There’s a new film coming out, called “IF” which assume Imaginary friends were real. Cool, and imaginary friends being real has been done before.
But IIRC, I didnt have one, and I was an only child. Is having an imaginary friend common? How about my fellow SDMBers?
I sometimes imagined the adventures of made-up characters, but I don’t think I ever imagined interacting with such a character.
Well, yeah, like in a game. And I talked to my pets and my fave stuff animals. We made up games with little plastic animals.
Like that for me too. What would they say to me that I didn’t know already? The other people in my head is a different matter.
I had imaginary friends when I was young, but I also had a vivid imagination. My older brother was more serious, had no imagination, and had few if any imaginary friends. I think it’s about how active and vivid your imagination is.
“My imaginary friend’s parents say I don’t exist.”
– A quote from long ago on the Straight Dope. (I said it once while walking with friends and some people passing the other way started laughing.)
I have no memory of it, but my parents said I had an imaginary friend.
I don’t think that I ever had a purely imaginary friend, but as a little boy, I definitely did give a personality to, and have conversations with, my stuffed dog, Fleegle.
(I wasn’t an only child, but my only sibling was born when I was 3 1/2 years old.)
I had several. Two were magical creatures who lived in the bas relief flowers on our plaster mantel. I also had imaginary twin sons. One was good, and the other was bad, so I was always shipping him off to my grandmother’s. (She had a sharp tongue and no patience.)
I’m 42 and I feel like my friends now are imaginary.
I haven’t had any, but in the last few years I’ve had sort of recurring dreams with recurring characters who I frequently run into at social events in my dreams.
I had a horse. But I’m pretty sure I knew he wasn’t the standard sense of real.
Hey, I had an imaginary horse, too! In fact, I had three horses from the book Black Beauty. We ate Cheerios every morning. At some point, I also had an imaginary kitten. I also had an imaginary boyfriend during early adolescence, and my diary entries were in the format of letters to him.
I was a weird kid.
My younger brother had one, with dire consequences.
There weren’t any neighbor kids his age, so if we weren’t doing things where he couldn’t tag along, he needed to create his own thing. That happened to be an imaginary friend named Louis. Louis was his daytime companion.
Unfortunately, Louis had an angry father, known as “The Two-eyed Cyclops,” who would materialize soon after bedtime. There were four of us boys upstairs, our mother not due home from work until after 11, and our dad getting some time to finally relax with the TV. But then the Two-eyed Cyclops would arrive and my brother would start screaming. Every night for weeks.
At first, leaving the bedroom lights on placated his torment, but steady that failed. He could only be left to scream himself to sleep, after which he’d wet the bed.
On one fraught night, our dad was at his wit’s end. He burst into the bedroom and waived the double barrels of his shotgun around the air. “I chased him under the bed!” Then, with my brother screaming on the bed, Dad shoved the muzzle under it and let off both barrels. “There, I killed him. Now go to sleep!”
But my brother didn’t react to two blank shotgun shells being discharged directly underneath him by drifting off into cozy sleep. “You can’t kill him! He’s invisible!”
Later in life, I’d meet people to whom my own childhood, assumed normal by myself at the time, seemed strange.
I beat my imaginary friend to death.
I had an imaginary friend who refused to play with me because he was too busy with his imaginary friend.
Many. I was left by my siblings as they went about their routines, a bunch.
I wasn’t allowed their freedom.
So, of course I made up friends. Sorta like a Peter Pan world. They flew and created adventures for me. They had magic but it was limited. And they commiserated with me during the “oh woe is me” moments.
I’m sure it saved my parents having to listen to me carry on and on.
They felt they were doing the best for me. I knew nothing else, so mostly I dealt with it. I suppose healthily. No one’s ever told me it was not.
I used to tell my kids these adventures I went on as stories. They loved them.
My son went all out on this, and had an imaginary school for a while, when he was around four. It for some reason was called Sea School
It had teachers, friends, enemies, random classmates. He’s quite imaginative.
I had eye floaters as a kid. I was sure these eye floaters were the manifestation of my imaginary friends.
I guess it was because it was something I could see that no one else could. Which made sense to my little child brain.
I had enough trouble making real friends, so I didn’t have the confidence to create fake ones.