Hi Greg,
I also suffer from HPPD, and it also took me 4 years to figure out what was wrong with me.
It happened when I was 16 and snorted butane gas. Nobody understood what was wrong with me so it feels really good to not be alone anymore.
My visuals started as patterns that ended in wierd spirals (triangles in triangles), now I have the normal description of HPPD visuals.
I understood the concept of negative and positives, and learned the rules of the expandation. I kept getting flashbacks everytime I smoke weed, and I kept on doing it for 2 years, hoping it would come to an end. It only became worse and worse.
I, too, after a couple years learned to live with it, and it just became an acceptable thing for me, and it gets weaker and weaker when I stop doing drugs.
I don't see fireworks, but when I get a panic attack or something like it, it triggers my condition and gives me flashbacks. That also applies to depression.
It's like a wave going back and forth through your head.
and I'm always over-analyzing things, which makes me go too deep into my own mind, and I see these patterns and functions which I understand, and when I was younger I came to a point where I understood and said"Oh no..." and really realized that my mind had gone too far. I was understanding things I wasn't supposed to.
This visions we have is like a broken filter. But the trick is to stay out of drugs, but I just keep going because I don't want 'it' to win over me.
But now I'm doing psychedelics, tranquilizers and benzo's. Weed/Hash is still the most dangerous drug I can take, because it triggers the flashbacks, and they keep expanding.
So yeah, I guess we two got HPPD almost at the same time. But I'm still doing drugs, so my filter gets broken again. But it recovers fast if I take a couple weeks or a months break from everything.
But yeah, I would be interested in reading about your LSD trip, and see if I can relate to that.
But butane gas is a pretty hardcore thing to trigger HPPD on, because it made me realize that the entire world is just a combination and expandation of positives, negatives and energy. Red, Blue, and mixed together it becomes yellow.
Long story, and so far nobody has understood my thoughts, so I just tried to forget what I had learned and tried to distance myself from it.
But for me it became 4 different stages of psychosis when smoking weed that evolved in 2 years.