This is a really nice conceit. I'd go further and say there are other types of pursuit that are dreamlike. Translation (my own work) can be like that, and to different extents for different languages. Hungarian to English is every bit as complex as difficult code because the structure of every sentence is so vastly different between the two languages that you have to hold the whole thing in your head to get the job done (in contrast to German or French, which I can do in my sleep). Math, especially analytical math, is the same way; you need to comprehend the whole model at once to make any progress.