Traditional folk beliefs emphasized the importance of transitional places and times as moments of contact with the afterlife. Crossroads in European folklore were considered places where one could easily encounter the devil or spirits – a crossroads , after all, is a space "neither here nor there," making it magically charged. Thresholds and doorways served as symbolic boundaries between the outside world and the home – hence the multitude of superstitions, such as avoiding standing on the threshold or greeting guests directly at the doorway. Cemeteries were often located on the outskirts of settlements – also on the border between the worlds of the living and the dead. The time of day also plays a significant role: twilight (between day and night) and midnight (the culminating point of the day) have for centuries been considered a time when contact with evil forces or spirits is most likely to occur. Even the popular Halloween holiday derives from the Celtic Samhain, a liminal moment of the transition between the seasons, when the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead was believed to blur.
Liminality applies not only to physical places but also to states of mind. We mentioned the anthropological significance earlier (the rite of passage phase), but it's also worth considering psychological transitional moments. This is where the concepts of hypnagogia and hypnopompia emerge—states on the border between sleep and wakefulness (just before falling asleep and just after waking). In these liminal stages of consciousness, people often experience phenomena such as sleep paralysis, sleep hallucinations, or the sense of the presence of something or someone in the room.
Many scientists believe that a significant portion of alleged "demonic visitations" or "alien abductions" in the bedroom may stem from sleep paralysis combined with intense hallucinations during the half-dream state. This represents a very literal penetration of the dream world (unreal) into waking life—another liminal experience, this time occurring in our minds.
But let's return to liminal spaces in the physical sense. Abandoned, quiet places have long been considered a setting for strange occurrences. Haunted houses are often buildings in a state of transition (abandoned, undergoing renovation, neglected—thus, "between" being habitable and ruinous). Old hotels with wind howling through the corridors, ghostly train stations where no one visits anymore, or even a forest at dusk—these are all the backdrops for many stories about ghosts, apparitions, and other phenomena. Why there? Perhaps because when the surroundings are empty and quiet, our imagination more easily fills them with projections from the subconscious. Or perhaps because—as some believe—the boundary between worlds is thinner there. In liminal places, people feel a bit like intruders outside their own world and time, and thus perhaps they open themselves more to the extraordinary.
Interestingly, many paranormal accounts combine elements of the Oz factor with a liminal setting. It's difficult to determine which is cause and which is effect—whether the unusual event makes the world around it "liminal" (quiet, empty, detached), or whether individuals in liminal situations (solitude, silence, night, a transitional setting) are more susceptible to unusual experiences.
It's possible that one reinforces the other in a feedback loop. A liminal space is the perfect setting for the Oz Factor to occur, as it already offers a foretaste of unreality: it's quiet, there are no people, and the normal context disappears. If something truly strange happens in such a setting, it's easy to slip into a state close to trance. Conversely, when experiencing the Oz Factor, we feel as if we've entered a different reality, we almost physically feel the change in our surroundings—the world around us becomes liminal, even if it was ordinary moments ago.
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