Imaginary friends

[Ichneumon]

I know the concept of imaginary friends from tv shows and cartoons as such, but I never had any contact with it outside of tv-shows and movies. My main question is, have you actually had experience with people in your real life who had or have imaginary friends or have you had or have one of your own. And if you, could you tell something about the experience?

[Tiger Duck]

Maybe not exactely, but I did had a stuffed animal/monster that I gave a lot more pesonality than it diserved, and I had the occasional conversation with him.

A few years ago I found out that toy was supos to be a lady :smallamused:

But he is still male to me even if he is named "Pretty"

[Traab]

Yeah ive never come across someone speaking to thin air or anything. At most ive seen kids talking to dolls and such. Although honestly, I havent seen a kid above the age of two with a single doll they carry around at all times. No Calvin and Hobbes types around my area!

[Linkavitch]

My little sister babysits one kid who has three or four imaginary friends. I've never observed it myself, though.

[Cyrion]

I used to have four or five imaginary friends- perhaps when I was around 2-3 years old. As I recall from stories my mom tells (I don't really remember much at all about them) they were "people" I'd talk to when I was playing by myself, and each one got his or her own personality, and I'd scrunch up my face differently or change my voice for each one. The only ones I can remember names of were the Monkey and the Witch. I think they were the product of an active imagination over social isolation or discomfort. At some point they just drifted away and were never heard from again.

[Starbuck_II]

I know the concept of imaginary friends from tv shows and cartoons as such, but I never had any contact with it outside of tv-shows and movies. My main question is, have you actually had experience with people in your real life who had or have imaginary friends or have you had or have one of your own. And if you, could you tell something about the experience?

My imaginary friends were visible (stuffed animals with own personality). They still have their own personalities. EVen brung my panda to college. He even wore his graduation gown on day I got graduated from my college yesterday.

[druid91]

Sorta, When I was younger I was superstitious about forests.

I think this was a product of reading tolkien.


Well that and luke my teddy bear.

[Savannah]

I didn't have imaginary friends per se, but I did have an imaginary world populated with characters that I controlled - kinda like writing a book, but it was all imaginary.

Oh, and I do have imaginary card partners, for whenever I get really bored and start playing cards with myself. They have to have different personalities to make it interesting - the one that sits to my left is really bold and always takes a risky move if it presents itself, while the one that sits across from me is very cautious and will never take a risky move unless the risk is very small, and the one that sits to my right is more middle of the road but also doesn't like antagonizing other players and will avoid skipping or otherwise harming a player if there is an alternative choice. They never talk or anything (thank goodness :smalltongue:) but they exist so that I can know how to play their hands and I don't have to play with three carbon copies of myself.

[pendell]

Well, I didn't have imaginary friends, but I *did* have imaginary enemies. After I watched Bakshi's adaptation of the Lord of the Rings, the scene that stuck in my mind was when the ringwraiths appeared in the hobbit's bedroom at Bree and slashed the sleeping figures in their beds.

...

I had a very, very, VERY hard time getting to sleep for weeks afterwards. I kept watching the closet for an ominous black cloaked shape to come out the minute my eyes closed.

So I had no imaginary friends. But I had imaginary enemies.

Well, okay. The way I finally got to sleep was by imagining myself protected by protectors with machine guns. So I guess that could be an imaginary friend -- but it wasn't the kind you're thinking of, I think.

Hey, some of us had disturbing childhoods.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Nameless Ghost]

The only imaginary friends I've had are characters in the stories I've written, however I never saw them as existing physically. Though I don't think there's really that much difference in it really, it's still creating a fictional character or nine and having them interact.

[Mando Knight]

I didn't have imaginary friends per se, but I did have an imaginary world populated with characters that I controlled - kinda like writing a book, but it was all imaginary.

I had a lot of this... though most of it was shared, by playing with my younger brothers.

[Fredaintdead]

I didn't have imaginary friends per se, but I did have an imaginary world populated with characters that I controlled - kinda like writing a book, but it was all imaginary.

Yeah, I'm 'guilty' of that too. Although I'd be fighting them with wooden weapons my granddad used to make for me. :smallsmile:
Maybe one day I should go back to that old shed and have a little play for old time's sake.

[Heliomance]

Not so much imaginary friends, but back in primary school my friend and I had an entire menagerie of imaginary pets. With superpowers, naturally.

...if memory serves, mine were all robots.

[Xanmyral]

Well, I've never seen any. I do have a friend who hallucinates, but not in a friendly sorta way.

Best I can give you is the characters I've made from several stories I write out of boredom, never a physical manifestation or a mock physical manifestation.

[DraPrime]

I recall having many great adventures with Superman when I was in preschool.

[MoonCat]

I had imaginary worlds. No friends in them, but a whole world. Also, talking to all my stuffed animals, and personalizing things so much I cried to throw away paper.

[Remmirath]

I had a lot of stuffed animals, toy dinosaurs, and a couple action figures that I gave personalities to ... oh, yeah, and one random imaginary dragon that didn't really have a basis in anything concrete (I based that off a dream I had, I think). So I suppose I did have some. That was, as I recall, up until I was about seven years old.

I certainly never thought any of that was actually real, and I don't recall ever talking to anything that wasn't there. It was mostly just something I did to keep myself amused when I didn't have a book to read or something else to do, or to get myself through tough situations by thinking about something else. As far as I remember, I mostly just made up stories about them but never wrote anything down.

[Lady Moreta]

I had imaginary friends when I was in primary school - earliest I can remember is when I was 7 and the latest was probably around 10 or 11, I don't remember exactly. Only difference was, my friends were fairy friends :smallbiggrin:

I can remember two distinct things. When I was 7, I used to pretend that everyone's desk in the classroom was their house and that we all drove between each other's desks and up to the mat and to see the teacher. I used to act it out too. I'd pantomine (very small gestures so people couldn't see me) leaving the 'house' and closing the door, getting into the 'car' and putting on my seatbelt, then I'd pantomine driving through the classroom. I thought it was great fun - to this day I still do it from time to time and I'm now in my late 20s.

The other occassion I must have been 9 or 10 and my only real friend at primary school was in another class, so I had no real friends in my class. I made up for the deficit with imaginary fairy friends... why fairies? I have no idea... but that's around the time I was really into Enid Blyton's The Wishing Chair and The Far-Away Tree books, which I think might have had something to do with it. I've always been a fantasy nut. I think I went with fairies because fairies were small enough that they could hang around my desk with me and not get squished by anyone else. And I did talk to them... generally only in my head, unless I was on my own. I distinctly remember one occassion walking across the field at school and having an out-loud conversation with my imaginary fairy friends. I'm kinda sorry now that I don't remember their names. They were awesome friends :smallsmile: and while I knew they were imaginary, they were very real to me.

Now I just have a big collection of stuffed toys, all of whom have distinctive personalities and each one is given a carefully-thought-of name when I get them. They've become my imaginary friends I think. And I will hug different ones depending on my mood. Clara the tiger is good for making me laugh. Teddy the (unimaginitively named) teddy bear is for when I just need a hug. Shara is my massive tiger I bought from Dream World, she's for when I'm cold and need a blanket. I could keep going, but I think I'll stop before I utterly embarass myself. :smallredface:

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

A year ago, a friend and I had a join imaginary friend called Greg. He was a cool guy.

[Trog]

<<
>>

...

There's this one troglodyte...

[LOTRfan]

I have a toy Elephant named Elephant (I was three, leave me alone). I used to give him his own personality, and I remember telling my mom that he was deathly afraid of the washing machine, so she wasn't allowed to wash him.

At one point, there was an entire world in my head where all my stuffed animals were alive and had personalities, similar to Winnie the Pooh....

[Obrysii]

I had two.

A old stuffed animal (it was made in '74) named Ruffy, and a true imaginary friend, a ghost named appropriately, Ghosty.

[AsteriskAmp]

When I was younger I used to talk to my plushies, though a number of them were human sized, then I got asthma and many disappeared, I continued talking to the survivors (which have fully fledged out personalities) until I managed to deal with my fear of darkness and solitude through psychotherapy. I still talk to them on ocassions, afraid they might feel lonely, and they are the best cared for things I own, they still get bathed and I have a small separate bed were all of them fit comfortably, they are kinda like my plushy family.

I used to have imaginary worlds with people on them and I'd get there when going bellow my blankets, there also inhabited the personalities of my plushies, again I stopped after dealing with my two main phobias since I stopped having the need to sleep completely covered in a blanket sarcophagus.

As for actual imaginary friends, I had only one, and it wasn't a friend proper, just an imaginary computer which happened to appear in places and would talk to me, providing trivia about random things, normally vaguely related to what was being said by someone around. To this day I still don't know how I managed to get amazed by random trivia spat by an imagined computer since I already knew what it was saying yet I didn't remember it somehow. It died around the point were I entered Middle School for reasons beyond me, it just sorta faded.

And yes, I am aware of the psychological implications of each of the above mentioned situations, I've gone over them several times, with and without psychologists involved.

[DM_for_once]

I had one when I was little. Of course at the time he was my invisible friend. Come to think of it he was a creepy little SOB.... how to describe him? Let's see, start with a beardless leprechaun, add the yellow zoot suit from The Mask, but instead of the hat with a feather it was a bowler hat. He also had three rows of very pointy teeth, and got very upset if you commented on his yellow bowler hat or scuffed his shoes. I didn't really have friends at the time and got picked on a lot. He never did tell me his name, though. (Yes, I realize that I made him up, so I get to name him, but at the time he seemed real enough and he was quite adamant about me not knowing his name.) You know what? I was creepy little SOB....:smalleek:

[ZombyWoof]

Let me dig out the chain of command for my umpteen dozen stuffed animals :smallwink:

[Dvandemon]

This is a little embarassing but my Imaginary friends were unimaginative copies of characters from tv. They would be what I watched recently and they were nice to me, they talked to me (It was really just me working multiple angles to solve a problem) and I could "turn on" what I heard, such as music, for them to hear.

[ghost_warlock]

When I was very young I had not only imaginary friends, but imaginary enemies as well. As has been said, I think it was a product of an over-active imagination and isolation. Spending your formative years alone in a tomb can do that, I suppose.

Although I don't remember much about them, I'm told that there were three imaginary humanoid friends, by the names of Blame, Dumb, and Jason. Not surprisingly, they were supposedly responsible for a lot of the poor behavior I'd get in trouble for. I find it interesting to note that I also have a cousin about my same age named Jason; so when something went wrong when he was around I suppose it would be a prudent idea to blame dumb Jason. :smallwink:

As far as my imaginary antagonists, I have vague memories of two. One, a dragon, was actually more of a wild card in that he was sometimes friendly and sometimes a jerk. The other, a gorilla, was always oppositional when he came around. I have a quasi-memory of needing to use the restroom but finding he was already in the bathroom and intentionally took his sweet time just to make me suffer.

No, I have never been diagnosed with schizophrenia, nor have I displayed any other symptoms of such of which I have been made aware. At least not since I was a young child, any way. :smalltongue:

[Eldan]

My parents claim I had one when I was young, but I don't remember it.

[nerd-7i+42e]

I had a hat and a pair of gloves which I was really attached to. The hat was named Fred, I think the gloves were named Mark and Gary. I always looked forward to winter when I could start wearing them. I treated them like kids; talked with them out-loud, allowed them to socialize with other hats and gloves, the whole thing. I think my family realized how unhealthy it was getting when in fifth grade I was literally in tears because I had left them in the car instead of bringing them into the movies so they could watch, and my mom wouldn't let me go back. I can actually remember the exact words my mom said: "Reality check: Fred's a hat." I immediately snapped out of it and wondered what was wrong with me. I still was slightly attached to them, and I was disappointed when I lost them, but it was never nearly as intense. Really, after that it was just my favorite hat and pair of gloves, not an imaginary friend.

Fred and the gloves had been preceded by a stick named Tommy, with whom I had a similar (albeit much shorter — our gardener threw it out without knowing that I was attached to it) relationship.

[Mauve Shirt]

I had a doll called Blue Baby. Blue Baby was replaced every few years, since I carried him around so much. I still have the 3rd or so incarnation on my shelf among a bunch of antique dolls. I played with plastic animals a lot, making them houses and imagining situations and such, but they weren't consistently named or really anything special to me.
I also had an imaginary friend I called Mikey Dude, and I have no idea where I got that name. I don't recall actually talking with Mikey, only about him. I'm pretty sure I just made him up to answer the question "do you have an imaginary friend?"

[Watchdog]

When I was a kid I had an imaginary friend named Bob who lived on the imaginary island of Beluga Land. The only other thing I remember is that everyone who lived on Beluga Land was required to be naked while cooking.

I was a weird kid.

[grimbold]

my cat has an imaginary personality if that counts

otherwise i often talk to myself or to other random entities who i believe are in the room
usually we debate over politics:smalleek:

[Fiery Diamond]

My imaginary friends were visible (stuffed animals with own personality). They still have their own personalities. EVen brung my panda to college. He even wore his graduation gown on day I got graduated from my college yesterday.


I didn't have imaginary friends per se, but I did have an imaginary world populated with characters that I controlled - kinda like writing a book, but it was all imaginary.


The only imaginary friends I've had are characters in the stories I've written, however I never saw them as existing physically. Though I don't think there's really that much difference in it really, it's still creating a fictional character or nine and having them interact.


I had a lot of this... though most of it was shared, by playing with my younger brothers.


Yeah, I'm 'guilty' of that too. Although I'd be fighting them with wooden weapons my granddad used to make for me. :smallsmile:
Maybe one day I should go back to that old shed and have a little play for old time's sake.


I had a lot of stuffed animals, toy dinosaurs, and a couple action figures that I gave personalities to ... oh, yeah, and one random imaginary dragon that didn't really have a basis in anything concrete (I based that off a dream I had, I think). So I suppose I did have some. That was, as I recall, up until I was about seven years old.

I certainly never thought any of that was actually real, and I don't recall ever talking to anything that wasn't there. It was mostly just something I did to keep myself amused when I didn't have a book to read or something else to do, or to get myself through tough situations by thinking about something else. As far as I remember, I mostly just made up stories about them but never wrote anything down.


I had imaginary friends when I was in primary school - earliest I can remember is when I was 7 and the latest was probably around 10 or 11, I don't remember exactly. Only difference was, my friends were fairy friends :smallbiggrin:

I can remember two distinct things. When I was 7, I used to pretend that everyone's desk in the classroom was their house and that we all drove between each other's desks and up to the mat and to see the teacher. I used to act it out too. I'd pantomine (very small gestures so people couldn't see me) leaving the 'house' and closing the door, getting into the 'car' and putting on my seatbelt, then I'd pantomine driving through the classroom. I thought it was great fun - to this day I still do it from time to time and I'm now in my late 20s.

The other occassion I must have been 9 or 10 and my only real friend at primary school was in another class, so I had no real friends in my class. I made up for the deficit with imaginary fairy friends... why fairies? I have no idea... but that's around the time I was really into Enid Blyton's The Wishing Chair and The Far-Away Tree books, which I think might have had something to do with it. I've always been a fantasy nut. I think I went with fairies because fairies were small enough that they could hang around my desk with me and not get squished by anyone else. And I did talk to them... generally only in my head, unless I was on my own. I distinctly remember one occassion walking across the field at school and having an out-loud conversation with my imaginary fairy friends. I'm kinda sorry now that I don't remember their names. They were awesome friends :smallsmile: and while I knew they were imaginary, they were very real to me.

Now I just have a big collection of stuffed toys, all of whom have distinctive personalities and each one is given a carefully-thought-of name when I get them. They've become my imaginary friends I think. And I will hug different ones depending on my mood. Clara the tiger is good for making me laugh. Teddy the (unimaginitively named) teddy bear is for when I just need a hug. Shara is my massive tiger I bought from Dream World, she's for when I'm cold and need a blanket. I could keep going, but I think I'll stop before I utterly embarass myself. :smallredface:

Wait... there are people who DON'T do these things? :smalleek:

(I still do some of them, and I just turned 22.)

[Lady Moreta]

Wait... there are people who DON'T do these things? :smalleek:

(I still do some of them, and I just turned 22.)

I'm 28 and I still do most of them :smalltongue:

Helped along, I'll admit, by my husband who has a knack for animating my stuffed toys... we have an odd marriage (fun though :smallbiggrin:)