Since much of meditation lingo is somewhere between veiled and grandiose, or rests on technical vernaculars illegible to modern practitioners, it's actually pretty common to get into patterns of grasping, looking, searching for the "real" experiences.
"Is this it, is that it?"
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But, there is no need to grasp. The experiences are perfectly happy to slap you in the face with pure immanence.
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Fireworks can be important. Major transitions do occur around moments that *feel* charged, special.
But it's a lot like the effects of strong painkillers or hallucinogens. There's no need to ask "is this it?" because "it" is as glaring as a ray of sunlight pointed at your eye.
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You tend to notice things like your entire visual field flickering in and out of being. There's really no need to go looking for that.
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Likewise, ignore sad jealous people who go to sanghas or forums to talk about how they've been meditating for 20 years and all it did was make them a little bit calmer.
They're not very accomplished meditators, and they don't want to admit that. Let them have their resentments.
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Once talked to a person who had been prescribed 15 minute mindfulness sessions by a therapist and had launched straight into heavy insight cycles. This shit happens.
It's useful to find people who are willing to explain or even just validate such experiences, but...
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... there are also a lot of self-serving religious institutions that want to tell you the only way to truly practice is to join their cult.
And their cult is full of these second-hand people who have never accomplished anything in their practice and would hate it if you did.
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Sometimes all it takes to integrate an experience is for someone to go "yup, that happens."
Conversely, it can be very damaging when ignorant people insist that you're just tripping/grandiose/whatever. That, ironically or not, can destabilize people and inculcate such patterns.
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Many highly specific meditation outcomes that seem like something out of a movie are actually so common with advanced practitioners that you'll find entire books dedicated to explaining and contextualizing them.
But these works are hard to find if you don't know where to look.
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And, since "where to look" is a moving target, there's no reason to assume you'll get there. Nevertheless, many bizarre outcomes are totally normal.
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