I seriously went around for a while with the weight of having killed someone - without a distinct dream of it happening, just the MEMORY of "remembering" it in a dream. My heuristic? Interrogate that "memory" until I can definitively say "It didn't happen!" B-) I wrote a story based on my imaginary love affair, BTW: here.  https://www.nature.com/articles/4541028a.pdf?origin=ppub I routinely picture the way things work in diagrammatic form in my mind (I'm just not good at transferring them onto computer) - and it profoundly changed the interpretation of one of my PhD student's work, because she had it pictured backwards. Until I sat with her staring into the middle distance and rotated the whole thing mentally...and said "That's wrong, it works like this!". So yes, it basically informs the way I work to a large extent.

I seriously went around for a while with the weight of having killed someone - without a distinct dream of it happening, just the MEMORY of "remembering" it in a dream. My heuristic? Interrogate that "memory" until I can definitively say "It didn't happen!" B-) I wrote a story based on my imaginary love affair, BTW: here.  https://www.nature.com/articles/4541028a.pdf?origin=ppub I routinely picture the way things work in diagrammatic form in my mind (I'm just not good at transferring them onto computer) - and it profoundly changed the interpretation of one of my PhD student's work, because she had it pictured backwards. Until I sat with her staring into the middle distance and rotated the whole thing mentally...and said "That's wrong, it works like this!". So yes, it basically informs the way I work to a large extent.