why do you pray? what do you hope to achieve?

obviously i pray so as to worship Allah and praise Him in the correct way he should be praised and worshipped.

but also as a muslim the method in which we pray also relates as to also why we pray.
EVERYTHING we do is in pursuit of reaching a level of spiritual purity by the pursuit of IHSAN (PERFECTION OF FAITH).

Ihsan definition: “is to worship Allah as you are seeing Him and while you see Him not, yet truly He sees you."

This is the Prophet’s definition of the term “Ihsan�, and it signifies that a person, who is characterized with Ihsan, does everything perfectly as he sees his MASTER watching him.

This is the level of IHSAN that GrandSheikh Nazim has reached whilst praying:

'A vision came to me and I saw myself climbing a ladder from our prayer place to the Bayt al-Ma'mur, the Ka`ba (mosque) of the Heavens. There I saw 124,000 prophets standing in rows for prayers, with Sayyidina Muhammad as Imam. I saw 124,000 Companions of the Prophet Muhammad standing in rows behind them. Then I saw the 7,007 Saints of the Naqshbandi Order standing behind them for prayer. Then I saw 124,000 saints of the other orders, standing in rows for prayers.'

what he described was not a physical experience, but a spiritual one.