Liminal Spaces

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Have you ever entered a place where your sense of reality seemed to disappear? One minute you are storming through life, the next you are in a state of derealization. You may feel confused and detached, anxiously waiting for something to happen, or just plain old uncomfortable. Places like airports, stairwells, high way rest stops, and hospital waiting rooms can all give you the same unsettling feeling, but have you ever thought about why that is? All these places mentioned have a similar feature that give that “off” feeling. These places are all located in sensory thresholds, they are called liminal spaces. There are other places that can cause these same eerie feelings. Environments that are anxiety provoking or different from what we typically …show more content…
The purpose of these places is solely to act as a throughway from one space to the next. The existence of these places is not about themselves, but the things that come before and after them. They have no definitive relationship to the places you are coming from or going to. Reality feels altered in these places because they were designed for us to keep moving through them. We are not meant to spend a long time in these spaces, and when we do or start to think of them as their own entities it then begins to feel odd. (McLaen, …show more content…
Often any prolong period in a liminal space will lead to the destruction of your beliefs and identity, following the chance of becoming a new you. This is the transformation period. You will often hear people describing this point of their life as rock bottom, where it was change all, or what shaped them into the person they are today. This liminality is a very important aspect a literature. Located in every great book, liminal space is “the space between an inciting incident in a story and the protagonist’s resolution.” “Liminal space is the period between Raskolnikov’s crime and his confession to detective Porfiry. It is the space between the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents and his becoming Batman in order to protect others. Liminal space is Luke Skywalker’s apprenticeship in the swamps of Dagobah. It is Frodo’s long, slow journey to Mordor. Liminal space is the period between Elizabeth Bennet’s realization she likes Mr. Darcy and the moment she agrees to marry him.” (Bunting,
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