Yeah. It was a life-changing experience.
1996: I'd played for 20 years, but was only doing church music for a little while. I'd been bumming about not being able to find a good gospel-style setting of the Gloria (a standard part of the Catholic Mass) for a few weeks.
This particular night, I did a concert backing up David Haas (he's big in some Catholic circles), drank too much iced tea (i. e., caffeine) at dinner after, and woke up in the middle of the night, with a fully-formed, six-part gospel-style Gloria running through my head. All the vocal parts, turnarounds, everything.
Not only was it all there, it would NOT go away - just ran in my head all day for three days. Finally, the third day, I took the day off work, went to my church, talked to the music director. He handed me a pad of manuscript paper, said "start writing".
The strangest thing about all this is that I NEVER wrote before - 20 years of playing, the only thing I'd come up with was a novelty Christmas Blues song. But this just FELL together. It also opened the floodgates - I've written a bunch or Christian music since. I try my hand at secular stuff sometimes, too - an occasional gem, but the Christian stuff just keeps coming.
That Gloria got performed at that year's midnight mass - 20+ voice choir and piano (that was a major coup in itself - getting the guitarists to put their axes down), plus tambo. It was a glorious moment. Never recorded it, but still one of the best things I've ever written (or, more accurately, held the pencil for). As far as I know, the sequence is still sitting on
the KT-88 I left behind...