Today, I’m delighted to welcome dream teacher and author Patti Allen MA in the House of Dreams. Patti served on the teaching staff of Seneca College in Toronto in the field of Holistic Health for ten years and currently serves as a mentor for Denise Linn’s online courses for Hay House.
With a specialty in facilitating dream groups, and a frequent guest on radio and TV, she presents lectures and workshops on the topic of dreams and how to work with them. Her dream healing oracle deck, The Abaton Keys® combines creativity, wisdom and dream knowledge to help dreamers access their own wisdom.
Patti, when did you first begin to remember and explore your dreams?
The first dream I interpreted was in 1980 after hearing an interview with Gayle Delaney on the radio. It helped me with a decision that was weighing on me. But I didn’t start exploring my dreams deeply until I didn’t my training in the Rubenfeld Synergy Method® in 1991, a technique for integrating body, mind, emotions and spirit. Part of the requirement was to go through the work myself and my dreams became quite vivid and intense. It began my search for meaning and a life-long love of dream exploration.
How do you use dreams in your own life?
Dreams have advised me on relationships, helped me problem-solve and given me access to Source and creative possibilities. They amuse me, educate me, help me learn about myself and those in my life. Quite simply, I am enlightened by my dreams and I am bereft without them.
What is the relationship between dreams and creativity?
I believe that we are created in the image of the Creator and embedded in that is creativity! Dreams provide inspiration in the emotions they convey, the colours they feature and in the stories they tell and visual images they show us. They are just waiting to be mined and used to create our lives… whether we use them in a “creative” project or not.
I’m particularly drawn to your website page on the Abaton Keys. What was your process in creating them?
Thank you! I did my master’s degree on the role of dreams and healing in ancient Greece and I loved the healing practices associated with dreams and the healing temples of Asklepios. Then, Denise Linn, the founder of the Soul Coaching Institute and my teacher in Soul Coaching®, created a course for Hay House on oracle card readings. I served as a mentor for that group and was inspired by the course material to actually create my own deck. It was a creative birthing that couldn’t have happened without the amazing work of collage artist Julia Still. As much as I organized the project, there was something bigger than myself, organizing me! To this day, when I do a reading for a client, I check the book that explains each card. The work came through me but didn’t necessarily lodge in the part of my brain that I can access. An interesting process to say the least!
Is there anything else you would like to say about dreams?
Yes! Explore your dreams, play with them and use them to grow your soul. There is no right or wrong way to start. We spend a 1/3 of our lives sleeping and through dream work, we can be 100% awake!Patti Allen
To learn more or contact Patti, go to www.pattiallen.com
Jenny Alexander's blog: Writing in the House of Dreams 
I love Patti’s idea that we can become 100% awake by using our dreams and that our sleep can be a source of huge creativity. And I did have to check out the website to find out more about the Abaton Keys – they look fascinating!
Yes – I love that idea too! It’s certainly my experience, and she puts it so succinctly
I don’t just believe dreams can help us in various aspects of our lives. I know they can. I can recall vivid dreams from childhood. One, in particular, as a young adult propelled me into a life of cautious behavior. I had wanted badly to move to California and start an acting career. I saw an ad in some magazine (I can’t remember) that asked aspiring performers to send $500 to a place in the Los Angeles area to secure an audition with a variety of casting directors and talent agents. They’d pay for the trips out there and back. On the night before I planned to go to the bank and get a USD 500 money order, I dreamed that a man who bore a striking resemblance to Jesus warned me not to do it. I awoke and felt strange about taking out that much money from my bank account, when I was a college student. So I decided against it. A short time later I saw a piece on a national entertainment show about that very matter. Not surprisingly, it turned out to be a scam. But thousands of people fell for it and sent this anonymous outfit money from all over the country. I think local law enforcement was looking into it at the time.
A few years ago my father dreamed he was mowing grass in a large field. Then he saw several immediate family members (his parents, a sister who’d passed away recently, etc.) standing by a large tree. They kept asking him if he wanted to join them. He looked at the vast expanse of grass and said no; that he had to finish mowing. He didn’t know what that meant. I told him they were testing him, in a way, to see if he was depressed or sad enough to give up on life. The large field of grass was a metaphor for life itself and all the things he still had and wanted to do.
Many people don’t want to consider the seriousness of their dreams (or nightmares), much less the connection between them and what happens to people during their waking hours. They’re either afraid of that level of consciousness or don’t want to admit everything that happens isn’t so clear and defined.
Thank-you for sharing those dreams – I think even people who don’t often remember or pay attention to dreams can have ‘beacon’ dreams like these, that really guide and direct their life, and are never forgotten.