End in Sight:
I'd be interested in knowing whether the thing you had afterwards, which you diagnose as A&P, was heavily vibratory or not. High levels of concentration (which fuel "hard" jhanas as you may be describing) can also lead to "pleasure hangovers" which make normal A&Ps seem like a joke...but, I have only seen this happen in a non-vibratory way. (So, if it was not vibratory, that would be more evidence for 7th jhana; if if was, I'm not sure either way.)
The reason I diagnose that phase as A&P is that I had gone through the entire progress of insight up to SE before, and I remember from back then that the days around A&P were full of the same kind of "side effects:" Seeing breaking up into individual frames, hearing breaking up into short bursts or blips of sound, lucid dreams, feeling like I could meditate forever, suddenly being able to go into deeper absorption than before, clearly noticing one sensation after the other and how seemingly continuous sensations, such as a sore throat, are really just a few individual sensations here and there, amid a sea of unrelated ones.
It's interesting that you should mention vibrations. I didn't think this was important to mention, but right around that time was the first time ever that my predominant way of experiencing reality became vibrations. During my first couple of passes through the ñanas, I would sometimes perceive vibrations, but most of the time I did not focus on the vibratory nature of sensations. Right around the event I am describing in this thread, I did actually start focusing mainly on the vibratory nature of everything. So all this is my account of the days around the actual event.
The actual event itself did not have any vibrations that I was aware of. The sound broke up into blips of sound, but that's not really a vibration. Other than that, sinking into the absorption, being in it, and coming out of it, there were no vibrations. It's during regular, formal meditation later that day and week, and soon also in daily life, that I started feeling vibrations everywhere.
Regardless of this, the word "pleasure hangover" seems somewhat accurate. For days I felt an afterglow, but mainly I felt dissatisfaction with everything else. The way I expressed this to a couple of friends was, "The experience makes the rest of this life seem like a B movie."
End in Sight:
Do you have a sense of what you did to enter this state (to go from sense-experiences to no sense-experiences)?
First I tried to just relax, like I sometimes do after an intense vipassana session. At the crucial point, when I started sensing that I was about to slip into something deep, I had a little bit of fear, but then decided to "go against nature" and let go of everything. I decided not to hang on to life, consciousness, or anything else. That's pretty much the only thing I did to enter the state. The rest happened by itself. I just fell into a deeper and deeper absorption as the last few thoughts dissolved or ran out without anything to grasp at them or process them into new ones.
End in Sight:
A random question (if you can answer)...which did you think was better, the possible 7th jhana thing, or the A&P thing? Why?
Better in the sense of what I liked at the time, definitely the possible 7th jhana, simply because what I consider A&P is just a certain level of understanding of reality. Sure, it's pretty cool at the time, suddenly anything and everything I experienced was brilliant, clean, sharp, but really it's always the same thing every second of every minute of every day of being alive: Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, ... sensations battering me, never once letting up. The possible 7th jhana, on the other hand, was a vacation from the battery of sensations, including thoughts. "I" just disconnected from it all for a while.
However, A&P is better in the sense that it led to SE in my case, which, while not as immediately pleasurable, took away a huge amount of suffering forever. Sure, it doesn't keep the sensations from battering me, but it once and for all absolves me of the persistent, nagging feeling that I am responsible for what I "intrinsically am." SE clearly shows that I am not intrinsically anything, so there is nothing to worry about.
So the question is a little bit like a nice walk on the beach vs. having a good relationship with your family abroad. They are both good, but depending on what aspect you focus on, each can be seen as clearly better than the other.