All Assets Gone from Scene When Re-Opening

I have been working on a scene today for the last 5 hours or so. Basically just a scene to practice all the various things I am learning as I learn them. I saved the project and the scene and can go into the appropriate folder and even see everything there. I went and rebooted my system and came back. I went into the folder for my project and found all my assets there, all my prefabs and everything else … sounds … etc.

But when I go to open my scene, it loads nothing. All my objects are still where they were in the scene, but none of the materials, textures, prefabs, scripts, sounds, etc. are loaded in. Am I doing something wrong?

It is basically acting like I am opening up a brand new project. I can’t seem to find a " project " file to open, just the scene that I had been working on within the project.

Can anyone help me here? How can I open this scene with all my assets and everything loaded up how it was before?

I had been saving the scene and project and everything quite regularly while working on it all today.

There is not “Project file” , the project folder is the "Thing " you open / point unity at.
Of you have your project opened form inside of unity you can find your scene file and open it.