You could give all the photos in the collection a certain keyword...or set of keywords. Then you could disband the collection and find them again via the keyword.
You could give them another rating, either a number (stars) or color. That would be another way to find them without having them in a collection.
Or if you don't need the collection anymore, you could just disband it. The photos themselves (or their edits) wouldn't be affected.
If you want to 'hide' the photos as well, you could export them into a completely new catalog, and since you can only have one catalog open at a time, you would have to open that specific catalog to see them. (you may have to delete time out of the first catalog, after putting them into a new one).