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The other ones for me:

- "go to your happy place", or "imagine you are on an island..."

- counting sheep to fall asleep. I just couldn't visualize them.

I still counted them, it just didn’t make sense. It was more a spreadsheet - spreadsheep? - than visualizing real sheep.

And it didn’t help me fall asleep at all.

I had to laugh so much because of spreadsheep. Thank you.

When I tried counting sheep it was very hard work: like stop motion animation. First picture a sheep, move it one frame, then re-draw everything including the fence that vanished every frame. It could easily take many minutes to move on sheep over a fence and exhaust me.

Same here. The scene where the witness describes the criminal's face in detail while the sketch artist can render a perfect drawing - I assumed that was pure Hollywood fantasy. Then I met people who could effortlessly recall/draw to that level and realized that wow it's real, but not for me.

I thought it was all metaphorical or for dramatic effect.