Liminality

Is "Outside Over There" an example of a liminal space? I'm referring here not to the Sendak book Outside Over There, but to the place that is mentioned in the book, that Ida falls into. That's a question worth pondering. 

The concept of liminal spaces emerged in video games where glitches or modifications to the imaginary world of the game allow one to pass through boundaries that one would not otherwise be able to cross, and one might get stuck in a half-baked place with just walls with no features, that auto-generate endlessly as one explores them, without any way back to the normal world of the game. 

The lore of the internet contemplates these spaces as being reflective of a real experience on the spiritual plane, one we just happened to discover by video games (or artists and poets before them). 

Of particular importance is the idea that any creature that one encounters in the liminal space is probably not your friend. This is typical in video games, and also in the dream I racounted. One traverses a liminal space in dread of encountering another being, I suppose. One finds comfort only the faces of familiar people, and even then one must be sure of their identity, which can be counterfeited.

Facets of this we see in Sendak's work. Ida is alone. She encounters other beings but they are non-human and less than benign. Her resolution is to find, and rescue, her lost baby sister, at which point they can both return from the liminal space, apparently by following a river, which is very interesting, because rivers are a good way to find one's way out of the woods when lost (not always foolproof becuase they might disappear into a cave or an impassible gorge).