The In-Between

I love liminal spaces. You probably know that by now. Those places between other places. The thresholds. The doorways. Places neither here nor there. That moment between today and tomorrow.

Somehow or another I found myself reading about hypnagogic and hypnopompic states, that is, the transitional periods of falling asleep and waking up, respectively.  Essentially, your brain doesn't always go smoothly from one to the other. It gets a little murky and mixed up, and gives you this liminal state between the two. And then I read about false awakening, where you think you've woken up, but you're still dreaming. The whole dream within a dream thing.

Me being me, I take some run of the mill mental phenomenon, and ask myself what kind of adventures could this lead to. I mean, a doorway's a doorway. Not just a link between asleep and awake, but maybe also a link to somewhere else. I've mentioned hypnic jerks before, that twitch when you're on the verge of sleep, like you've nearly fallen and caught yourself. But where were you falling to?

This is one of those things that I bring up all the time (or so it feels like), but I've yet to do anything meaningful with it. I always have it in my pile of ideas, but it never quite makes it into the story. Right now, I don't know what I'm going to do with it. Maybe…

Maybe I can use it for my revision of The Long Road. I mean, I've yet to figure out how they jump across realities, or whatever the hell they're doing. Maybe this is a game of doorways, of thresholds and borders. Every time you cross one, there's no guarantee you'll end up where you intended. So every state line, every bridge over a ravine, every time someone falls asleep…

Interesting. Could be utter nonsense, but interesting, nonetheless.

I think maybe I have to figure out the why before I get too caught up in the how. That is, why them? Why are they suddenly opening these doors and crossing these thresholds? We're past the point of "make it up as we go" and "figure it out later." We need answers. We need outlines.

We need a plan.

Stay tuned for the next exciting installment of metaphysical rambling! I'll see you Wednesday.