Media & speaking
Put a dream on the air and I’ll read it live.
I’m J.M. DeBord — RadOwl to a couple of million people on Reddit — and I’ve spent 25 years studying dreams and better than a decade interpreting them in public, one at a time. Hundreds of interviews later, the segment that always lands is the same one: hand me a real dream, cold, and let your audience watch it come apart.
As seen and heard in
The Guardian · Coast to Coast AM · The Cut · The Higherside Chats · Mind Your Business
Plus several hundred more interviews across radio, podcasts and television.
Featured coverage
The Guardian — “Sweet dreams are made of this: why dream analysis is flourishing”
When the Guardian went looking for someone to anchor a feature on why dream analysis is having a moment, they came to me, and the piece opens on my name and a Victorian parlour game called What Did I Eat Last Night? — players read out last night’s dream while everyone else guessed what they’d eaten for supper. I still think it sounds like a good night.
I’m quoted through the rest of it too, including on the 1970s hypothesis that reduced dreams to the brain’s random electrical noise — the “brain farts” idea that set dream research back a generation. That’s the kind of source I am: I’ll give you the anecdote that opens the segment and the substance that holds it up.
“One heck of a dream interpreter!”
George Noory — host, Coast to Coast AM
Noory has spent two decades interviewing people about the unexplained on overnight radio, which means he has heard every version of this — the guest who hedges, the guest who performs, the guest who reaches for a dream dictionary the moment a caller says “snake.” What he is reacting to is that I don’t do any of those. I ask the caller what the snake was doing and how they felt while it happened, and the meaning comes out of the caller’s own life, on air, in about four minutes.
What I talk about
Any of these works as a full segment or a ten-minute hit. Tell me your audience and I’ll aim it.
Live dream interpretation. Hosts, callers, listeners. Unrehearsed.
Dreams that solve problems. Why your best ideas show up at 3 a.m.
Nightmares and recurring dreams. Why they repeat, and what makes them stop.
Dreams of people who have died. The most emotionally loaded call you’ll take, and how to handle it well.
Dreams that seem to know things. Precognition, treated honestly rather than credulously.
The science of sleep and dreaming. I keep current with the research.
Famous dreams in history. Lincoln dreaming his own death; Sugar Ray Robinson dreaming he killed Jimmy Doyle in the ring — then doing it.
Common symbols. Teeth, falling, being chased, the ex who keeps showing up.
What makes a good segment
Most dream experts explain dreams. That’s a fine three minutes of radio and nobody remembers it. What people remember is watching someone’s own dream get taken apart in front of them, because everybody in the audience is quietly running their own dream alongside it.
So open the phones, or bring me your own dream and don’t warn me first. I’d rather work cold — it proves the method instead of describing it. I’ve never needed prep material, and I’ve never had a dream I couldn’t get somewhere useful with inside a segment.
One thing I won’t do is tell a caller what their dream means. I ask what the imagery brings up for them and where it touches their life right now, and they arrive at it themselves — usually with an audible moment when it lands. That moment is the segment. It also happens to be the honest position: they made the dream, so the meaning was theirs before I got there.
Practical notes: I’m in Tucson, Arizona (Mountain time, no daylight saving). Remote or in studio, video or audio. I have broadcast-quality audio at home and I’ve done enough overnight radio to be genuinely awake at 2 a.m. Eastern.
Press kit
Take what you need. No need to email me first for any of this.
Short bio — 50 words
J.M. DeBord — known online as RadOwl — has published more than 25,000 dream interpretations at r/dreams, Reddit’s largest dreaming community, where he has been a senior moderator since 2014. He is the author of DREAMS 1-2-3 and The Dream Interpretation Dictionary, and a recurring guest on Coast to Coast AM.
Long bio — 150 words
J.M. DeBord, known online as RadOwl, is a trusted name in dream interpretation and the author of four books on dreams and the unexplained, including The Dream Interpretation Dictionary (Visible Ink Press) and DREAMS 1-2-3: Three Steps to Interpret Dreams.
He has published more than 25,000 dream interpretations at r/dreams, Reddit’s largest dreaming community, where he has served as a senior moderator since 2014 — the largest public record of dream interpretation anywhere. He was the dream expert in residence at Canyon Ranch in Tucson, has been quoted as a dream expert in The Guardian and The Cut, and is a recurring guest on Coast to Coast AM.
He co-hosts the Dreams That Shape Us podcast, teaches the DREAMS 1-2-3 method to students in more than 200 countries through Owls School of Dreaming, and draws on 25 years of study and practice. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Headshot
Cleared for editorial use with any interview or appearance. Credit line: J.M. DeBord. 700×887 JPEG.
Let’s book it
Email me directly and tell me the show, the date, and roughly how long you’ve got. If you want a live-interpretation segment, say so — that’s the one I’ll clear the calendar for.
