Linking room

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A linking room is a concept in multiverse and metafiction stories. Linking rooms are usually visualized as vast, sometimes infinite, hallways with doors running the entire length. They often appear in dream sequences and cartoons. Each door is actually a portal to a different place.

[edit] Books

The most famous one is probably the "long, low hall" in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It has doors of all sizes all around it, going to starkly different exteriors.

Linking rooms do not need to be hallways, and linking room portals do not need to be doors. The Wood between the Worlds in C. S. Lewis' Magician's Nephew is a vast wooded area with many small, deceptively shallow pools of water, each of which represents an individual world or universe. Jasper Fforde's metafictional The Well of Lost Plots features a vast library, 52 stories tall (26 floors up, 26 floors down) with all books ever written or attempted, each a portal accessible to brave or foolish souls.

In a certain way, both the Kingdom of Amber and Courts of Chaos in Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber may be seen as a linking room between the Worlds of Shadow.

The Tower in the Dark Tower series from Stephen King can be considered a kind of linking room in the form of a Tower, forming the hub of the universe, with all possible worlds revolving around it as spokes on a wheel.

In The Neverending Story, the protagonist Bastian Balthazar Bux enters the Temple of a Thousand Doors, which helps him find Atreyu.

[edit] Movies

The Tim Burton film The Nightmare Before Christmas features an area similar to the Wood between the Worlds where Jack gains entrance to Christmas Town.

The Matrix Reloaded features a classic hallway-style linking room, which is described as an access passageway for the programmers who maintain the Matrix.

One of the most recent is the factory where Sullivan and Wazowski work in Monsters, Inc.. It is the starting point from the Monster universe to millions of children's bedrooms in our world. New doors are constantly brought to this hall from a huge storage area.

[edit] Games

The Myst series of computer games uses linking books to jump from one Age to another.