Crossing the Threshold: The Art & Science of Transliminality
We often talk about liminal spaces — those mysterious in-between moments of change and transformation. But there’s a another concept from psychology that takes this idea inward: transliminality.
Coined by psychologist Michael Thalbourne, transliminality describes a person’s tendency for thoughts, emotions, and perceptions to cross the “threshold” between the conscious and unconscious mind . People high in transliminality often report vivid dreams, mystical experiences, heightened creativity, and a porous sense of self, what psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann called “thin boundaries”.
First I’ll get into the history and psychology. Skip ahead for artistry, creativity, and stream of consciousness…
Over two decades of studies have explored this trait using the Revised Transliminality Scale (RTS). Findings show that higher transliminality correlates with:
Creativity and imagination, including fantasy-proneness and artistic flow
Mystical or unusual experiences, from déjà vu to altered states
Absorption and openness, or the ability to become fully immersed in music, art, or meditation
Dream recall and spirituality, reflecting a more fluid connection between inner and outer worlds
Transliminality also predicts dissociative and sleep-related experiences, such as lucid dreaming and nightmares, and is associated with higher scores on dissociation measures. This suggests that transliminality may underlie a general vulnerability to altered states of consciousness, which are common in both dissociative disorders and schizotypal personality disorder.
Childhood trauma is a potential antecedent of high transliminality, which may partially explain the overlap between trauma, dissociation, and psychosis-spectrum symptoms. The literature also highlights that transliminality, in combination with other cognitive-perceptual traits, can moderate the impact of unusual beliefs on well-being and psychopathology.
In summary, transliminality is best understood as a transdiagnostic trait that increases susceptibility to both psychosis-spectrum and dissociative symptoms, and may help explain the clinical overlap between these conditions. Its assessment may be useful in identifying individuals at risk for complex psychopathology involving altered states of consciousness, though it is not itself a diagnostic criterion.
Neuroscientific work also hints that people high in transliminality may show unique resting-brain patterns associated with openness and unusual experiences, though these results remain preliminary. Researchers have noted overlaps with thin boundaries, hypnotic susceptibility, and schizotypal traits, reminding us that the same openness that fuels creativity can also heighten sensitivity.
Artistry, creativity, stream of consciousness…
While “transliminal spaces” are not a formal research term, artists, psychologists, and philosophers alike use it to describe those threshold zones between waking and dreaming, self and other, science and spirit, where transformation happens. These liminal thresholds can manifest in altered states, creative reverie, or moments of profound emotional resonance. They invite both surrender and awareness, bridging the rational and the mystical. In many ways, transliminal spaces are the laboratories of consciousness: sites where intuition meets intellect, where insight arises not through analysis but through felt experience.
Creative Thresholds
Many artists intentionally enter transliminal states—between waking and sleeping, between intention and accident—to allow unconscious material to surface. Surrealists like Salvador Dalí and André Breton practiced hypnagogic techniques (capturing images from the edge of sleep), while writers like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce used stream-of-consciousness to channel this fluidity between the inner and outer world.
In visual art, film, and performance, transliminal spaces are often depicted as dreamlike or otherworldly environments. Think foggy thresholds, doorways, mirrors, twilight scenes, or in-between worlds. These settings symbolize the psyche’s liminal states: moments of identity shift, spiritual encounter, or emotional transformation. Think of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, or Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored infinity rooms.
Artists use transliminality as a practice, a way of accessing states beyond rational control. Through meditation, psychedelics, sound, movement, or trance, they enter altered modes of awareness that blur distinctions between self and creation. The artwork then becomes both an artifact and an extension of that transliminal journey.
Dreaming a Transliminal Practice
Dreaming is the most intimate form of transliminal experience, a nightly crossing between consciousness and the unconscious, where imagery, emotion, and memory blur into one another. It’s where the psyche speaks in symbols and the self dissolves into something wider.
Artists have long drawn from this space. The Surrealists treated dreams as portals to the unconscious; Jung saw them as messages from the soul’s deeper strata. Today, many creators treat dreams as inner data, fragments of feeling and vision that later surface in paint, poetry, or sound.
Lucid dreaming, when you wake within a dream, is the epitome of transliminality. Awareness and imagination merge, and the dreamer becomes both witness and creator. Filmmakers like Jodorowsky and musicians like Aphex Twin use it as a rehearsal space for perception itself, where time bends, symbols shift, and reality becomes pliable.
Dreaming, then, is not an escape but a training ground for consciousness. Both dreaming and lucid dreaming remind us that creativity is itself a threshold. It’s like a dialogue between intention and emergence, waking and wonder. To make art is to dream while awake, giving form to what was once unseen.
Perhaps that’s the beauty of transliminality: it’s both a scientific construct and a poetic one, reminding us that the most profound insights often emerge in the spaces between.
Photo credit: Lummi
References
Thalbourne, M. A., & Houran, J. (2000). Transliminality: Its nature and correlates. Personality and Individual Differences, 28(5), 853–871. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(99)00193-1
Hartmann, E. (1991). Boundaries in the Mind: A New Psychology of Personality. Basic Books.
Thalbourne, M. A., Bartemucci, L., Delin, P. S., Fox, B., & Nofi, O. (1997). Transliminality: Its relation to dream life, religiosity, and mystical experience. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 7(1), 71–77. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327582ijpr0701_8
Soffer-Dudek, N., & Shahar, G. (2009). What are sleep-related experiences? Associations with transliminality, psychological distress, and life stress. Consciousness and Cognition, 18(4), 891–904. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2008.07.007
Koffel, E., & Watson, D. (2009). Unusual sleep experiences, dissociation, and schizotypy: Evidence for a common domain. Clinical Psychology Review, 29(6), 548–559. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2009.06.004
Thalbourne, M. A., Houran, J., & Crawley, S. E. (2003). Childhood trauma as a possible antecedent of transliminality. Psychological Reports, 93(3 Pt 1), 687–694. https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.2003.93.3.687
Renard, S. B., Huntjens, R. J., Lysaker, P. H., et al. (2017). Unique and overlapping symptoms in schizophrenia spectrum and dissociative disorders in relation to models of psychopathology: A systematic review. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 43(1), 108–121. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbw063
Dagnall, N., Denovan, A., Drinkwater, K. G., & Escolà-Gascón, Á. (2022). Paranormal belief and well-being: The moderating roles of transliminality and psychopathology-related facets. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 915860. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.915860
Fleck, J. I., Green, D. L., & Tart, C. T. (2008). The transliminal brain at rest: EEG correlates of openness to experience. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(3), 1189–1199. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2008.02.001
Rosen, C., Davidson, C., Nelson, B., & Bourgin, J. (2023). Transliminality, sensed presence, and attenuated psychosis: Exploring overlapping phenomenology. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1173642. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1173642
Irving, P., McClenon, J., & Jones, L. (2024). Transliminality, dissociation, and hypnotic responsiveness: A replication and extension study. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 31(2), 45–62.
