In the middle of his dream, an artist awoke. He reached for his
pencil and started to draw. He started with a single dot. It took
the artist hours to finish his picture, and afterwards he collapsed
back into bed. Soon he was asleep again, still smiling from thoughts
of what he had drawn.
The dot, on the other hand, was not as happy. It looked around the
page and saw lines all around. They were long and colorful, and the
dot was neither. "I don't belong here," it thought, "I am just a
small, meaningless dot and this picture does not need me." So the
dot jumped off of the page.
It approached a newspaper that was lying nearby. There were dots all
over the newspaper. "Surely this is where I am meant to be," it said
aloud. As soon as the dot hopped onto the front page of the
newspaper, all the other dots started to yell. "You cannot stay
here!" they said. "Why not?" asked the dot. "You are dots, and you
are here."
"We are not dots," they said, "we are periods, and we belong in
books, and stories, and newspapers. You are just a dot." The dot
felt silly, so it left the newspaper.
Then the dot saw a white cube with dots on every side. "This is
where I belong," it thought to itself. "Excuse me," it said politely
to four dots sitting on a side of the cube, "I am a dot and you are
dots, so may I join you?"
"No, you may not," said the four dots. "We are dots on a pair of
dice. An extra dot would ruin a pair of dice." The dot felt silly
again and hopped over to the artist who was sound asleep.
"I wonder why he drew me..." thought the dot. And that's when it saw
dots on the artist's hand and arm. "Perhaps this is where I was
meant to be," said the dot as it crawled onto the artist's hand and
rested.
"Ahem," said one of the dots on his arm. "AHEM!" said the arm dot
even louder. "You are not a freckle. You are a dot, and only
freckles belong here." "Aren't freckles a type of dot?" asked the
dot, who was not feeling welcome anymore.
"Yes, we are," said the freckle, "We are a special kind of dot, and
you are definitely not one of us." (Of all the dots it had met, the
rejected dot felt that freckles were clearly the rudest.) The dot
did not know what to do. It didn't belong with lines, or periods, or
dice, or rude freckles.
The artist woke up at that very moment and went to look at his
picture, but he was heartbroken by what he saw. He held up the
drawing and sighed. "Where has my seed gone?" he cried.
"This is supposed to be a picture of a seed in the soil before it
grows into a mighty tree, but without the seed, it is useless, and I
cannot draw another so perfect as I did the first time," said the
artist sadly.
The dot began to feel silly one last time. It had not realized that
all along it was not just a dot, but also a seed. A seed may start
off small, but there's no telling how large it will become, how many
beautiful leaves it will grow, and how many people will find shelter
under it.
The dot jumped back onto the page. It jumped onto the exact spot it
had left because it knew that, although it was just a small dot, it
meant much more in the big picture.