The one thing that that picture of HPPD does not adequately explain is time. In my opinion you should think of the (distorted) square as a superposition of the

The one thing that that picture of HPPD does not adequately explain is time. In my opinion you should think of the (distorted) square as a superposition of the total time spent, not a snapshot. Another thing to mention for (some?) people with some sort of psychoactive or hallucinatory experience is that "real" things can complicate matters. An example: If you wear glasses with coloured reflections and are not used to it, then it can compound your paranoia about the other things that are "not real" that you are seeing. A similar thing about streetlights: Foggy or misty nights already do funny things to the lights and you can overexaggerate this effect by confusing real and not real things. One should be careful about these things. In my case I had these kind of experiences at university and without psychoactive substances. Doing abstract mathematics certainly can complicate matters, but it is not a prerequisite. Also, crazy people may be crazy, but often their fears are logical in the sense that you can't really disprove them. I mean, how do you really prove to someone that they were not kidnapped by aliens? In the end you just need to show the value of Occam's Razor in your own life. I think the best case scenario is maybe analogous to eventually writing an interesting movie (I think the Twilight Zone was inspired by such experiences) and NOT getting to some super hyper special plane of existence. I do also think that the creative cycle has both a logical and an illogical component. The latter is like training the model, where you cycle through senseless things with funny connections until the logical part takes over and makes it concrete. It's like the difference between "OMG what is this weird static electricity thing OMG it's so weird" (which is a fair observation) and going to "So, what we can say about electricity is that x, y and z. And this is how to build a circuit."