Art And Life Which Is The More Vivid?

My husband and I have taken up television series because going out in the evening becomes less attractive with advancing age.  So we have worked our way through The Good Wife and now are approaching the end of The West Wing. Of course along the way we watched The Sopranos and The Wire although the violence of the latter made me have such bad dreams that I stopped watching.  There are several others we have watched as well, all of them introducing us to an imaginary society and circle of friends which compensate for the emptiness of our social life here in Sarasota.  We haven't really met many people whom we like a lot or are age compatible but when you can spend evenings with Kalinda Sharma or Will Gardner or Diane Lockhart or Josh, Toby, CJ or the rest of the gang in the White House who needs to go to church suppers, mah jong parties and their like?  The people we encounter on these programs have become so much the furniture of my mind that I often identify one or another of them as someone in my personal circle.  What would Josh think of this?, for instance.  This identification reached a crescendo for me last year when a friend and I were strolling toward an art exhibit in Chelsea when we came abreast of a young couple with their child advancing upon us.  The young woman was so immediately and completely familiar to me that I instinctively made eye contact so I could smile and nod in her direction.  She followed suit although clearly mystified.  This went on back and forth until she paused, and I said: "Forgive me, but don't I know you?  You seem so familiar to me."  Smiling, she identified herself as a character on a series I had been watching for some time, and indeed I had in my imagination adopted her into the circle of my companions, although and this was amusing, I did not like her character at all, nor did she, the actress, much like her character, but in real life she was personable, attractive, and compelling.  After a round of smiles and salutations we parted, and reality impinged and her character left the social group I had created in my brain.