OP here: that is an excellent point! Of the eight read-throughs, four were on Friday night, then I had dreams involving some kind of TRON-like vector spaces, and at brunch on Saturday things seemed to start gelling. The four extra read-throughs were to crystallise that intuition to a level that I felt I could start writing it up. I'm 100% sure the sleep was what built some kind of intuition at a pre-linguistic stage that I could build on.