I'll break this up into two parts, since there seems to be a lot of writing: part one will be going through mind & body up to equanimity on retreat; part 2 will be the following days of dark nighting, with strong experiences which culminated in an apparent fruition.
part 1: 5 day retreatAttitude on arrival: I had 5 days to go as far as I can (striving mistake made many times). I vowed to note my experiences every moment of the day. I was pumped up from Tarin's
reformed slacker's guide to stream entry (highly recommended read). This was a zen sesshin with a lot of sitting and little walking. I took the bathroom breaks and downtime as either naps or walking meditation. I followed their schedule, but stuck with noting-style vipassina, because it's what I knew and have precious little time for retreats.
primary techniques:sitting: follow breath at nose, belly, or choicless position. For me they are in order of decreasing concentration but increasing investigation. Once I start to get visualizations, I choose them as my object and investigate by describing how and where they appear. Physical sensations get peppered in as they present themselves.
walking: begin with noting the foot meeting the ground, increase to 'where on the foot,' occasionally allow the position of sensation in my body become the meditation object. Again, I find success in choicelessness.
day 0 (8-10:30pm) rode my excitement in with meditative exuberance. good concentration, good investigation. Felt a brief (~10 s), but very pleasurable opiated stage which I took to be mild A&P, but in retrospect was probably an above average 'mind and body.'
day 1: strong physical pain from sitting with an injured back and knees (from regular life). It took a little time to find the optimal posture for extended sitting, but even after I did, I had strong recurring back pains for the entire sesshin. With 4 days ahead of me, I seriously considered leaving the retreat; I was fortunate to be held back by a fear of failure.
conclusion: All I wanted to do was dry vipassina so I could make the most progress possible on this retreat. Samantha has a nice way of making pain managable and I learned this lesson too late.
day 2: I was probably in the dark night most of the day. Strobing visuals with negative emotions. I admit a prejudice against dealing with emotions on the cushion, because I fear getting lost in the stories. Instead I alternated between avoiding meditation and actually getting lost in fantasies and powering through with dry vipassina.
conclusion: what actually got me past this stuff was noting some of the 'stuff' coming up: relationship issues, feeling like a bad meditator, feeling like a failure, feeling like I wouldn't get enlightened, feeling like I should just drop all this meditation business. My existing prejudice against this was the problem, noting it loosened me up a bit.
day 3: Joyous morning with strong energy and rapture. This kicked in my christian upbringing and I felt I was giving myself up to God. If only every morning could start this way! My thought at the time was: this must be what heroin is like. At the time I ascribe this to a samantha jhana, but it was almost certainly the A&P event. I rode the positive feeling for a the better half of the day before going back to vipassina and falling into the dark night and battling up to low equinimity by the end of the day. Was hallucinating motion and patterns on walks during the day and by the end had trouble walking to the meeting with the roshi and difficulty remembering how to bow. On the cushion I was occasionally lucid dreaming; was a bit out there.
conclusion: At the time I was trying to avoid absorption into the pleasure, but in retrospect, the healing was probably healthy and the time spent in it was probably valuable.
day 4: Fell back into the dark night. I must not have admitted to myself the extent to which things were sucking, because I wasted half the day absorbed in stories and fantasies. I had to acknowledge the pain and suffering of these stages and rally up the courage to go through it again. It's like being a medic that has to run through the crossfire repeatedly to retrieve injured soldiers... ok, maybe not that scary. Dry vipassina through the stages with occasional concentration breaks to steady my head. On one hand, I was having trouble keeping up with the events of the dark night and the concentration breaks helped steady me. On the other, I think I was avoiding my reality with concentration and wimping out of the tough parts. It was a battle of a day, but by the end I was accepting the pain and suffering and breaching into equanimity territory again.
conclusion: Insert your Greek tragedy here. I'll go with Sisyphus.
day 5: fall back to the dark night and giving up. 2 dimensional damn!! The first being that I have to deal with this crap again and the second being that I'm giving up because I don't think I can make it to fruition by 6pm. Well let me tell you, giving up here sucks. I didn't get to avoid this problem as much as I tried and wanted. I rallied myself up for one or two more 'goes' at getting back to equanimity, but really threw in the towel by about 2:30. The last day added an extra challenge of "you're out of time." I noted that a couple times, but I bet it got the better of me in the end.
conclusion: I spent the end doing pure concentration breathing just to settle the throbbing in my forehead. I had energy lodged in my third eye and scalp for at least a day and that and the back pain was wearing on me. The samantha helped settle the strobing, but didn't solve the problem. In fact, despite Daniel's warning about leaving a retreat in the dark knight, I still vented my anger on the toll booth operator on the drive back. In my defense, he did give me 3 dollar coins

I'm obviously kidding about the 'defense' because it was such trivial thing, but I lashed out saying "yeah, but these dollars suck!" Whoa, where did that come from? re-observation... crap.
Afterthoughts: My great thanks to Daniel for his book and Tarin for the reformed slacker's guide. I didn't get to where I wanted, but I got as far as I did, because of the advice in your writings.
Mini post-game analyses: I could really use some advice here. Many things seem clear to me today that didn't on retreat. Does anyone find it helpful to set aside 15-30 minutes at the end of the day to figure out what happened and set the goals for the next day? It goes against Tarin's "meditate at all times when awake" and "analysis is not the same as meditation" but seems like it could be a skillful way to do this.