This improbable book, Appointment with the Wise Old Dog: A Bridge to the Transformative Power of Dreams, elicits intriguing paradoxes. Its subject is the psyche, although the author, an internationally recognized musician and writer, possessed no psychological credentials. Its content is the distillation of thirty-five years of intensely private, inner work that generated nineteen diaries, six volumes of dream journals, a collection of forty-three dream paintings, and a grassroots movement that resulted in the distribution of more than twenty thousand DVDs. Its artwork emerged without the benefit of a single drawing lesson. Its origin arose from a personal life-changing conversion in which a self-confessed agnostic, without either psychological or spiritual moorings, was struck dumb by a dream, at the age of seventeen, and found himself on a lifelong pilgrimage towards an experience of the sacred.

What motivated David to take on the task of realizing this improbable book? David hoped his book would provide the necessary, comprehensive complement to his well known 1998 DVD, Appointment with the Wise Old Dog: Dream Images in a Time of Crisis. Profoundly expanding on the DVD, this book contains the foundational work–his forty-three dream paintings and commentaries derived from a lifetime of numinous archetypal dreams—so that David’s cancer experience becomes only a part of his whole life’s story, a coda to his thirty-five year inner journey.

From his seventeenth year onward, he allowed himself to be guided by those archetypal images, moving inexorably towards their inherent goal of wholeness. In the end, I trust David kept his “Appointment with the Wise Old Dog.”