I like to read language-specific books initially to ramp up quickly. Though, my goal is to get to actually building something as fast as possible. The books just make it easy to quickly grab the basics.
I have plenty of dreams about problems I'm working on. I usually end up dreaming of a way to solve them too.
Though I did have this one dream where I was able to open up a virtual console next to anyone I saw and could program them to do whatever I felt like. I could do this with just random objects too, not just people. That'd be an interesting game idea now that I think about it.
His basisc series is what has essentially been teaching me how to cook, and the binging series is great for getting some inspiration.