Early one morning last week, Stephan Cesarini was parked on Sag Harbor Main Street in a 34.5-foot 1988 Airstream. The side door of the bus was open and as people passed, they’d peer inside, wonder to their friends, and point. It didn’t take long before a middle-aged woman poked her head through the open door. “What is this bus?”
“This is the Gratitude Bus,” said Mr. Cesarini. “We have probably the largest living archive of people’s life dreams around the country embodied in this vessel and handwritten on these cards. What’s your dream?” he asked her.
“My daughter. I want her to be happy,” she said. He handed her a 3-by-5 index card. “Declare it,” he said. On one side, the card read “8 billion dreams is on a mission to inspire every human on Earth to declare their dream by 2024,” with space for the dreamer to add a name, email, and phone number. On the other side, it was blank, with room for a dream.
The woman told Mr. Cesarini about her daughter, a social worker up in Boston. “We need to have a lot more gratitude for every little thing that we have, because it can be taken away very easily,” she said, as Mr. Cesarini, a self-described “human dream catcher” nodded.
Earlier, a man shed tears as he told Mr. Cesarini his dream: “To continue my healing and grief for the loss of Gayle. To travel our bucket list of places and adventures and to honor our love.” Mr. Cesarini was both thoughtful and excited.
“The dream question is just a prompt to create human connection. That’s what this bus represents. That’s the love that this bus embodies. That’s what it’s all about,” he said. “There’s love to be shared in real life, but most people aren’t experiencing that. People are just in their phones.”
“I store this out of my mom’s, in Jersey,” Mr. Cesarini said from what could be described as the living room the Gratitude Bus. He’s been parking around the East End recently and was in Sag Harbor on July 24, taking up three spots next to Grindstone Coffee and Donuts. Perhaps because it was early, the police hadn’t bothered him yet. “I’m not fully versed in the regulations,” he admitted, but added that he had never been ticketed. “This bus has a veil of protection around it. Maybe the cops think, ‘How can I ticket the Gratitude Bus?’ ”
The inside has the sort of ramshackle patina once identified with hippies: iconography from Eastern religions, Nepalese hemp slipcovers, that sort of thing.
It wasn’t always this way for Mr. Cesarini, a 40-something who co-created ReachLocal, an internet advertising company. In 2011, when the company went public, he rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq exchange, only to be fired six months later by his board. In the aftermath, he was angry, embarrassed, and searching for direction. He described the shift as “traumatic.” A friend suggested he travel, and shortly after, he had bought the Airstream and started the work of becoming a human dream catcher.
Thirteen years later, he says he’s gone through a fair amount of the money he once had (he said was making north of $1 million a year in his internet days) and is searching for funding for his 501(c)(3) officially named “8 Billion Dreams.” “I self-funded this thing for so long, but now we’re actually taking donations. Now my investors are like, ‘You need to make this a sustainable thing.’ We need a few million dollars that I’m hopefully going to manifest in the next month. I’ve got so much work to do, brother, but nothing matters until I get the funding.”
What will his nonprofit do with the money? It’s developing a digital app (“Dream matching” is something he’s looking to explore). The nonprofit is planning a get-out-the-vote tour (“You’d be amazed at how the dream question unites Republicans and Democrats”). It’s making merch (he flashed a white hat with the word “Gratitude” written across it in white), and 8 Billion Dreams has another bus that’s being finished; it’s going to say “Dream” on the outside. He needs to hire dream catchers. By 2028, he hopes to bring people together in Kansas, in the center of the country, an idea that came to him, fittingly, in a dream. “I met with 100 farmers in Kansas. I have the land and a partner,” he said.
“You can be skeptical about my visions for what all happens in terms of the digital — I’ve got a lot of work to do to manifest that — but I believe they’re going to happen in big ways. But there’s nothing to be skeptical about what this bus has been doing for 10 years, which is, through human connections, spreading love. Most people don’t have a dream, which is why I do it. This is an invitation, or permission, to dream. If somebody is seen, and they feel that hope in their heart for even a moment, it will carry,” he said.
Dreams (he’s caught about 60 percent of the total in the United States) fall into different categories (“I’ve spreadsheeted and analyzed them”), but importantly, economic prosperity, or lack thereof, is a big factor in how and if people dream.
He learned this after a dream workshop in Palestine, long before the recent war. “The first 10 kids got up and said, ‘My dream is of a free Palestine.’ I said to the translator, ‘Tell them we all want a free Palestine. I want to know what their second dream is,’ and I watched them not be able to come up with a dream. That’s when I realized it’s a privilege to dream. People who are in financial struggle don’t have the capacity to dream, and they stop. They give up on dreaming. The opposite also exists. When somebody has too much, they may only dream of material things. You have two ends of the spectrum. How we get to the middle is by not becoming more socially isolated. Becoming more socially connected with real human connections, where people feel love and they’re not feeling fear, that’s the answer.”
“This is the biggest idea ever maybe, and I say this with humility. Like, eight billion people, eight billion dreams, maybe it’s a 100-year vision, maybe it’s a 500-year vision. The point is, eight billion dreams represents every human on earth living their dream. How can you have a bigger vision? It’s the impossible, it’s what everybody will say is impossible.”
Some of the dreams people have shared with him can be read at his website, 8billiondreams.com.
