[gfwilliams]

I get this too - thought it was just me/my family.

I never seem to actually 'dream' the answer, or know what it is ahead of time. It just seems obvious when I look at the code again later, and I totally rely on it now.

As others have said, actively thinking about the problem makes it less likely I'll solve it. Usually I just keep looking through my open issues, maybe writing a few lines, until I get that feeling I know how to do it.

Any other disciplines where this is 'a thing' - or is it just programming? I heard someone mention maths...

[phee]

I definitely experience it a lot with math. I think the way we learn and "write" math is somewhat different from how our brain does it. So you need to give it a bit of time to translate everything to its language and back to the formalism we use.

Sometimes I feel like a problem is way easier in unconscious space, like I'm sure solution is there, I can almost see it but it needs time to encode it in the much slower conscious form.

[ythn]

Patrick Rothfuss (Kingkiller Chronicle) mentioned a similar thing in writing, I think. He'll be stuck trying to describe something and he just can't get it "right", so he'll go for a walk or something and later his mind will come up with the perfect prose to insert at the part he was stuck on.