Awaking from the nightmare

Your pulse quickens, beads of ice cold sweat form on your forehead. Images appear before you that make no sense as you move from your living room through the hallway of a house from your childhood and into your 1st grade classroom, looking out the windows and seeing scenes from old movies, almost recognizable. Screams and sounds of moaning and breaking glass can be heard in the distance. Or were they in the next room? The awful feeling of dread consumes you. You don’t know why. Something is missing. Something is wrong. The hair stands up on the back of your neck. Are you alone, or in a crowded room? You try to flee, with thousand pound weights around your ankles. Each step pushes your feet further and further into the sandy floor. You grab at things to try to pull you forward away from...what? In a final burst of complete horror, you find your self sitting straight up in your bed, drenched in sweat, heart pounding in your ears with eyes squinting, straining for elements of reality. Straining to visualize any recognizable images to put as much distance between the nightmare and real life. The clock radio, the street light coming through the window, the comforting silhouettes of. personal items. It was only a dream. As your heart beat slows and your eyes adjust to the light, you realize it wasn’t real and that you’re in the safety of your own home.

Such has been the last seven days, I awoke this morning. Last Sunday after principal photography was wrapped for “Wisdom”, I ran some filmmaking errands then went off to a nice mother’s day dinner. I arrived at home to a black computer screen with four lines of text. Fearing the worst, I called my computer wiz friend Jeff and read to him those four lines. After each line, he responded with a rather frank “mmm hmm”, “mmm hmm”. Until the forth line, to which he responded “Oooohh.” Umm, I don’t want to hear “oooohh” when it comes to my PC. My life is in my PC. After about three hours of messing, I was finally able to get booted and get on to write a few things in the blog. The next attempt was Tuesday night, and it took several boots to get in and write the e-mails and blogs that I was able to complete, and after about two hours, I heard a couple of loud knocks and my screen went blue. Oooohh. I’ve been without a computer ever since, until 6:00am this morning. Mad props to Steve for bailing me out of this nightmare and for helping me rebuild my system (with new hard drive installed) and putting me back to where I was last Sunday. With no data lost. I can breath again, and the heart rate is slowing. As with all nightmares, you wait for the other shoe to drop. For Mike Meyers’ hand to spring out of the lake or for Freddie Kruger’s face to appear where you least expect it. But for now, all is well with the computer. All of my programs and data files are in tact. I will take the next few days and develop and employ a backup strategy for my data. Then I will start downloading footage for “Wisdom” and “Hero Alley” so that they can be edited. Awaking from the nightmare.