When I was a child, a strange question came to me: why do we not remember how we enter sleep? No adult could answer it. Everyone sleeps, everyone dreams, but almost no one looks directly at the passage between waking and sleep. Later I found my answer: the passage is not hidden, we simply do not place our attention there.
Hidden World is not just a name. It is the idea that next to ordinary reality there is a whole layer of experience that usually remains outside our perception. It does not need to be invented or colored by fantasy. First it has to be seen, and only then can we learn to interact with it.
That is why the Hidden World is the world we do not look at, not a world that does not exist. Modern practicality often pushes aside other ways of perceiving, but human experience is wider than what can immediately be turned into a technology or a formula.
If something can be repeated, it deserves attention. The project starts from a simple research logic: people sleep, see dreams, experience altered states of consciousness, and can observe transitions between them. This is already a set of facts we can work with.
One of the first experiments was connected with falling asleep. The hypothesis was simple: if consciousness passes into sleep every time, then under certain conditions the boundary itself can be noticed. After several years of attempts, I found a state in which that transition could be observed. The repeatable conditions were simple: strong sleep deprivation and an external stimulus pulling me out of sleep. In my case it was the voice of a dispatcher at a railway station in the summer of 1991.
At that time the dominant view was that dreams occurred only in REM sleep, the rapid eye movement phase. Only later did the scientific community move away from the strict idea that dreaming belongs exclusively to REM sleep. This story shows how slowly science changes its dogmas, especially when the subject is inner experience that is hard to formalize.
In 2008 I discovered that yoga contains practical tools for entering and managing altered states of consciousness. Yoga and meditation are not only a path to liberation or work with the body. They make it possible to direct attention, observe consciousness, and as a side effect help with stress, anxiety, and depressive states.
You are on a research platform devoted to consciousness and self-knowledge. The goal of the project is to explain, in modern language, phenomena that can be checked, repeated, and used. We do not use science as decoration; we rely on it where it helps us form conclusions.
Our work is closer to philosophy and scientific mysticism in the spirit of William James: ancient techniques of working with consciousness receive a second life when they are tested through attention, experience, and careful method.
This direction has been developing for more than 120 years. After William James, the thread was continued in different ways by Bertrand Russell, Michael Polanyi, Francisco Varela with neurophenomenology, and Evan Thompson. For us, it is important to remain on the boundary between rationality and first-person experience without sliding into pseudoscience.
We offer methods for checking and repeatability. Our explanations include only the concepts needed for a practice to work. Any explanation should be treated carefully: it may be clarified or changed when new data appears.
Remember: each of you can become a researcher. A scientific degree or a laboratory is not always required. Many important discoveries were made by attentive amateurs while professional environments were still carefully holding on to familiar dogmas.