Husserl had long ago considered the possibility that the whole intentional dance could just as easily be understood as occurring inside a person’s inner realm. Since the epoché suspended questions about whether things were real, nothing stood in the way of this interpretation. Real, not real; inside, outside; what difference did it make? Reflecting on this, Husserl began turning his phenomenology into a branch of ‘idealism’ — the philosophical tradition which denied external reality and defined everything as a kind of private hallucination.