I get very disorientated whenever I have to reconnect with friends I haven’t met for years! Reality shifts and memories don’t fit in with present perception!

That's exactly what I'm talking about!

Something subjectively a bit similar was seen in the film Interstellar. Have you seen it? The main character had left the Earth and his twelve-year-old daughter on a mission to find habitable worlds in other solar systems. Due to the relativistic time dilation effect (it really happens in close to light-speed flight or very powerful gravity fields, the ship had spent a lot of time near a black hole) time had passed much more slowly on the ship than on Earth. He got back to Earth just in time to meet his daughter - on her deathbed - while not having aged much himself. Memories out of whack with reality. That's what long absences cause.