My OP is my question and my cite.
When kids have “imaginary friends,” do they literally see another creature there or do they just pretend that they have a friend?
I had an imaginary friend until around age 5 and I knew he was imaginary. I did not hallucinate seeing a person who was not there, even though I was adamant that room be left for him at the table.
My imaginary friends were based on my real-life friends from pre-school. I did visualize them as “we” were playing, but I knew that the imaginaries weren’t the real version of my school friends. I remember having a “fight” with one of the imaginaries once; I’d probably argued with the real-life Emily earlier in the week. I think my weekends were just spent reenacting the previous week’s events.
I don’t know if I ever had non-human imaginary friends.
When I was about 5 years old I had an imaginary friend, I couldn’t see anything, I think it was just a way of getting by.
I once was a maid to a little girl who had an Imaginary friend she named Johnny O; one day she quit talking about him and we asked after awhile what happened to Johnny O and she replied,“I flushed him down the toilet”.
Monavis
I had imaginary little people for friends. I knew they were imaginary. However, there was something more gratifying about imagining them than I would enjoy today. I think the incentive to imagine things is much stronger in youth, though the confusion about what is real is no stronger.
Jonesy was completely to invisible, though I acted like I could hear him talking to me.
I didn’t see them with my eyes like a hallucination, but I “saw” them in my head*. When I got older, I learned that this is called “visualization” and grownups spend a lot of money to learn how to do it.
*For example, think about your childhood home for a second. Picture it in your head - the windows there and there and the door and the color and the trees that grew in front…you “see” it, right? You could count the windows if I asked you how many there were. But, if you’re like most of us, you don’t actually see your house floating in front of your computer screen blocking my words. That’s how I “saw” my imaginary friends.
Invisible when he feels like it, or at least that’s what Harvey tells me…
The first time I met my imaginary friend, I did “see” him: It was a trick of shadows and such which vaguely resembled a deer, if you squinted at it the right way. After that, though, he was always invisible (even to me, though I generally knew where he was).
I did, though, genuinely think he existed, to the point that I was jealous that my sister had imaginary friends, but I didn’t (since Rokko the three-inch tall invisible deer that followed me around was real). Later I learned that my sister didn’t even actually have imaginary friends at all; she just pretended she did to annoy me.
I don’t care what anyone else says–Cecil Adams is as real as any of you are! And he’s my friend…
Play acting, though I did scare the shit out of myself once when I lost track of what I was doing and actually poured two glasses of coke even though I was the only one in the house. Glad I was alone, I’d have an embarrassing time trying to explain my way out of that one.
My mother tells me that I actually used to speak in a different voice when my “imaginary friend” answered me. I knew there was no one really there, though. I could picture them in my mind but I couldn’t actually see them.
I am told that my imaginary friend that I described when I was asked what he looked like was the spitting image of my long dead great grandfather. The only extant picture of him was down in Florida, which I did not visit until I was 6 years old christmastime. [I really remember that trip, grandparents lived near sarasota fla, and I saw *little people* in the airport… wow, adults MY size!]
He used to read me stories, or so I reported. He lasted from about the summer after I turned 4 until the summer we moved back to the states, just before I turned 6.
I have no idea about my brothers 2 imaginary friends [named Piggy and Dolly] at all, I just remember mom and dad telling us about our imaginary friends when my brothers youngest developed an imaginary friend and Bro was worried about it.
Back in the early 60s the child shrink didnt seem to be worried, but the 80s one my brother hired seemed worried, and they got a visit from a social worker from the town shortly after. sigh I guess imagination = abuse?
I had an imaginary friend called Demon. (I pronounced it “Demmon”, so luckily my parents didn’t get a priest in to shout “The power of Christ compels you!” at me.) I have no recollection of how I interacted with him, though I’ve been told I blamed a lot of breakages and spillages on him - but I do know the only time I ever saw him was in a dream - he was a butterfly and lived behind the clock face of Big Ben.
My little sister claimed to have a friend called Claudia Butterworth, who lived in her wallpaper. She admitted that Claudia wasn’t real, but she could imagine her playing games with the animals in the wallpaper design.
It depends, for many children the imaginary friend has a physical being…is name might be “Fred” but his body is in his teddy (or related soft toy person).
Many children have a huge attachement to a “cuddly toy” that to them has a very real personality. That cuddly toy is just the physical example of young childrens need to have many attachments, the imaginary friend in a well worn body.
My imaginary friend only “existed” when I was talking with her on the phone. And I never actually heard her or believed she was real.
Of my three children, only my eldest ever had an imaginary friend. Multiple ones, actually. She talked about them from the age of about 2 to 5. She got her little sister to play along with her sometimes, but the l’il sis never developed imaginary friends of her own, and would only interact with them when the older one mentioned they were “in play”.
One incident does stand out in my mind, though. I was playing bridge with some friends of mine at a New Year’s Eve party when she was 3 years old. We were beginning to review a particular hand in a post-mortem when my daughter came over to me from where she had been playing with other kids and said, “You should lead a trump.”
Now bridge is a fairly complicated game with many angles, but this comment was 100% germane in the context of the discussion: I had been “on opening lead” (the one out of four players to play the first card of the hand), and was wondering if I had made the right choice. There had been a trump suit (there isn’t always one), and I had not chosen to lead a trump. Yet I had not said out loud the words “lead” or “trump” yet in the discussion, not within her hearing.
Surprised, I asked, “Who said that? Was it Uncle Marco” (one of my friends who had been playing)?
“No, Cucca said that.” (Cucca being her imaginary friend.)
“What! Cucca told you to lead a trump?”
She got a very wicked gleam in her eye and said, “No. Cucca told YOU to lead a trump!”
Apparently this Cucca was a bridge player! :eek:
A few weeks later her imaginary friend gained an imaginary companion, “Dino”. On impulse one day I Googled for “Cucca” and “Dino” in the same search, and found that there was a university in Italy whose faculty had two professors named Cucca and Dino. Hmmmmmmmmm. I wonder if they play bridge together?
I’m told that I had imaginary friends when I was young (a family of small, Gumby-like creatures that lived in the walls), but I also remember embellishing quite a bit for the sake of the adults, since they seemed to get a kick out of the whole concept. People would ask me to tell them more about my imaginary friends, so I’d make up all kinds of weird shit to please them. I honestly don’t think I ever interacted with these creatures, much less saw them. I always thought of them as fictional characters in a story I enjoyed telling to adults.
I still have imaginary friends. Well, no, in fact they’re real, I swear. Just can’t shake their hands 'cause of that damn straitjacket.
From what I understand, these are actually two largely unrelated phenomena. As I understand it, most children will have some “transitional object” (often but not always something soft like a blanket or teddy bear, but it can be anything), but a transitional object need not have a “personality” associated with it, like an imaginary friend does. Again from my personal experience, I never made any particular connection between Rokko and my Softy Cover (a soft woven baby blanket I treasured).