Hi everyone!

Today is the third day of my new weekly series! In this series I feature authors that asked me to be featured or that asked me to read their books.

To see the other authors I featured click here! To be featured contact me here!!

Today I’m going to feature P.H.T. Bennet an author that has written Raising Sleeping Stones (The Orora Crona Chronicles Book 1). In this post there will be a bio about the author and his book, an interview and a giveaway!

About P.H.T. Bennet:
P.H.T. Bennet began exploring his dreams when he was a child and has never bothered to stop. He had the good luck to have two daughters, Juliette and Paola, who not only served as the inspirations for DeeDee and Kiva, the main characters of Raising Sleeping Stones, but also helped him turn their family dreamwork sessions into this book. His lucky streak grew when he married his lovely wife, Mim, who tolerates his turning on a light in the middle of the night to write down ever-crazier dreams and talking about them in the morning as long as he lets her sleep in, first. His favorite dreams involve flying, visiting the dead, and replaying nightmares until they reveal their secrets.
Raising Sleeping Stones – Description:
When sisters Kiva and DeeDee Stone discover a mysterious plot that threatens them and everything they care about, they have to take a crash course in the ancient art of DreamKeeping to survive. As two elder DreamKeepers lead them up the Varruvyen river to the Eyle of Return, they show the girls how to gain dream powers greater than anything they had ever imagined. But can they become strong enough to face the monsters that haunt their dreams at night, strong enough to fight the enemies that draw nearer each day? The answer lies somewhere in the broken history of Orora Crona, the Valley of Dreams lost centuries ago, and whoever can piece it together first will rule for centuries to come.

Arvenig: Tell us a little about yourself and the role that dreams have played in your life.
P.H.T: Bennet: Like most kids, I had a lot of crazy dreams when I was little. What made me different- and made a lot of kids think I was really weird -was that I actually paid attention to them. I wrote them down, I made pictures of what I’d seen there, and I tried to figure out why I’d had them. The first incredible dream I remember was when I was 5-6 years old. I dreamt that I was sleeping in a huge purple bed in a huge room that was suspended from the ceiling on chains. I wanted to fly, and as soon as I had that thought, the skylight opened, the chains released, and the bed flew out the window and into the night sky. I was like Aladdin on his flying carpet- it was so cool. When I later wrote about that dream in school, it somehow got published in a magazine piece in Better Homes and Gardens. That’s when I decided to take my dreams really seriously.
As I grew up, my dreams got better, and richer, and more interesting. It seemed that the more I paid attention to them, the more useful they became. I started to see in my dreams things that were obsessing or bothering me while I was awake. I also got much better at lucid dreaming, flying, and finding solutions to my problems in my dreams. In a typical week, I capture at least 10 dreams, all of which are pretty interesting, but at least 2-3 of them are telling me things I didn’t know I knew.

A: When did you first realize you wanted to write a book about dreams?
P: It was when my daughters were really young, maybe 4 and 6. They were having nightmares that were really freaking them out, and they would come into our room in the middle of the night crying. Now that’s pretty common for kids, especially once they start going to school and having all those social anxieties. What wasn’t usual was what happened next. I taught them how to tame their nightmares, make their monsters less threatening, the settings less spooky. They were amazed that it worked so well and asked me to show them other things they could do in their dreams. Soon, they were flying, breathing underwater, and having lucid dreams.
Then my oldest told me I should write those techniques down so that other kids could do what they were doing. I tried a lot of different approaches, but none worked until I thought about my oldest daughter’s obsession with the Harry Potter books. She would read and reread them until she had a near photographic memory of all the details of each character. But I realized that no matter how many times she read them, she never got any better at magic. And I thought, what if I wrote an adventure series for kids that not only told a great story, but also actually taught them skills that they could try and get better at outside the book? So that’s what I did. I made a book whose two main characters, Kiva and DeeDee Stone, were based on my daughters, and every week, I’d read new chapters to them before they went to sleep. To my amazement, within  week, they’d be doing in their dreams whatever Kiva and DeeDee were doing in the chapters. I kept making their characters do crazier things, and they kept doing them or doing more advanced things, so really, my daughters’ dreams were where we tested out almost all the dream techniques in the books.
Later, when Raising Sleeping Stones  was finished but hadn’t yet been published, I sent chapters out to kids across the country and they sent back fantastic ideas about what they wanted to do in their dreams and learn about their dreams. I’ve tried to put almost all of that into the series..

A: What do you want your readers to grasp about dreaming?
P:Hmm…so many things. First, some really basic things that most people don’t know about dreams, like the fact that we all dream several times every night, whether we remember them or not. Interestingly, and all the research bears this out, the more you want and try to remember, the more you do remember, so just thinking or talking about them in the morning, or writing down notes or making sketches in a dream journal can actually boost your memory.
Then there’s the fact that, for most people, the more you start paying attention to your dreams, the better they get. They’ll get crazier, more interesting, and more useful. Kiva and DeeDee grow up in a town where no one seems to dream at all. They never talk about dreams because the rich dreaming culture they all came from has been forbidden for centuries. But when Kiva starts noticing her dreams, they very quickly reveal creativity, imagination, and emotions she had never realized she was capable of. And that, I think, is the biggest thing that I want my readers to get out of these books: the chance to discover how incredible, unique, and creative their dreams can show them to be.

A: What are you working on at the moment?
P: Two really cool projects. The first is a free summer dreaming program I’m organizing with a great group of dreaming experts and authors of books on dreams.
The second thing, which won’t surprise anyone, is that I’m editing book two of the series, which is when Kiva and DeeDee take their dreams to a level that no readers, I’m pretty sure, have ever done or thought about. And I’ll bet that some of my readers, just as my daughters did with the first book, will end up not only doing some of the things the girls do in their dreams, but may even go beyond. And that’s what I really look forward to, when my readers top what the characters are doing.

You could win an ebook copy of the book Raising Sleeping Stones by P.H.T. Bennet and the AWESOME APP

So what are you waiting for! Enter this giveaway!

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Thank you so much Case Lane for taking part in this post

and thanks for reading,