Last night I dreamed that I had to present my thesis to my readers orally—all 87 pages of it. Everything was going well until the end of chapter 2, when I came across a bunch of dummy text and references to tables and figures that I had never heard of. I slowly came to the realisation that in my dream I had incorporated the dummy text into the end of chapter 2 to get an idea of how much I would have to write to reach my desired word count, and forgot to replace it with real text before submitting it. All the professors and classmates who came to hear me speak started laughing as I flipped through the next few pages of my thesis, to see how much lorem ipsum I had padded my thesis with.
Two, three, four … eight pages. When the meaningless padding was removed, my thesis was only 79 pages long—one page short of the minimum required length.
I tried to explain to my readers that the next chapter was where it got interesting, and that I needed to finish with my thesis to start my next academic programme, but by that time, they had already begun walking out.
Apparently this is what grad students dream about. Well, this and dinosaurs. I drew a picture of that dream.
