Now this was a stray thought that came out of nowhere - the tale of the Elves and the Shoemaker. Which is a bit of a "WTF", but it must have come out of my disjointed half-remembered dreams. Anyways, if you're not familiar with it you can read it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elves_and_the_Shoemaker
Anyways, completely out of the blue, and so I googled it this morning, wondering "WTF", and it's pretty much the tale I remembered, and the "epiphany" - if you can call it that - is that the shoemaker simply slept on his problems and his dreaming (unconscious) mind solved them for him.
Bizarre.