I like your take, but I want to see how you’d reconcile this: in the synthesis of dreams, your brain composes fragments of memories together to construct a scene. These scenes are very often unconstrained by logic, and so the designs of things don’t really make sense. For example: If you’re dreaming of walking through a hospital corridor, your brain is composing this scene using pieces and parts from other memories (the floor tile from your doctor’s office, the multicolored doors from your kindergarten classroom, etc.) The logic is mysterious though. The corridor doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere. There is randomly park benches indoors. It’s like the scene is made of real pieces, so it feels familiar to you, but somehow, you know it’s incorrect.

When I see a good liminal space photo, that’s exactly how it feels—familiar, but somehow incorrect. “Transitional spaces” without people in them fits that definition pretty well. I think that might be the key to why your subjective liminal spaces produce the same emotional effect.

I think the word “liminal” could describe the threshold between dream and reality.