What Thoughts Wake You Up at Night?

I asked through Facebook and Twitter "What thoughts wake you up at night?" The response was varied; from nonsensical to downright scary.

"Gee, the idea of munching on some (fill in the blank with just about anything vegetarian) sounds great." "Where is my handbag?" "Did we lock the security gate?" "Why are the dogs so quiet?"

And several matched the thought that woke me up the other night:

"I gotta pee."

It's one thing to be awoken by your kids making noise in the next room and quite another when it's you who is sabotaging your own restful night.Thoughts that wake you up in the middle of the night engulfed in worry or fear is a common indicator of stress. The pressures and uncertainties in your daily life visit you through dreams and symbolic thoughts. Sometimes these dreams and thoughts jar you back into consciousness yet the feelings that evoked the rude jolt to healthy sleeping patterns remain.

These feelings are indicators for you to examine to reveal a greater understanding of yourself and what you experience. A dream in which you are worried, scared, or stressed in any way is a reflection of the dis-ease you are experiencing in your waking life.

According to the Dictionary of Dreams, the following symbols may shed some light on what the above thoughts may indicate as deep rooted feelings and fears that are getting in the way of emotional and physical well being:

eating food - This may be an indicator that the dreamer is concerned about a weight problem or eating disorder. It may be a health warning to draw attention to one's eating habits or weight problem. (although the veggie munching response to my query above could have been sent in fun and humor)

search - Search and not find: Instills the need to find something that is lacking within. Can be spiritual or need for self-examination. Search and find: Signal of accomplishment and self-capability.

gate - Closed: An opportunity for you to decide upon. Open: The beginning of an opportunity to leave your current situation.

intruder - Someone or something has interfered with your peace of mind by forcing a situation upon you.

burglar - An intruder, unwelcome person or event, loss of something. Being forcibly deprived by someone's actions.

With regard to the need to pee - when ya gotta go, ya gotta go!

Most dreams contain messages that serve to teach you something about yourself. Recurring dreams and wake-up thoughts are triggered by a life circumstance that keeps repeating itself. They are a message from your Higher Self to pay attention to, examine, and form a new perspective around the hidden meaning behind the dream symbol. Without judgment of any kind, look within yourself and face whatever you find in your exploration of what is the underlying stress.

Chances are you have placed yourself as a victim in your worry. Any area where you give up your personal power, your ability and responsibility to intentionally create your experiences, you will suffer with stress or anxiety. Know that you are a victim to no one and no circumstance unless you allow yourself to be. Whether a horrible thing happened to you or could happen to you is not what is creating stress. What brings on worry, doubt and fear is what you have the event mean for or about you in your life moving forward. You have absolute power over how you choose to experience any event in your life, unless you relinquish it. When you let go of your power you deny your self.

To reclaim your personal power focus upon all that you have done and achieved in your life. I'll bet that anything you set your mind to and were passionate about you have either achieved or are in the process of making it a real experience. Instead of giving up on yourself you were able to overcome obstacles, reach for new perspectives and new ideas when the going got tough. Do the same thing now with whatever wakes you up at night, Reach for a newer and better perspective. Take back your power and responsibility so that you can dream sweet dreams and enjoy restful nights.

Turning Ideas, Goals, and Dreams Into Reality

The best way to make a goal or idea materialize is to learn how to make it persist. Have you ever been sidetracked from a good idea, a meaningful goal, or your dream because you did not quite know how to make it materialize? The ability to make your ideas or dreams a reality is not only a key factor of success, it is also an indispensable asset to achieving happiness, or to one's ability to recover quickly from unexpected setbacks. It takes a tremendous amount of mental fortitude, realistic thinking, and creative problem solving to be able to achieve the success and happiness one desires out of life. These are just some of the conditions and actions that it takes, in order to have an idea materialize, or make a dream come true. Persistence is not just the ability to keep on keeping on; it is also the very essence of making ideas and dreams a reality.

Nothing can exist, survive, or last unless it can also persist. With that being said, how do you make an idea persist, until it materializes? How do you maintain your motivation and drive in the face of challenges? Most importantly, how can you free yourself from the elasticity of recurring problems, so that you can move forward with less effort or stress - and with greater effectiveness? The key here is to know and fully understand what the elements of persistence are, and use them to take effective actions that will get you results. No solution is useful to anyone unless they know about it and feel certain they can use it to accomplish the results they desire. Allow me to introduce the book and workbook Secrets of the Art of Persistence - solutions for turning your ideas and dreams into reality.

Dreams Or Goals?

Many of us have big dreams and high aspirations; there is nothing wrong with this. If no one ever dreamt big we wouldn't have people like Donald Trump. Trump himself has said "As long as you're going to be thinking anyway, think big."

In order to even gain a quarter of Trump's success you must set high goals and aim for a better lifestyle, although, you must realize the difference between a goal and a dream. A day dream explained by psychologist Eric Klinger "is a visionary fantasy experienced while awake, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions." The key term is FANTASY. A day dream is only that, a dream, it has no base and no means of actualization. Day dreaming will lead you away from being aware of your surroundings. This kind of thought will lead you down a path of disappointment because when you are not aware of the world around you, you will have no idea how to conquer it.

Well you may then say "When I daydream they are things I really want!" There is nothing wrong with that. You can and should desire to live the lifestyle you desire. But you also must realize that simply signing up as a representative will not make you a desired $50,000 a month. If your lifestyle choice requires you to make that much you must realize your goals to get there. Thinking of the car, home, or TV you could purchase on that budget is not the goal but it is motivation.

Using that motivation set incremental goals starting from the top. No matter how motivated you are this will help you be realistic and avoid the discouragement that causes so many network marketers to quit. So start with you main goal: $50k a month. When do you want it by? The shorter the main goal the harder you will have to work to get it i.e. if you want $50k in six months it will require twice the amount of work as to making $50k in twelve months. Now break down that goal as to how much money you will make each month leading up to your main objective. This will keep you on task and allow you to adjust your work ethic each month depending on how close you are to your monthly financial goal.

Now that you have broken down your finical goals and set out a time line you now need to figure out what will get you to each of those monthly goals. For example if your next month's goal is to make $4,000 and to do so you need to sign up 6 reps and sell 30 points worth of product or services then this is your monthly goal. Now 6 new reps are not going to magically appear. You need to present your opportunity on a daily basis to as many people you think necessary so that you obtain the six reps, but to at least one person a day 5 days a week. Also determine who you will be selling your product or services to; 5 points need to be sold a week. So now you have your weekly goals: 1 presentation a day, 5 points of product or service sold during the week.

Review your goals on a weekly basis and analyze where you stand. By breaking down your goals based upon your motivation you will be able to better stay focused and achieve your dreams.

Remember your goals must have an end date and must be measurable. In this manner you can take your dreams turn it into motivation be successful. Your dreams are real and you want them. Don't let anyone take your dreams away but you must be strong and work hard to obtain them. Dale Carnegie has said "Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do." Don't be a fool and don't let fools strip you of what you wish for your life and your family.

Sweet dreams are made of geomagnetic activity

Looking for an explanation for recurring nightmares of leaving the house without your trousers on or losing your teeth? New research suggests you can blame the Earth's magnetic field, rather than a repressed childhood.

Darren Lipnicki, a psychologist formerly at the Center for Space Medicine in Berlin, Germany, found a correlation between the bizarreness of his dreams, recorded over eight years, and extremes in local geomagnetic activity.

Other studies have tied low geomagnetic activity to increases in the production of the melatonin, a potent hormone that helps set the body's circadian clock. So, based on anecdotal evidence that melatonin supplements used as a sleeping aid can cause off-kilter dreams, Lipnicki wondered whether local magnetic fields could induce the same effects.
Bizarreness barometer

Between 1990 and 1997, he kept meticulous records of his nightly reveries, amassing a total 2387 written accounts during his teenage years. "I always wanted to do science with them," he says.

For the study, he devised a five-point scoring system to rate the bizarreness of these dreams. On the low end are dreams completely representative of reality – "I am sitting at a table doing some maths or physics homework," for instance.

Dreams that scored a three could happen, but seemed unlikely. For example: "A friend is in the backyard of my house, building a wooden platform atop of 7-foot high stilts."

The most bizarre dreams that Lipnicki recorded had little or no connection with reality: "I was stranded on a foreign coastline with a monkey that spoke English and a woman that suddenly became small, almost doll-sized. Then I was at home."
Dream result

Lipnicki looked up daily geomagnetic activity in Perth, Australia – his home at the time. A scale called the k-index quantifies local geomagnetic activity, and he included only days that scored on the extremes of this index. This whittled his dream log down to 66 days of low geomagnetic activity and 70 days of high activity.

Using these figures, Lipnicki uncovered a statistical correlation between dream bizarreness and geomagnetic activity, with freakier dreams occurring on days with the least geomagnetic activity.

Of course, this correlation doesn't prove that the Earth's magnetic activity determines whether we dream of a mundane day at the park or something more like an LSD trip. But a larger and better controlled study may be worth pursuing, Lipnicki says. "At this stage, it's just putting the idea out there."

Learn Some Techniques of Lucid Dreaming

Have you ever experienced a dream whose results you could determine, and where you could do anything at will? Then perhaps you were able to have a "lucid dream," which occurs when you know that you are dreaming, and can thus manipulate your dream to suit your needs.

Sweet dreaming is a common phenomenon which has been used as the theme of movies and books, and which is the focus of interest of psychologists, New Age groups, and artists alike. Because they often feel real, lucid dreams can often be more memorable than any other kind of dream. Even the pain of nightmares can be offset by lucid dreaming, which is why some psychologists recommend that their patients intentionally have lucid dreams, so that the patients can rid themselves of any torment or inner strife that may impair them in the daytime.

Although lucid dreaming is relatively rare, it can be achieved with different techniques, and this means you are no different. Before lucid dreaming can be done, however, you have to recognize that you are dreaming. You can do this by looking for "dream signs", which can be identified by performing the following "reality tests".

1. If you are confronted with text or a clock in a dream, read the text or the time, look away, and then look at the text or time again. In the real world, text and time will not change; in the dream world, however, text and time will alter drastically.

2. Switch on electronic objects, or look at reflective objects. Electronic switches such as light switches will not usually work in the dream world. Mirrors will be blurred, or will show distorted images.

3. Try to inflict pain on yourself, or keep yourself from breathing. If you feel your chest tighten, or if you feel little or no resistance or pain on your skin, then you may be in a dream state.

4. Observe your environment: do you see talking animals? Are there purple dogs and green horses? Do buildings suddenly get up and dance? You may be dreaming.

Not everyone can have lucid dreams. There are many factors that affect such ability, including meditation and age. If you do wish to have lucid dreams, and you can recognize that you are in the dream state, then you can get started with any of the following techniques.

In Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming (MILD), all you need to do is to prepare yourself mentally for lucid dreaming. While you fall asleep, remind yourself, over and over, to watch out for dream signs, and to know that you are dreaming.

The easiest way to start sweet dreaming is the Wake-back-to-bed Induction Technique (WBTB). This exploits the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) cycles, which indicate deep sleep and lucid dreaming, and which get longer in the latter parts of the night. To employ WBTB, go to sleep tired, then wake up in five hours' time. As soon as you are awake, direct all your thoughts on the will to make yourself have lucid dreams while keeping yourself awake for an hour. When you are finished with the hour of focus, go back to sleep. Not only may you have lucid dreams, you will have them longer, and more vivid.

A common technique is called Waking Induction of Lucid Dreaming (WILD). This involves going from the waking state directly to the lucid dream state. To use WILD, you have to recognize that you have reached the border between waking and sleeping, and you have to remain aware of your state. You may be able to enter a dream with complete awareness, and an ability to change events to suit your needs.

Another effective method is the Cycle Adjustment Technique (CAT), which means adjusting your sleep hours so that you are more alert during the later portions of your sleep. To do so, try to wake up about an hour and a half before you normally do, and continue to do so until your cycles are completely adjusted. This heightened awareness of having to wake up; alternating with normal hours of waking at the usual time, actually makes the body more aware of the dreaming state, and can induce lucid dreaming.

Don Juan's Technique is also like MILD, except that it requires focus on your hands. All you have to do is to stare at your hands before going to sleep, then telling yourself (preferably aloud) that when you look at your hands later, you will realize that you are in a dream state. When you do reach the dream state, look at your hands again, repeat the words to yourself, and continue to do so to keep your awareness during the entire dream.

Lucid dreaming experts recommend three basic steps to induce a lucid dream. First, you have to relax as you go to sleep. Second, remain aware of your dream state. Last, enter your dream, and continue to remain aware of the state, all while enjoying what your dream can offer. In lucid dreaming, you can fly, run at impossible speeds, experience activities that you might not normally do while you are awake, get ideas for a novel or work of art, and even rehearse scenarios that you might encounter in real life!

Once you know that you are dreaming, remember every single detail of your dream. Try to manipulate the dream to suit your preferences. If you can, keep a dream journal, along with a pen, on your bedside table. As soon as you wake up from your dream, relax, keep your eyes closed to remember as many details as possible, then open your journal and write everything down.

Lucid dreaming can be done by everyone, and its benefits can be enjoyed by all. If lucid dreaming can rid us of our inner demons, then by all means, let the sleeping begin!

Lucid Dreaming: How To Have A Lucid Dream

Maybe pigs cannot fly yet, but you sure can. At least in your dreams. Lucid dreaming is a mysterious art form that many people wish they could master. You may have experienced a lucid dream, in which you were aware you were dreaming.

But would it not be great if you could have that self-awareness on a regular basis, and as a result able to influence your dreams?

Dreaming is realizing you are dreaming as you dream. When you reach the Lucid Dreaming state, you will be able to control your dreams and experience anything you wish.

Maybe you would like to take a flight through the sky or make other impossible things possible. Or maybe you would like to tell your boss you think he is unfair, without getting fired in real life.

There are many appeals to lucid dreaming, and if you can learn the elusive skill, then a world of excitement and an opportunity for personal growth await you.

I remember standing out on a deck in the foggy night air and having a most peculiar, amazing thought: I am dreaming right now. I can walk through walls. And then I immediately walked through a wall! Well, at least in my dream!

I will never forget this accidental lucid dream and I certainly would like to experience something like that again. But how? In order to become an expert lucid dreamer, you must understand the basics of the art.

1) Why not just have normal dreams?

What is the effect of lucid dreaming? Not only do we all desire to control our environment and make fantastical things happen, but a dream is a safe place to rehearse for our waking life.

This is not to say our real world fears and anxieties do not follow us into our sleep, but no character or plot we conjure up in our dreams can physically harm us and no one but the dreamer will know what happens in a dream.

This means that a baseball player can practice his swing, a politician can practice her speech, or a newly widowed man can find love again - all without actual consequences.

Lucid dreaming gives people a forum; a place they can test the water or fulfill their desires. It also gives them a place to confront their fears. When we are able to control our dreams, we can turn those nightmares into memorable, productive fantasies.

2) How to lucid dream

Many folks spend years and years perfecting the craft of lucid dreaming, but if you are like me, you are not about to dedicate your time and energy to such an endeavor.

After all, you probably have a full-time job or children to worry about! So what are some simple tips to having clear, lucid dreams? Luckily, there are easy things you and I can do to control our dreams.

a. Keep a dream journal

The first step toward effective lucid dreaming is to log all your dreams on paper. As soon as you wake up from a dream, jot down everything you remember from it.

Do this every morning as well. The better your dream recall, the better your ability to lucid dream will be. One of the goals of maintaining a dream diary is to find out if you are already having lucid dreams as is! You may very well be.

b. Notice trends

Now that you have a log of your dreams, you can begin to take them apart. Are there patterns to your dreams? For example, do certain objects always show up, is there a setting that you commonly dream about, do you feel your dream is first or third person, etc?

Once you notice these regularities, you can then train yourself to respond to them with the question - Am I dreaming or is this real?

If you raise your self-consciousness and doubt, lucid dreaming is all the more possible.

c. Expect to lucid dream

Every night before you go to sleep, write down on paper - I will have a lucid dream.

Studies have shown that when you suggest things to your subconscious, while conscious, your suggestions are often taken to heart!

So if you plan on having a lucid dream, say so.

d. Short is not as sweet

Many people complain that they cannot prolong their lucid dreams. There are three techniques to doing just that. When you realize you are in a dream, spin around, rub your hands together, and focus on an object in it, repeating to yourself - the next scene will be a dream.

After you practice some of these techniques, you may want to invest in lucid dreaming products and courses too.

One of the biggest mysteries about lucid dreaming is whether or not the ancient art serves to increase the frequency of lucid dreams or on the other hand, simply improves lucid dream recall.

Either way, the more aware we are of our dreams, the more aware we will be in our waking life. If we want clarity about real world problems, we can gain it by having clarity in our dreams!

Lucid dreaming is closely related to astral projection! So, I would be sharing some of my lucid dreaming journeys here and I wish you many sweet lucid dreams this evening.

I Was Dreaming That I Met A Girl: What Does It Mean?

Question: I was dreaming that I met a girl I liked at school on the road and we had sex and she was like an animal. Then after I wanted to find her so I could ask her out. I tried looking everywhere for her but I couldn't find her. Is this common and what does it mean?

Well, they don't call them Dream Girls for no reason! Actually, it is hard to say what a dream means to another individual -- that is best left up to the dreamer to decide. However, these kinds of dreams bring out some interesting observations by psychologists. The first is the idea of what is called the autonomous psyche -- that our imagination is much more independent that we know. At one moment it provides us with our hearts desire, and at another it seems to keep what we want most away from us.

Sigmund Freud felt that the dream maker had to strike a balance between the two so we don't wake up all the time. Carl Jung found that by cooperating with this tension we can become more wholesome beings. In this sense, the tension would be between having what we want, and moving towards something better. Jung felt that dream girls (or boys) teased and played with us to draw us into a larger way of being.

If this were my dream, for example, the searching for the girl might be a way to keep me in school. If we could just have each other all the time, I might not return to the school. Another psychologist, Jacques Lacan, sees the continual searching for desire as the way of the world and teaches that instead of trying to always get what we want, we are really better off focusing more on the search itself. In this vain, it becomes my task to clearly express my loss of her, just exactly what it is that is missing and what my desire really is and can be. These are three levels at work in all dreams, there are many more, but it sounds like I better not give the whole story away just yet!