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[Alexandr Korol]

Question: When you met with Big Alexander, you wrote that during your interaction with him, it felt like being in a vacuum. You didn’t hear the crowd, and the crowd didn’t see you — you were like behind glass, with no time or space. From a technical perspective, why does this protective state from the outside world arise? After all, it’s just a meeting between two people on the street — but as it turns out, it’s not an ordinary meeting, and no external forces can interfere with it.

I wouldn’t really call it a protective thing. It’s just something else — it’s like, essentially, when I was with him, it felt like we entered another world. The same thing happens to me when I write books. I can sit down to write and completely fall out of time, get lost in it. You know, I often gave this example — like when a child sits down to play with LEGO. His mom tells him that she’ll call him for dinner in five hours. And he just sits down, and suddenly she’s calling him — and he doesn’t understand, but she says five hours have passed, and to him, it felt like only five minutes. But what’s even more interesting is that sometimes it’s the opposite — while he’s playing with that LEGO, he can be so immersed in it that it feels like he’s lived there his whole life, like an eternity. And when he’s pulled away from it, it turns out he wasn’t there very long, but it felt like a whole year. So what is that? What happens to a child in that moment? That only happens with children. And I have that too. Truly creative people — those who are born with it, a gift from God — they have this. They fall into that state. I don’t know exactly what kind of state it is, but based on all my books and the “Alternative History” series, of course I can make some assumptions. Like, when I was standing in the street talking with Big Alexander, we ended up in that “corridor,” that state I call “without mind.” And it turns out, that state was exactly like the one I’m in now. I have that same feeling right now — as if you hear him fully, in a multidimensional way, and he hears you the same, like he’s in your head and you’re in his. And your attention is so completely absorbed in the conversation that everything else just disappears. The same thing, probably, you — people — have experienced something similar, like during a conflict. You’re arguing with someone, and if it happens publicly, say on the street, then in that moment of emotion, you forget where you are, what’s around you, what people might think — because you’re completely swept up, overwhelmed. And this was similar, only in a calm, stable mood, but you’re still in a kind of trance,