Hello Lamppost

This afternoon, I decided to take a well-deserved afternoon nap (somehow an inevitable end to a day of church). This was the first time in a while I have been able to remember my dreams, possibly due to the fact that I've barely been able to sleep these past couple days/weeks. As a result, I had a particularly funny dream:

I was checking my e-mail (epic, huh?)and I got an e-mail from my supervisor. Opening it up, I saw a one-liner IM-esque e-mail stating, "Hmmm....noticed something funny up there. Has it always been there?" Somehow knowing precisely to what he was referring, I looked at the e-mail header and noticed we were accidentally CC-ing some gentleman with the name "Durango G" to all our e-mails in that thread. I am not usually a "reply all" type, but I guess the two of us continued to reply all and this guy was CC-ed to all our unexciting e-mails about research revisions. This got me quite anxious, thinking that maybe this guy was going to steal all of our highly novel ideas, and more so, that it was likely my fault, and I had accidentally wronged my supervisor.

Anyway, in my dream, mirroring reality, I was extremely tired and even this rousing e-mail was unable to keep me from sleep. I went back to sleep and awoke a little while later, to more e-mails from my supervisor. I checked the one "we can kiss this review by-by [sic]" first (my supervisor usually has impeccable grammar/spelling and is able to create concise and relevant subject headings for e-mails, unlike this). It stated basically that our mini review had little chance of getting published now due to our CC-ing blunder; Durango G was the editor in chief for the Journal of Geriatric Medicine (unlikely to be true).

This didn't make sense to me. The project we were working on was only minutely related to geriatrics (i.e. the problem may be more prevalent in the geriatric population, but isn't pretty much everything?). So I opened the previous message, where my supervisor asked me to run a study on how elderly people were "unable to feel a coin when it touched their skin, but were able to sense its presence". He asked me to choose a journal to submit to.

So at about that point, I woke up,and thought about what just happened. The entire thing was pretty preposterous. I mean, who would passively receive a whole gamut e-mails jabbering on about text revisions, and not want out of that mailing list? Secondly, who would EVER do a study like the one suggested? How does that even make sense? Why would it be significant whether or not the geriatric population can feel coins specifically? And what is this "presence"? Are coins sentient beings or something?

So, as dreams mirror reality, so does reality mirror my dreams. I got up and checked my e-mail. Sitting in my inbox, instead of an e-mail from my supervisor, was a letter from the editor in chief of the journal to which I had submitted one of my projects. Unfortunately, we've been having a string of rejections for a kind of quirky paper we had written for another project and I was bracing for the worst. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the words "accepted with minor revisions" : ) Then, scrolling down, I saw that the reviewer just wanted some sentences changed - SCORE!

And now, I'm one step closer to publishing the project that is completely mine: ethics to paper. Also, we've broken this rejection trend - hopefully I'll receive some more good news in the near future (waddaya say, Skull Base?).