Transliminality: its relation to dream-life, religiosity and mystical experience

Abstract

In a previous article (Thalbourne & Delin, 1994), evidence was presented that there exists a common thread underlying creative personality, mystical experience, psychopathology (both schizotypal and manic-depressive), and belief in the paranor- mal. This common factor was named rransliminality and was tentatively defined as a largely involuntary susceptibility to, and awareness of, large volumes of inwardly generated psychological phenomena of an ideational and affective kind (p. 25). This second article details the results of a follow-up study of this general psychological factor, in which 116 participants from the first study completed further question- naires. Transliminality was found to be related to measures of dream recall and dream interpretation, to Haraldsson's 8-Item Religiosity Scale and several other measures of religiosity, and to 2 additional measures of mystical experience.