I find it extremely difficult to articulate what I mean. I’ve gotten this feeling throughout my entire life, even when I was a child, and I’m sure there must be many others who’ve experienced it; I just can’t find any mention of it online.
I’ll give you an example. Sometimes you might be going from place to place, doing your own thing. When you’re done with whatever you were doing, you just… stop … and take in your surroundings. Suddenly the quietness around you seems to give you a tingling, comforting feeling that’s quite honestly a beautiful feeling.
I’m 22, and I’ve been getting this throughout my entire life; and heck, I even get it when playing videogames (particularly open-world games), if they’re immersive enough. The most common place I get this feeling in the real world is when I’ve been travelling in a car for a while (I don’t drive currently, usually it’s my mother driving me), and we reach our destination: The car stops; the engine turns off; the music on the radio goes silent, and I’m in no rush to hop out. For some reason this feeling rushes over me; it feels similar to butterflies and goes through my upper legs and stomach; even in my upper arms for some reason, but is all very comforting.
My earliest memory with it (although I know I had it years prior to this), was one day when I was 7-9 yrs old. I remember it quite vividly, actually. I don’t remember where I had come from (probably school or something), but my Mum had been driving me for what felt like quite a while. She pulled into our front driveway and stopped. The engine shut off; the radio went silent. It felt calming, and I didn’t get out of the car because I was just appreciating and enjoying the feeling of sitting in the quietness, with the subtle ticking sound coming from the cars engine you tend to hear when turning it off, just outside. My Mum said to me, something along the lines of “Why aren’t you hopping out, Liam?”. I don’t remember what I said in response, but I definitely had no idea how to explain the reason to her; I find it difficult to even explain now as a young adult.
Now, I’ve managed to learn where and when to just “stop”, and have this feeling come over me, like second-nature, but I still find that I can’t well explain when or how it happens with words; that’s why this post is so long.
As I said earlier, I also sometimes get this feeling when playing videogames. One of my favourite games of all time is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (The sequel, too). It’s an open-world game where you can travel to almost every single nook and cranny of the land of Hyrule, on foot or by horse. One of the things I absolutely love the most, is just walking around the world, exploring, and taking it all in. I don’t care about defeating every single monster in every single enemy campsite across the world, or getting from place to place in the shortest time possible, or finding the most powerful loot or weapons; I just like to immerse myself in the world, like I’m actually there. And that feeling I described: I get it around almost every single corner, especially in out-of-the-way places like the top-edges of cliff-faces, where people in Hyrule never visit. In fact, I can give you an example: I was watching IGN’s video of the game from 2016 when it was still in development (video link is timestamped to where I want to show you), and because I had been watching this gameplay video for the past 20 minutes, I was very immersed and relaxed in the game world. As soon as the player climbed up to this rock that was protruding out of the cliff-face, he immediately turned around to stop and take a look at the view in the distance, due to being so high up. I immediately, immersed, had that feeling come over me again, and it felt so nice; as it always does.
Is there name for this? If so, what is this called? There has to be some kind of psychology behind all of this.
Absolutely. The abrupt change from loud to quiet certainly does it a lot. Maybe the reason I got the feeling when watching the clip from Breath of the Wild I linked was because I had been watching (and hearing) the whole process of the player climbing the cliff-face, from the ground up to that point of the cliff. It wasn’t loud, but there was the constant rustling sound of the main character, Link, climbing the cliff-face, until he suddenly stopped. That combined with the beauty of the view he stopped to take a look at produced that really strong, calm feeling.
Liminal space! Hope this helps.
Based on how Wikipedia explains it in your link, I think the feeling I get from liminal spaces is similar, but not the exact same thing as what I described. Liminal spaces often elicit feeling often from an unexpected lack of something that should usually be there. For example, being in mega-sized stadium all by yourself, where there would usually be thousands of people at once, or walking around your school yard ultra early in the morning when nobody is around. This certainly produces a similar feeling to what I described in my post, but different, and I can still get the feeling in busy or loud environments, it’s just much rarer, and I haven’t experienced it enough to be able to tell exactly what sets it off in busy or noisy environments.
I got it once in the last year when I visited the city of Melbourne, Australia. I arrived at Southern Cross railway station. I had to wait for a friend to pick me up from there. I stood out of the way and leaned against a wall right beside a Hungry Jacks (fast food franchise), and the feeling came over me when I observed my surroundings, despite being in a very busy and noisy environment. This is kind of an opposite situation to the feeling you get from liminal spaces.
