Four times a year, every Federal Reserve policymaker who participates anonymously marks a dot on a chart showing where they personally think the policy rate should be at the end of each of the next few years. Plotted together, this becomes the Summary of Economic Projections — universally shortened to "the dot plot."
Each dot reflects one official's personal view at that moment, not a commitment, and not necessarily even their actual vote on the day. The dots and the vote are formally separate things, which is exactly why a meeting can produce a unanimous decision while the dot plot underneath it shows real, sometimes wide, disagreement about what comes next.
The actual rate decision tells you where policy sits today. The dot plot tells you where roughly 18 separate people expect policy to drift over the next year or two. Currency and bond markets are forward-looking by nature — they price in expected future cash flows, not just current ones — so a shift in the median dot changes the math on every dollar-denominated asset immediately, even when nothing about today's actual rate has changed.