I tend to do exactly this whenever I am bored, however I often keep coming up with the same combinations of words.

It is fascinating to see how deep you went into explaining the philosophy behind having an 'original thought'.

It would be like asking if a caveman 500,000 years ago would have come up with the solution to how to fix a bug in the code I just wrote.

This line was the perfect analogy to make me realise how I had overlooked this aspect of my question: the limit to what you would consider a unique thought. Its definition is as vague as defining what is right or wrong.

I am genuinely grateful for you having took your time to write such an elaborate response to my post. You answered the question in the exact manner I was looking for and also included some of your personal thoughts that made me perceive my own question at an angle even I could not think of before. I almost feel like this post isn't worthy of such a high quality comment. Hope your day goes great the same way you made mine.

The problem, I think, is that all thoughts seem to be a product of previous thoughts. Totally new thoughts are driven by external stimuli. We can, however, mutate an existing thought into a new one.

This is an amazing interpretation of what I had in mind. Obviously you cannot easily think of something that would not exist in this universe, however you could create combinations or alterations of existing objects to form a particular scenario that you would not get to experience in real life, similar to how much scenarios are created in our dreams.

What I meant was to not rely on objects or scenes near where you are positioned in order to think of something new.

Considering most of our dreams are unique and not really thought of by ourselves at will, I wouldn't count it