dreams: recurring characters
12 Apr 2019 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneI almost always remember my dreams when I wake up, ever since I started taking Venlafaxine really, but even more so in the last year or so since the dose went up.
And people I knew from childhood show up really frequently in my dreams - my extended family, most of whom I haven't seen in person for years, family friends and neighbors, and also my middle school friends and girl scout troop members (age ~12-18, which I guess also makes them middle school friends). Not only do I see comparatively little of my high school friends in dreams, whom I mostly didn't have contact with after age 20 or so - I very rarely see more recent acquaintances from my adult life.
My wife's extended family, who have pretty much functioned as my extended family for 15 years now, and her mother, are often referenced but they're usually offscreen. I've made plenty of friends and long-term acquaintances in my adult life... who have mostly not shown up in Dreamland. It's like my long-term memory filled up the cast a long time ago and lost the ability to create new characters????
I'll even dream about things obviously related to my daily life, like about one of the schools where I studied Finnish or one of the schools where I worked, but when I get to the workplace it will be a made-up place that doesn't exist in the real world and the people there will be equally fictional.
But any dream, no matter how unlikely, has decent odds of my parents and sister or my aunts, uncles, and cousins showing up. I guess it's a credit to my parents that all that extended family played such a significant role in my mental life even though they all lived 8, 11, or 14+ hours' drive away...
And people I knew from childhood show up really frequently in my dreams - my extended family, most of whom I haven't seen in person for years, family friends and neighbors, and also my middle school friends and girl scout troop members (age ~12-18, which I guess also makes them middle school friends). Not only do I see comparatively little of my high school friends in dreams, whom I mostly didn't have contact with after age 20 or so - I very rarely see more recent acquaintances from my adult life.
My wife's extended family, who have pretty much functioned as my extended family for 15 years now, and her mother, are often referenced but they're usually offscreen. I've made plenty of friends and long-term acquaintances in my adult life... who have mostly not shown up in Dreamland. It's like my long-term memory filled up the cast a long time ago and lost the ability to create new characters????
I'll even dream about things obviously related to my daily life, like about one of the schools where I studied Finnish or one of the schools where I worked, but when I get to the workplace it will be a made-up place that doesn't exist in the real world and the people there will be equally fictional.
But any dream, no matter how unlikely, has decent odds of my parents and sister or my aunts, uncles, and cousins showing up. I guess it's a credit to my parents that all that extended family played such a significant role in my mental life even though they all lived 8, 11, or 14+ hours' drive away...
