How real can we expect God to be? Most Christians will say that God is real to them indirectly, eg. through an answered prayer or unexpected blessing, or through circumstances that seem to be too co-incidental otherwise. That is what conservative Christianity deems as "safe". Then there are other Christians who talk about the more metaphysical aspects of God, eg. God speaking to them. Here we enter the realm of the subjective, we talk of "sensing", "prompting", "intuition", "peace or unease". We talk of "sensing the presence of God", "sensing his love". Some Christians are very weary of this because it seems to border of psychology and unreliable emotions.
But if we were to search scripture, we will find that such interactions between God and man is not uncommon. The bible speaks of the Spirit "testifying" with our spirit, causing the "love of God to be shed abroad in our hearts". The bible also speaks of the "peace of God that surpasses all understanding" guarding our hears and minds. The Old testament speaks of a still small voice, a voice behind our ears etc.
If we cut ourselves off from these subjective interactions with God, we cut ourselves from perhaps the main way in which God speaks to us apart from through Scripture. God is Spirit and any communication must necessarily be a spirit-to-spirit communication. Given the tripartite (ie. body-soul-spirit) nature of man, this will no doubt impact on our psychology, ie. our mind and our emotions. While some of these senses may well be self-generated, ie. purely psychological, we must learn to discern that which stems from ourselves and that which stems from God.
The key to this discernment is honesty and obedience. First we must be completely honest with ourselves and our intentions. Wrong intentions can cause us to think that God is affirming something we ourselves want to do. Honesty will enable us to discern the presence or absence of a deep and abiding sense of peace which will be absent if we are deceiving ourselves. Through constant suppressing of this "voice of conscience" we can grieve the Spirit into silence. But if we can embrace honesty and a willingness to obey, we will find the prompting and the communication becoming stronger and more sure over time.