For some reason, starting this blog has been bringing up lots of stories and reflections about how editing has evolved since the digital revolution.  Here’s another such ramble.

Sometime before I moved from Dallas to San Francisco, call it 2003-ish, I had a series of vivid dreams.  I had recently bought my first MacBook Pro, and I suppose it affected my subconscious somehow, because I literally dreamt about it.  It was the sole object of my adoration at that time in my life, and I constantly marveled and wondered at such an incredible machine. I took it with me everywhere.

Anyway, in these dreams I was traveling on a plane.  I have no idea from where or to, just traveling.  And I was amazed by the fact that I was editing a video en route, right there kicked back with a double scotch, in my fantasy first-class chair, on a laptop.  It felt like freedom.  And that was all.  Just one small dream scene, more like a feeling than a scene.  Over and over again, almost nightly.

Flash forward to 2008, and I forgot about the dreams.  I was dating a girl in LA at the time, and working for Symantec making Web 2.0 marketing videos.  I had recently shot interviews with Symantec executives in LA and Mountain View for five new thought leadership videos.  The interviews were kinda long, so I had a lot of editing to do, about a week’s worth at least.  There was almost no point in my being in the office in Cupertino, as I would be unavailable for other assignments until all five videos were cut.  Symantec was very cool about telecommuting, so I arranged with my boss to work from LA for about two weeks, and to FTP the finished edits back up to Cupertino.  He was totally cool with it, but mentioned that the first of the five videos was due the day I was to fly to LA.  More than a fair deal!

But, of course, I didn’t finish the video on time—which is incredibly rare, I swear.  I was worked frantically the night before my flight trying to finish that first video, but it was not to be.  I didn’t make it, but I did get very close.  No problem.  I could finish the last of it on the plane the next day and upload from LA.

And that was exactly how it happened.  The memory of the dream crashed back into my mind like a ton of bricks that next day mid-flight, a true “kick in the eye”.  There I was on Virgin America, just like my dream, upgraded to first class for free with a double scotch on my tray, finishing graphics and rendering out a video I was about to upload to Cupertino before end of day.  On a MacBook Pro.  Not déjà vu, as I’d literally dreamt it before!  In fact, I’d even recorded the dream in a journal for future reference.  There was no intuition about it, it was pure memory.  I still have no idea what to make of it.

But I do know that there was a strange feeling of providence.  Some fleeting sense of being in the right place at the right time.  That everything was ok, and things were going exactly according to plan.

For real…