Neil Gaiman has reposted a terrific article called "The Nature of the Infection" on his blog. It’s about how ideas influence us in a viral fashion. For him, Dr Who has been a huge influence on how he perceives the world. He mentions a particular story – The War Games – as being instrumental in shaping his reality. I remember that story too, and can appreciate what it has done to Gaiman:
These days, as a middle-aged and respectable author, I still feel a sense of indeterminate but infinite possibility on entering a lift, particularly a small one with white walls. That to date the doors that have opened have always done so in the same time, and world, and even the same building in which I started out seems merely fortuitous – evidence only of a lack of imagination on the part of the rest of the universe.
I know exactly what he means – I have caught the same virus – but I can date the point of infection to long before Dr Who.
It dates from growing up in my parent’s hotel. In the off-season, I had the run of the place. When I was six or seven, I used to shut myself in some of the large assortment of cupboards and wardrobes that were scattered through the bedrooms. I was quite convinced that when I came out of a cupboard I would be in a room that looked the same as the one which I had just left but that it was, in some mysterious fashion, totally different. And that beyond the room lay a hotel that was not the one I was in just a few moments ago…
Geoff Coupe's Blog 
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