Sudoku at Midnight

During periods when I'm having particular trouble with pain, I tend to wander around the house in the middle of the night.  The boys have long since gotten used to coming home in the wee hours of the morning to find me sitting at the table reading a magazine or wandering kind of aimlessly or working a crossword puzzle.

One thing that has always escaped me is how to do a Sudoku.  I have always understood the theory of it, and I could usually figure out the first couple of moves on an easy one.  What really puzzled me, was that anyone could do them at all.  Even my ancient father is able to work them, although he stays away from the diabolical ones.

Recently I have discovered that I can complete the easy ones and even the medium ones in the middle of the night.  For some reason I can see the larger patterns that escape me during the day.  In the daytime I try to think them out verbally... okay there is a six in this row and a six in this other column etc.  At night I am more apt to see things out of the corner of my eye as it were.  I see columns and rows and blocks as more of a whole.  Why does this kind of enlarged capacity to take things in evade me in the day?

It's almost Shavot, the Jewish holiday commemorating the giving of the Torah.  One of the traditions is to study all night.  It's a very fun time to study.  People get a little punchy and they say things that normally they wouldn't say.  I think it's fair to say that they may make connections that they wouldn't otherwise.

So the Kabbalists, who thought that G-d was closest to earth in the middle of the night, and therefore thought it the best time to study may have been on to something.  To be able to connect somehow to the universe may happen when our minds are less bound by the rules of thought that we impose on ourselves in the daytime.