The Appearance of People in Dreams

One thing I have been thinking about recently is when and why people start to appear in dreams, and also when they disappear from them. This morning I had my first dream (at least that I can recall, I suppose) where my baby Liam was conceptually and visually in it. Liam, as of yesterday, is 5 months old. Before then, I had talked with my wife Lindsay on how I hadn't had a dream with him in it yet; Lindsay hadn't either. We talked about how even with each other, we didn't have dreams of the other person until in our marriages, although we had dated for 11-12 months before marrying. It has got me thinking about what tends to hold for a person to appear in our "dream space." I remember that I use to dream of high school friends, and still do of some of them from time to time, but the majority of them no longer come into my dreams. This is certainly the case of middle school or very young childhood friends. I haven't dreamed of my grandmother who passed away almost 4 years ago in a very long time.

What is it that qualifies one to be a character in one's dream space? Is it that they have a certain enough "reality" in one's mind, or that they are an important enough figure in one's life? There may be something to this, but I have had many dreams in the past couple of years where the characters in the dreams have no resemblance to anyone I am close to. It is possible they were pulled from someone I glanced at in passing, or it possible I simply conjured their looks up, them having no correspond figure in the waking world. If the former, it is not the intensity of familiarity that draws a person into the dream space. Though perhaps the intensity affects the probability of appearing in the space. After all, I cannot say that I have recognized a person that was not in the waking world as reappearing in another dream. However, Lindsay, my parents and many friends have been recurring characters in my dreams. What makes them more recurring? The familiarity/intimacy with these people? Often people point to dream symbolism, and here they might suggest that one associates that person more with a certain thing about life. I think we tend to over-symbolize the dreams, since many of my dreams are also straight-forward narratives. There are no "caged eagles," suggesting my lack of freedom, for instance. Anyway, thinking about the appearance of Liam in my dreams has been a source of amusement. Have any of you thought about this?