Liminality

It's probably risky to blog about the thoughts one has as one is waking up, but it seemed interesting at the time...

This morning as I was waking up, after the snooze button had been hit at least once, and I was falling back into dreams, I had a weird experience.

For just a brief second, it seems I was dreaming about someone (it was a man, but I don't know who) who had grown up as the child of missionaries. The point was that as an adult (he was probably a missionary himself), he was never quite comfortable at "home" (in the States, where, in theory, he's "from") or in the field. Neither was clearly and completely where he belonged. He lived his life in two realms, entirely rooted in neither one.

That was not the weird part. This is in fact a very common phenomenon for children of missionaries. Which is why mission runs in families.

The weird part was that I suddenly realized that my clock radio was, in fact, still talking. I had not actually succeeded in hitting the snooze button hard enough. (Since I sleep with earplugs, it's sometimes hard to tell until the evil buzzer alarm comes on later.) And for a just a moment, I was convinced that I was dreaming about this man living in two different realms because I was, in that very moment, in two different realms, sleep and wakefulness. There were things pulling me in each direction. Something about it seemed terribly profound.

Liminality, I think, it what you call that. You'd think that if we experience it every morning and every night, we'd be more comfortable with it. After all, you can have some pretty deep thoughts when you're there, eh?