I'm not going to recite the well-known symptoms of mania and depression. They are available throughout this website in several locations. You can check the links and look back through the diagnoses pages for discussion about them. Instead, what I will do here is provide a human experience of the symptoms themselves. Now imagine a banquet of all your most favourite foods before you.
Flight of ideas is much like that.
Well, yes and no, mostly no though because bipolars aren't aware of how their thoughts seem to others. The fact that we can't sleep and can't concentrate doesn't necessarily dawn on us bipolar types. We inhabit a world of our own and personality-wise we can give a good, if a bit skewed, justification for our behaviors and thoughts. During a hypomanic stage, we yak incessantly about anything, everything, and for hours, with very little connection of topics. Full blown mania shows up as extremely fast speech, incoherence, and often with paranoid, sometimes hallucinatory, subject matter as a centerpiece.