limen /LI-mən/. noun. A threshold, typically of consciousness and sensation. The point below which a sensation isn’t perceived. See also, the more common adjective, liminal. Latin līmen (threshold).
“Margin of evening, an indeterminate limen between creatures diurnal and nocturnal. Twilight congeals as the first raccoons descend the chinquapin oak.” (Christopher Dewdney)
“I could complicate this with a few more real and imaginary castles—and a loving and respectful reference to your own seminal work on the limen and the liminal. What do you think? Will it wash? Will I be torn by Maenads?” (A.S. Byatt)
“Such to the dead might appear the world of the living—charged with information, with meaning, yet somehow always just, terribly, beyond that fateful limen where any lamp of comprehension might beam forth.” (Thomas Pynchon)
“…getting drunk does serve to mobilize the internal contradictions and conflicts, to point up and make urgent the appetites and needs which are smoldering below the limen of awareness, and so to ignite the fuse.” (Robert M. Lindner)