I refer to the infamous story of the hippopotamus in the swamp: in the middle of a game, finding himself bewildered by t...

I refer to the infamous story of the hippopotamus in the swamp: in the middle of a game, finding himself bewildered by the complications that would result from a piece sacrifice that he said was his first instinctive choice for a next move, drifted off into a fantasy at the board about trying to drag a hippopotamus out of a swamp, until—failing apparently to imagine any way of accomplishing this—he got exasperated, thought to himself "let the hippo drown!", and came back to himself with the realization that he should trust his instinctive choice. He made his move, won the game, and then was amused to see how this episode was written up in the press: "After forty minutes, Mikhail Tal made a well-considered piece sacrifice."Tal had drifted off into a fugue state at the chess board for forty minutes! Was he really not thinking about the game at all, or was his bewildering hippopotamus fantasy somehow equivalent to thinking about the game, not rationally but symbolically and intuitively? W...