a winning lottery ticket. Jose Silva then went to the lottery agency and bought tickets with the numbers 3-4-3. The 3-7-3 weren’t available as somebody else had already purchased them. The end of the story is Jose won over $10,000!

The Indian Ayurvedic medicine practitioners agree that both intuition and intellect are necessary to give a person a correct diagnosis and treatment of their specific disease. Pulse diagnosis which is done by the physician placing three fingers on the patient’s pulse allows him to know the types of energetic imbalances he has and to some extent how to correct them. The mind and heart of the doctor have to be in tune while this takes place. Do you know that pulse diagnosis has been used for over 5,000 years and it continues to be used even today?

Getty museum is an art museum in California housed on two campuses: the Getty Centre and Getty Villa. The museum is famous in world and has been visited by millions of people so far. In 1983 the Getty Museum received a statue that was thought to be original. However, when experts in the field came to check it, they all declared that the statue was phony or fake. They didn’t specify any particular reason but only recognized that a gut feeling told them there was something wrong with it.

Use your intuitive power for the best results in your life. When it comes to making decisions about what to do with the rest of your life, with your career, with your relationships, the societal and household pressures that seep into our unconscious are irrelevant. It is our intuition alone that can play the pivotal role. Turn to your intuition in these times, turn inward and ask yourself what feels right and what feels wrong. You will never be let down.

Sigmund Freud the father of psychology said that mind is landscaped. Like a landscape, mind has a structure and each structure has function of its own to play. In Freud’s model of mind the conscious mind (everything that we see and are aware of) is seen as the tip of the iceberg of our unconscious mind. Our unconscious mind is like a storehouse of our primitive wishes, ideas, and impulse which are kept at bay and mediated by the preconscious area. According to Freud the structure of the unconscious mind is like a large metal pot ‘cauldron’. So all that we desire but are scared to speak of and some events which have left lasting effect on us of which we are unable to speak because of fright are locked away in the unconscious mind. The ‘locking away’ process happens through suppression/repression. Sigmund Freud emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind; he stated that to a great extent it governs behavior of people. And, the objective of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious (aware).

In 1923, Freud developed a more structural model of the mind comprising of id, ego and superego. These are not physical areas within the brain, but rather hypothetical conceptualizations of important mental functions.

Freud said that the id expresses pleasures which comprises of two kinds of biological instincts or drives which Freud labeled as Eros and Thanatos. Eros helps the individual to survive; it expresses life-sustaining activities such as respiration, eating and sex. The energy created by the life instincts is known as libido. In contrast, Thanatos is viewed as a set of destructive forces present in all human beings such as hostility, aggression and destruction. Freud believed that Eros is stronger than Thanatos, thus enabling people to survive rather than self-destruct.

The ego develops from the id during infancy. The ego’s goal is to satisfy the demands of the id in a safe manner which is socially accepted and does not harm others.  In contrast to the id the ego follows the reality principle as it operates from both the conscious and unconscious mind.

The superego develops during early childhood when the child identifies with the same sex parent and is responsible for setting moral standards to be followed. The superego operates on the ethics and morality principle and motivates us to behave socially in a responsible and acceptable manner. The superego makes us self-governed; we feel ashamed for cheating others or harming others and feel guilty if rules are not followed by us. When there is conflict between the objectives of the id and superego the ego acts as a referee and arbitrates the conflict. The ego can thus organize various defense mechanisms to prevent it from becoming overwhelmed by anxiety.

Freud has explained that our brain guards us from disturbing thoughts and memories by holding back them and he believed that we are almost entirely driven by unconscious sexual desire. So Freud used to say that our dreams are a secret outlet for these repressed desires. Sigmund Freud used dream analysis to interpret the fundamental language of dreams; it is very different from normal conscious thinking. Freud intelligently used id, ego and super-ego to support his research on dreams.

The study of dreaming is called Oneirology; its psychoanalysis runs through neuroscience, psychology, and literature. Do you know, till today the plain fact why we dream is still unexplained. But that hasn’t stopped scientists from coming up with some pretty fascinating premise; each study has come out with variety of reasoning.

Dreaming allows wish fulfillment: After examining and analyzing dreams of hundreds of his patients, Freud came up with a presumption that dreams are wish-fulfillments. Any dream, no matter how terrifying, can be looked at as a way of getting something that you want, either literally or symbolically. If you dream of falling from height, which is the most common dream, the dream suggests that you may have lost control over a particular situation in your life. The situation can possibly be linked to job, work, and school assignment, home or even in your relationship. Falling dreams are usually vivid ones that you can recall them quite easily and are able to remember most of the symbols.

Dreaming is storing an idea in memory: Famous psychiatrist Jie Zhang said that dreams are not just randomly-generated stories caused by neural impulses. Perhaps, there are also more reasons for dreaming them. He said that our brain is always storing memories regardless of whether we are awake or asleep. Dreams are a kind of “temporary storage” area of realization, a spot where we hold memories before we move them from short-term to long-term storage. A dream flashes through our mind before it is filed in our memory.

Dream often cleanses our mind: In our dreams we get rid of undesirable connections and associations that build up in our brains throughout the day. Basically, dreams are garbage collection mechanisms, clearing our minds of useless thoughts and making way for better ones. Essentially, we dream in order to forget the bad actions and deeds. Dreams help us get rid of the information overload of daily life and retain only the most important data. Yes, that’s the truth.

Strengthening what we learn: One theory suggests that we actually dream to remember rather than forget. It’s based on a number of studies that show people remember what they’ve learned better if they dream after learning it.  It supports Jie Zhang’s theory about long-term memory storage; our dreams help us retain what we’ve learned.

Psychiatrists suggest that we should keep people awake and talk to them for hours if they have experienced a trauma. The theory is reinforced by recent studies on trauma, which suggest that when people go to sleep right after a traumatic experience, they are more likely to remember and be haunted by the trauma.

Preparation for threats: Neuroscientist Antti Revonusuo of Finland suggested that dreams play a biological function often to replicate threatening events which prepare us to face it. People who have threatening kinds of dreams are better able to face threats in their waking hours, because they’ve already run through these in their dreams. Harvard medical researcher Deirdre Barrett suggests that dreams are a kind of theatre in which we are able to solve problems more effectively than when we are awake. This happens partly because the dreaming mind makes connections more quickly than the waking mind does. This idea is based in part on experiments she did where people were asked to solve problems while “sleeping on them.” The problem-solving outcomes were better for the candidates who dreamt.

Processing painful emotions with symbolic associations: solving problems in our sleep is itself a kind of Darwinian process. Basically, dreams are natural selection for ideas and this can broaden to the level of emotions, too. One group of researchers suggests that dreams are places where we run through situations and try to select the most useful emotional reactions to them. Psychologist Richart Coutts suggests that this is the best way to react to those situations emotionally. And, we often feel better about painful issues the next morning after a night of dreams. While a Darwinian model of dreaming suggests that we aggressively transform our ideas to weed out problematic and awkward emotions, a new model of dreaming suggests that the process is more like therapy. We don’t aggressively select for the most adaptive idea or emotion, we just run through those ideas and emotions and place them in a broader psychological context. Often, the brain does this by associating an emotion with a symbol.

So friends, dreams play an important role in our emotional, psychological and physical health. We have the romantic, terrifying, emotional, funny, awkward, loving, uniting, separating and weird dreams. What we may not realize is that these dreams are common across cultures and their seemingly wacky content is both important and meaningful. We spend an average of eight hours a night sleeping, which is basically a third of our life. About a quarter of our sleep is spent dreaming, which in an average lifetime represents about six full years of dreaming. Most of the researchers conclude that dreams play a central role in our emotional health, our memory, our learning and to help us to find solutions to our problems.