Don’t spread it around, but I’m officially off sick today, labouring under a heavy cold that the children brought home from school. One consequence is that, perhaps having been deprived of oxygen during the night, I’ve been having the most vivid nightmares.
Nightmares of the most preternaturally excruciating detail, that leave me, in that vitiated state of drear and monochrome wakefulness, in a kind of chthonic gloom as the ichorous shades of eventide dissipate from my fevered brain like the effluvia of corruption sliding glutinously through namelessly hideous wastes down to a viscid and putrid sea of blasphemously eldritch, or eldritchly blasphemous extent. Or maybe I need new drugs.
Now, dear, I know you’ve been feeling a little horse hoarse
Anyway, I should like to share one with you. In this dream I had with Rohnian abandon given up my secure editorial job at Nature in which I have little to do except lie back and be fed grapes by flying babies
Go on, tell me again the one about the release of calcium from intracellular stores
… and had become a postdoc at a research institute in a foreign country, in which I was supposed to be doing something about neurotransmitters or transcriptomes or signalling [insert scientific-sounding gobbledegook here in mouse brians brains.
The campus was new and gleaming, offering seminars, journal clubs, societies and diversions to cater for every taste, and of a variety calculated to bewilder the green newcomer. My colleagues were very friendly but exuded the confidence of those in the know, and had little time to spare from their own pursuits to guide me. Of the protocols and procedures required to do my job (whatever it was) I knew nothing, and those who with good grace consented to train me were often (and with justification) rather miffed when I spilled things, or, on one occasion, dropped a very expensive, potentially toxic and radioactive vial of something or other so that it slid into a state of inaccessibility beneath some large and complex machinery of unknown function.
The shade of my PI hung over everything like a cloud, but never seemed to be there in person to offer any kind of guidance or solace, and whose messages from some remote location were of the shut-up-and-get-on-with-it variety.
On waking…
_ … and don’t come back!_
You may be appealing, ladies, but which one of you is the corresponding author?
It struck me then, over my breakfast kedgeree
Kedgeree, yesterday
that the life I had so gladly consigned to the looming shades beneath the crepuscular eaves of the forests of morpheus
Look, are you sure this is the tissue-culture suite?
is one faced in the full glare of waking day by postdocs and graduate students. Some of them really have even traded the security of being fed grapes by flying babies for this bizarre, baffling and itinerant existence.
If that describes you, as I suspect it does, you’re completely, barkingly, dribblingly insane. And I love you for it. So, for all those scientists out there — I salute you.
That reminds me what our tissue culture suite needs: a few cypress trees. Thanks for clearing that up.
By the way, Henry, in an interesting circularity, it was actually a nightmare that inspired me to first start thinking seriously about going back to the lab. Maybe it should save that story for a blog.
Henry, I’m touched. No, really.
Stuff your salute – I want a medal! Well… that or a free “Manuscript Accepted” voucher from Nature…
yes
Like a “get out of jail free” card! When do you use it? To publish any old bollocks right before tenure? Just to get that magic Nature paper. Or for something wicked good and awesome that the rest of the scientific community just doesn’t understand!
:D
Anyway, back OT. I often have very
Voivodvivid dreams where I’m back in college or highschool and I’m about to sit my finals in something and realise that I forgot to go to a single lecture and thus have no idea what the exam is about. So, I’ve aced everything else but am about to not get the degree/grad school place I need cos I forgot about Art History, or something. Awful fears of stupid failure I guess.And recently, I guess cos I’m finally moving away from the bench, I have dreams about doing another
stint in living hellpostdoc, but where everything works for a change…@ Jenny – I am agog for that blog.
@ Lee – >>sniff<< (well, I did say I had a cold)
@ Stephen – stuff your submission with used notes non-consecutively numbered, and I’ll see what I can do Thinks – hopr Maxine isn’t reading this]
@ Ian – And recently, I guess cos I’m finally moving away from the bench
Tell all. Touring with Status Quo again?
Henry, I suspect these dreams were not induced by hypoxia, but from elevated nitric oxide levels due to iNOS caused by immune system stimulation by your acute viral infection. More vivid dream states is something that several people have noticed when they increased their basal NO levels by applying the ammonia oxidizing bacteria I am working with topically.
I suspect (though this is somewhat speculative), that the more vivid dreams of high NO would not be accompanied by fear or terror, regardless of how preternatural they were. That is because stress and terror tend to be low NO states.
As it turns out, calcium and NO are linked, with each causing release of the other.
OK, I should fess up. I’ve been on mild antidepressants (citalopram, a serotonin reuptake inhibitor) and had run out for three days when I had my nightmare. I know from experience that coming off antidepressants leads to very vivid dreams. Which rather puts the mockers on those fools who say the drugs don’t work, doesn’t it?
Hang on.. That was The Verve wasn’t it? I think they found the drugs did work…
And Henry, we prefer to say “The” Quo…
@ Henry, here’s another wee Rush nugget for your entertainment at an appropriate time.
I consider myself entertained. (Ian, you might like that clip, too…)
Also agog for Jenny’s blog.
Glad to see my day job described as a waking nightmare, by none other than a senior editor at Nature. I shall recall this when I have my annual review tomorrow.
HG
SSRIs often have Rapid Eye Movement stage (REM) suppressing effects. Coming off an SSRI should cause a REM rebound effect.
… but does that explain Michael Stipes?
does anything?
Haha! What a horrible dream… I hope my blog post about the system (and people getting stuck in postdocs) didn’t have anything to do with it. Sometimes my blog should not be read before bed time. (Other times it’s exactly what one needs to sleep well.)
I didn’t mean this blog to soliit diagnoses of the Inner Workinsg of Gee, but it is interesting.
@ Eva: posibly …
@ David: I suspect (though this is somewhat speculative), that the more vivid dreams of high NO would not be accompanied by fear or terror, regardless of how preternatural they were. That is because stress and terror tend to be low NO states.
The dream had neither fear nor terror – just a mild anxiety. But what struck m was the richness of detail such that I can remember it quite clearly even several days later.
@ Nathaniel: SSRIs often have Rapid Eye Movement stage (REM) suppressing effects. Coming off an SSRI should cause a REM rebound effect.
Yup. That makes sense. I’ve now renewed my prescription: the first night I had a rather vivid dream that I can’t recall clearly, unlike the one of being a scientist all at sea. Since then I have reverted to my normal state of senile and inept repose.