There are a lot of characters that join me in my dreams; I almost
never find the landscape void of everyone, not that that would
necessarily be a bad thing. My characters are varied, their identities
coming from all sorts of places.
Also note:
while I refer to these characters as if they are people, human beings,
that is not always the case for any of the following categories (yes,
including the first one).
Twins & Clones
It may seem like a easy way out, a shortcut into populating dreams with
duplicates of myself, but it most certainly is not. Being rather
attracted to my own self (at least, more than I'm attracted to anyone
else these days) and
enjoying my own company
at least as much as that of others' (if not more), it's a pleasure (in
more ways than one) for me. I like being surrounded by self-copies.
Those copies, be they twins, clones, or otherwise, tend to exist in two
different types. The first is self-existing bodies, and the second is as
an extension of myself. In the first case, they are separate people who
simply look and act like me; same body, same personality, but I don't
get to experience their perspective. In the second, they act more like
an extension of myself, as if my consciousness inhabited or was spread
across more than one physical manifestation, not unlike my right hand
and my left hand, except they are not joined to each other by flesh.
Experiencing
extensions of oneself, and thereby experiencing yourself interacting
with yourself is a very unique experience. If you ever find yourself in a
similar dream, I highly recommend taking full advantage of it. You
might learn some things about yourself and about how other people
perceive you.
Splinters of Myself
This
is one of the most common types of personality that populates my
dreamscapes, seconded only by the next category. Splinters of myself are
not twins or clones as I described in the previous section; I do not
have any control over them, they rarely act as I would or look as I do. I
use the term "splinter" literally: they are aspects of my personality,
usually ones that are conflicting, and they manifest without or separate
from the alternate part of myself that interferes with them.
The best example of splinter can be found in my (unfortunately mostly abandoned) story "
Bands."
This story was one of the many that was found in a dream, but unlike
most stories that started that way, this was regularly fueled by
additional installments in dreams; it was a serial dream, one of my
longest running and longest spanning, occurring over the span of several
years.
In Bands, there are three main characters:
Paul, Katie, and Chris, and each of them was a splinter of myself, with
something "more" thrown in. That more was something ethereal and
borderline magical, something beond the normal that the real me, either
with all the parts pulled back together or if I'd majored in one and let
the other parts of me go, would never be capable of.
They were splinters that were literally living their own lives, and as they
told me of their adventures, or I watched in dreams (sometimes through
Paul's eyes but usually as an omnipotent observer), I would write them
down, compile the pieces, and there was the story.
Somebody I Used To Know
This is definitely the largest demographic of people who populate my dreams.
Whether I knew them for only a few hours, or I saw them regularly for
several years, they have about an equal chance of showing up and
participating in some way. They usually behave as I would expect them to
from the impressions I picked up while I knew them, and I rarely have
any control over their actions, even in lucid dreams or WBTB events.
When I make note of these people in my dream journal, I generally try to
only refer to them by their initials or a nickname that few besides
myself know. It's mostly because they are usually people I don't
interact with anymore and I don't wish to draw them into being
associated with me without their consent. I'll leave them to make that
decision, and if they find the dream less than flattering, well, all the
better that I referred to them in an obscure enough fashion that they
can't accuse me of libel.
They are sometimes main
characters and sometimes background characters, but I rarely get
duplicates of one person in a single dream. That feature seems to be
limited exclusively to myself.
Celebs
Popular
media too often portrays dreams as a place where you can do anything
you want in the presence of celebrities and famous people, whether it be
socialize, flirt, or something malicious or erotic. For myself, it is
only very rarely that famous faces take the stage in my dreams, and when
they do, it's usually only in a supporting role to those in the above
categories.
Again, when sharing these dreams publicly, I
try to leave only initials or limited references of their identity;
though it is far less obscuring (and usually
easier to guess)
than private citizens' names, it still allows for a sense of humility:
I'm not publishing the dream to celebrate the presence of someone
famous, I'm publishing it to share and complete my dream journal. The
purpose is the dream and the storyline contained therein, not the
people.
Somebody That I Haven't Met Yet
It's
strange, but sometimes my mind seems to invent people. They're not a
part of me, not a part of someone else, not someone I once met, or saw
off in the distance. They seem to be completely of themselves and no-one
else. These people are hard to spot in my dream journals, because I
largely describe them by referring other people I know who share or
remind me of particular characteristics.
That's
not to say that these new people are just people I've met before
wearing a new skin; everybody shares some aspects of their personality
with someone else; given a wide enough friend-base and a comprehensive
index of their characteristics (both physical and behavoristic) I could
describe just about any mixture.
Summary
If
nothing else, I'm hardly ever lonely in my dreams, and when I am
lonely, I'm not truly alone. My interactions with people in the
dreamworlds are more akin to my online interactions with
consensual-reality personages: more cultured, more comfortable, than my
face-to-face interactions, where I generally come off as shy and
borderline anti-social.
What sort of characters and creatures populate your dreams?