My wife was remarkably cool about it, but of course, if you read the end of the article, you can see that I didn't quite make it all the way. =) What she didn't like so much, was that between 6-7pm I was not available to help out with making dinner.
As for your "forehead catching fire" that sounds like it could be related to concept of the acquired sign or counter sign (basically "images", though they need not be visual, that come to signal certain mental states), though for it to persist outside of meditation sounds odd.
Yeah, the forehead-flame was/is really bizarre. I did some Google searches for it and didn't find much of anything that didn't seem like pseudo-science (look up "Ajna chakra" and you'll see what I mean...)
It's always hard to convey to people that it was very different from a mental image / thought / feeling in that it actually feels tactile, in the same way that if you had a rock in your shoe, you wouldn't confuse it for anything else--I just don't know what this "rock" is made of; it could certainly be a creation of my mind, but it doesn't present itself that way. It's easy to ignore, so I ignore it.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/painhe...