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Twilight serves as a liminal time, between day and night. The name of the television fiction series The Twilight Zone makes reference to this, describing it as "the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition" in one variant of the original series' opening. The name is from an actual zone observable from space in the place where daylight or shadow advances or retreats about the Earth. Noon and, more often, midnight can be considered liminal, the first transitioning between morning and afternoon, the latter between days.
Within the years, liminal times include equinoxes when day and night have equal length, and solstices, when the increase of day or night shifts over to its decrease. Where the Quarter days are held to mark the change in seasons, they also are liminal times.
New Year's Day, whatever its connection or lack of one to the astronomical sky, is a liminal time. Customs such as fortune-telling take advantage of this liminal state. In a number of cultures, actions and events on the first day of the year can determine the year, leading to such beliefs as First-Foot. Many cultures regard it as a time especially prone to hauntings by ghosts - liminal beings, neither alive nor dead.
Liminality can refer to the time between conception and birth in western cultures;some Eastern cultures counting the beginning of existence as the moment of conception.
Another example of liminality can occur when someone has just awoken from a dream and in a hypnagogic state of mind is unable to distinguish whether or not their dream really occurred. Drunkenness is a state in which the person is neither sick nor well.
In reality illegal immigrants (present but not "official"), stateless people, intersexual or transgender people, bisexual people in most contemporary societies, and those of mixed ethnicity or accused but not yet judged guilty or not guilty, are liminal. Teenagers, being neither children nor adults, are liminal people. The trickster and related archetypes embody many such contradictions as do many popular culture celebrities. The category could also hypothetically and in fiction include cyborgs, hybrids between two species, shapeshifters. One could also consider seals, crabs, shorebirds, frogs, bats, dolphins/whales and other "border animals" to be liminal. It should come as no surprise that these liminal creatures figure prominently in mythology as shapeshifters and spirit guides.
Wounds are liminal in that a wound is in constant flux, either getting better or getting worse. It is a site of healing or infection (or both, simultaneously). Menstruation is a condition in which (like a wound) the boundary between the inside of the body and the outside of the body is broken. Sex is a liminal act.
On an even more cosmic level, we have those judged both living and non-living, such as the human fetus in the abortion debate, those in a Persistent Vegetative State, undead characters and Schrödinger's cat. Plants such as seaweed (between sea and land) and mistletoe (between earth and sky) are not only liminal themselves, but are used in liminal rituals such as healing.
These can range from borders, to no man's lands and disputed territories, to crossroads to perhaps airports or hotels, which people pass through but do not live in. In mythology and religion or esoteric lore this can include such realms as Purgatory or Da'at which as well as signifying liminality some theologians have denied actually existing, making them, in some cases, doubly liminal. "Between-ness" defines these spaces. For a hotel worker (an insider) or a person passing by with disinterest (a total outsider), the hotel would have a very different connotation. To a traveller staying there, the hotel would function as a liminal zone.
Examples in fiction include the Interzone, the Wood between the Worlds and, as mentioned, The Twilight Zone. In the series itself, fittingly, the Twilight Zone does not appear as an actual literal location, making it both a place and not a place at the same time, and therefore also doubly liminal.
Doors, windows, springs, caves, shores, rivers, volcanic calderas, fords, passes, crossroads, bridges, and marshes are all liminal. Oedipus (an adoptee and therefore liminal) met his father at the crossroads and killed him; the bluesman Robert Johnson met the devil at the crossroads, where he is said to have sold his soul. Major transformations occur at crossroads and other liminal places, at least partly because liminality -- being so unstable -- can pave the way for access to esoteric knowledge or understanding of both sides. Liminality is sacred, alluring, and dangerous.
Turner coined the term liminoid to refer to experiences that have characteristics of liminal experiences but are optional and don't involve a resolution of a personal crisis. A graduation ceremony might be regarded as liminal while a rock concert might be understood to be liminoid. The liminal is part of society, an aspect of social or religious ritual, while the liminoid is a break from society, part of play. Turner stated that liminal experiences are rare and diminished in industrial societies, and are replaced by liminoid experiences.
