Fear receding faster than George Costanza's hairline...

To describe the experience of going from watching one movie 3+ times a day for an entire month to not watching it is difficult, as the body tends to "blur" memories of a traumatic event.  The first stage of T8S challenge was very much that, a breakup and a near-death experience mixed into one.  While I'd become increasingly jittery and paranoid as I watched T7S over and over again, once I stopped those feelings actually increased as my body missed what it had grown to expect.  The first day "off" was reletively normal; I saw Death walking down side streets out of the corner of my eye, I heard Nils Poppe speaking in Swedish behind me only to disappear when I turned around, and every time I heard a woman's voice it was Bibi Andersson saying "I love you."  If that experience could be characterized as a waking dream then days 2 and 3 were living nightmares.  Instead of catching glimpses of a black cloak I felt icy fingers on my wrist, or heard breathing inches behind me.  I woke up in a sweat several times a night, almost always within a few minutes of 5AM the first time, and then almost on the hour after that until I got up for good at 8 for work.  At work I would have to translate people's words, or try and read lips as if they were speaking in a foreign language.

All the while I have to be honest in that I was completely consumed with horror.  You know the feeling of when you wake up after a night out and you have no idea where you are, but you know that it's not where you're supposed to be?  It was that, multiplied by the fact that I wasn't just waking up but was in fact feeling that way 24/7, and I'm sure that's why I was unable to sleep more than a few hours at a time as well.  I'd trained my body to watch T7S, and when I stopped it was telling me that I'd broken a bond of trust and would pay the penalty.  My shoulders hunch at my desk as I remember back to that first week "off" and now I'm rubbing my arms like a junkie remembering his first week off of smack...

more to come