A Moment of Panic

In the midst of my hour and a half long morning wake up today, I was dozing in and out of sleep waiting for the very last moment to bolt out of bed, shower and make it to work.

As I laid drifting in and out, the journalism gods felt the need to play a dirty, dirty prank.

I slipped off into a dream in a newsroom. I was just handed an assignment to do a feature story on two baseball players – twin guys, if I recall, and they were some of the top players in the state. I made my phone calls, setup my interviews and was prepared to head out and do my story. But on the way out, I went home and took a nap.

Then, suddenly, I woke up in a moment of panic – a freak-out moment if I've ever had one. "OH, SHIT! I have a story to do!" My mind started racing with solutions of how I was going to do my track down the players, the coach and finish my story by 10:30. But it was still 6:30, I had four hours to take care of everything. So I did what any good journalist would do at that time.

I went back for another 30 minutes of sleep.

Somewhere in that time, what I think was me asleep – maybe something more of my subconscious talking to me – I realized I didn't have a story due and it was all a dream.

I woke up a bit confused. As I laid in bed my head swam as I wondered if I had a story due or if it was just all a sick, nasty prank the journalism gods decided to play.

Just an fyi, j gods, April Fools Day was seven days ago. You're a little late.

This isn't the first time, though, that I've woken up in cold sweats freaking out about something journalism related. When I was promoted to editor at my first paper, the News-Register out at North Lake College about three years ago, getting a good night's sleep then was pretty tough. In between my panics of worry that I got a fact or two wrong in a story, I was also designing the paper at the time, and that's where the most trouble came.

Most nights, after sending the paper to press, I'd go home and relax. And once I drifted to a hard sleep came the nightmares: did I change the headline on the front page? Oh, shit, did I change the dummy copy to the real story and is the jump right? You're sure that photo matches the story, right, dumbass? You may laugh, but these were legit concerns. And my panic would not only last through that dream, it carried over for the weekend and didn't ease until I saw the paper on Monday. (At the N-R, we sent the paper to press Friday night and it was delivered on Monday.)

Then, I guess, once I got a few papers under my belt and gained some confidence, the dreams – er, nightmares, I suppose – subsided and all was well once more.

But now they're back. And hopefully it's all just one sick prank. If not, journalism gods, this means war.