Hey, everybody, it's Aaron. This week, we're going to be relieving Pete Whitehead—temporarily—of his illustration duties. We're actually going to be employing a student in one of his classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art. I mentioned last week that dozens of students from this class submitted illustrations for this story you're about to listen to today, and they were all fantastic.
But the one we picked was from an artist named Sarah Drago. Congratulations, Sarah. We're featuring your illustration. We're also going to contract with Sarah and pay her for this piece of art, which I think is really important.
A couple of things. Sarah's work and interpretation visually of this story, I think it really did it justice. You can see her illustration wherever you're listening to this podcast right now, whatever the podcast player is, or you can take a deeper dive and go to 7minutestories.com, check out more about Sarah and her other work.
We're also going to be creating a page for the majority of the other submissions that came in, because, like I said, this was a tough choice. You can see some of the other artists' interpretation of this story, learn more a little bit about them. And listen, after looking at all these illustrations, if you need some art, and you want to employ an artist, consider reaching out to them. They won't let you down. They're fantastic.
Okay, that's it for now. Let's get to the introduction music.
You're listening to 7 Minute Stories with Aaron Calafato. This is season three. If you want to connect with us or grab some merch, visit us at 7minutestories.com. That's the number seven, minutestories.com. This episode, Living the Dream.
I can hear the wind chimes outside my recording studio. You may not be able to hear them, but I hear them. It's so interesting because I just realized at this moment, the sound of these wind chimes were a part of an experience, a dream that I had when I was a kid, that I've been telling people about, and no one has been really able to get what I was saying. But maybe over the course of this short story, you may at least relate to it. So hang with me here, because this is a bit of a trip.
I'm like six years old, and I have this dream in which… The only way I can describe it is that I experienced an emotion within the dream that I've never experienced while being awake, then or since. We have these spectrum of emotions we're familiar with as human beings—happiness, sadness, wonder, curiosity, a hybrid of those. We know what those are, and new ones are added as we get older, but we know what we got on the menu. That's what it is to be a human being. Not this dream. This dream, the emotion I had was something totally different.
I walk out on my back porch. This is the dream. I walk out, and I'm looking back at the woods. Behind the shadows of the trees, there are fireworks going off, but they're not normal fireworks. In fact, what it looked like was it was watercolors being splashed against the sky. In the dream, I'm just standing on the back porch watching these watercolor fireworks and am able to feel something that I can only describe as like excitement, wonder, being at peace, also a surrealistic experience, a gratitude.
I don't know. It's like all of those feelings, if you mixed them all up into one, created a new feeling that I can't put a label to. It's just like a new emotion. It was absolutely nuts. And maybe the dream lasted for a second, but when I woke up, I knew it was something special. You can imagine, I'm trying to tell my mom about this, and other people, and no one really got it. For years, I've told people about this dream that I've had, and everyone's like, "That's kind of weird. All right, I don't really get it."
Now, listen, I was six, okay? We're not talking about an intentional trip, if you know what I'm saying, for you adults out there. I'm a kid, and I've heard people have these type of experiences when they've expanded their mind—LSD, acid, these type of things. This is not that. This isn't something that's chemically induced. This was an organic experience as a kid that I had. It was crazy.
The only parallel that I have to this dream happened about a year later, but this time I was awake. I was hoping that I could go on this little bike adventure with my neighbors. We were going to take our bikes out and really go as far out as we could from the neighborhood. My mom, I begged her and begged her and begged her. I said, "Please, let me go on this bike ride with my friends."
She finally was like, "Okay, I'll let you do it, but you got to be home by sunset." And, man, I felt like I was in charge of the world because I knew sunset was the curfew, but I could go as far out as I could go, and I would go out into places I had never gone before.
I'm pedaling my bike on this summer night. I'm breathing the air. It's dusk. The sunset is absolutely beautiful, and it's changing every single minute, it feels like. We're just riding our bikes out into the unknown, wind going through my hair, felt so alive. I've never felt so alive in my life on this bike ride, gripping the handles of the bike. The sound of all the birds and crickets and the fireflies are out.
We end up several blocks from my house out in this open field. It's like a painting. These suburban kids are just standing next to their bikes in this open field, and there's fireflies everywhere. We're all just enamored with the sunset, and we're just staring at it. As I'm staring at it, I started getting this feeling again. It was like I could feel things outside of the spectrum of what I'm used to feeling. It was like my awareness grew in this moment for just a second.
Now, decades later, over the summer, in my 20s, I read a book by the philosopher Immanuel Kant called The Critique of Pure Reason. I'm not going to go into a dissertation about this, but in this book, it talks about our limitation of experience. As human beings, we have what we have to measure the world around us. It's not that that's not real, but what if it's just a piece of the puzzle? What if we can only see and measure and experience and feel what we can feel because of how we're designed?
That leads me to think, well, then what else is out there to experience and feel? What else exists beyond our scope of perception and measurement? I'm thinking maybe that bike ride, standing out in that field and having that awareness, and maybe that dream that I had a year earlier where I felt a new emotion, maybe they were interconnected. Maybe that was my glimpse into something beyond myself. Maybe that's a taste of awareness outside of my own limited perception. Maybe I pushed the boundaries of that for whatever reason, but it was a glimpse into something out there.
I can tell you that feeling that I had looking outside of what I know to be true, it didn't scare me. I just felt a sense of absolute humility and wonder. "Man," I thought, "what an adventure exists out there. What an adventure!"
But more importantly, as I think about it now, I think, "What a gift." One in a million, one in a trillion, one in infinity, and I get to experience that. Not just being alive, but looking beyond myself and what's possible. We all have that, I think. A great adventure in front of us, in life, and looking out into the unknown. I'll talk to you next week.
7 Minute Stories is created and performed by Aaron Calafato. Our senior audio engineer is Ken Wendt. Our resident artist is Pete Whitehead. Original music by TJ Duke.
If you or your company needs help starting a podcast, Aaron and Ken's company Valley View does just that. Reach out to them at valleyview.fm. Special thanks to our partners at Evergreen Podcasts. I'm Cori Birce. Make sure to tune in next week for another story.
