These kinds of musings you're describing are the very thing that prompted my first novel, A Familiar Rain, which actually took twenty years to write - it was simmering inside me that long - my wife typed the first draft and then it sat in a file cabinet where I taught - I was obsessed with an incident recounted by Wilder Penfield, the famous Canadian brain surgeon who had performed open brain surgery on a woman and his probe accidentally touched a part of her brain that caused her to relive a moment from her past. Meditating on the consequences of that resulted in the book.