If you're happening to read this, and you happen to be familiar with the work of both Mike Oldfield and me, you may be surprised to know that I wasn't at all familiar with his work until the last year or two, so while I now consider him an influence, this is only recent, and necessarily limited – I'm still coming to grips with his discography, and large swathes of it are terra incognita.
Given that, it's surprising how often I do something very specific that he did already. The latest such case: I was planning to do one or even two ABBA covers for Derivatives v3, only to learn that Mike covered ABBA's “Arrival” on QE2--which I have yet to even listen to. I'd like to think that I'm tapped into the Source (as Rick Rubin terms it) in a similar way to Mike, but likely it's just that Mike did so many things first that anyone is likely to later repeat something he did, even unknowingly.