Playwriting - Surgery while awake?

From a close playwright friend.

"When I'm writing a play and it's going well, I start to feel like I'm on an operating table - awake while someone is cutting me open, looking for something. It gets weirder because, always, when I look up, I don't see a doctor. Instead I see all these strangers looking down at me from the operating theatre's bleachers. And then I lift my head to find out who is operating on me and I see that the hands that are cutting me open, using stainless steel instruments to explore my insides, don't belong to a doctor at all. The hands are my own hands."

Yep. Pretty much.