Same for me. Apparently I would have fairly lengthy conversations with my imaginary friend.
Couldn’t tell you a thing about them now. I have no memory whatsoever of it.
I always did have a vivid imagination.
Were you intentionally channeling Calvin’s Uncle Max?
I had a couple of imaginary friends: Billy, who stood by me when the other kids teased me at recess [I was the smallest in my class], and Rip Roarer, who helped me through thunderstorms and blizzards [well, it seemed like a blizzard to me].
I never thought of having imaginary friends. I would just read books.
As a child, I insisted that I didn’t have an imaginary friend, because Rocco, the three-inch tall invisible deer who flew around me in a little invisible plane, was real.
My sister, meanwhile, was jealous of me having an imaginary friend, so she pretended to have one even though she didn’t.
I didn’t have imaginary friends, although my mom always tells the story of my cow moose that I said lived in the broom closet. How I even knew the term for a female moose at the age of 2, I have no idea.
This is me.
I read everything in the house. Some days there just wasn’t reading material.
This months Readers digest just went so far for a kid.
I did have a 2 volume giant book of kids stories one summer about age 4-5 that was very entertaining.
I particularly remember the Aesop’s fable section. (They were very kid softened, I found out later)
I carried that book everywhere.
Hell, I was in high school and I made up an imaginary boyfriend. This was because my best friend was starting to grow into a gorgeous young woman and got all the male attention in our circle. The imaginary boyfriend was to console me for being the also-ran.
A lot of people in high school had imaginary boyfriends and girlfriends. They usually go to a different school, in Canada.
Mine ran alongside pacing the car whenever we went anywhere. He was very fast, and could jump anything; though I think he mostly went around buildings. We lived out in the country, and did very little in-city driving.
I got to live with real live cats!
We had cats, too! But the imaginary kitten was mine alone, and she talked to me.
As I listen to Bayliss pressing his “love you, treat” buttons incessantly. Real talking pets can cause problems.
Those imaginary ones too:
Son of Sam was kind of a scary outcome of this.
I had an imaginary friend named Tony. He was a little boy that lived in my mouth. Always telling me what hotel rooms to stay away from and crap like that.
REDRUM
^I was going to post just that. Wasn’t allowed.
That raises an interesting question. Can you pretend to have an imaginary friend? Can you pretend to pretend something? Or would your sister just have given herself an imaginary friend because you had one?
I ask becuase I’m not entirely sure I came up with the idea of an imaginary friend on my own. I vaguely remember learning about the concept and then having one–though I’m sure I did talk to myself before then. And I never did think he was real.
His name was Humpty, and he was two dimensional and intangible, and could basically just float around in my vision, ala @Grrr’s floater friends. But I think I got that idea from watching a special on the Muppets involving Waldo C. Graphic. a CGI puppet who flew around the screen and was intangible.
I had one, from ages c. 3-4. Weirdly, for such a verbally gifted kid (I started talking at 7 months) he just had a simple variation of my own name. I’d insist my parents set a place for him at the dinner table.
One day my mother noticed I hadn’t mentioned him lately or reacted if there wasn’t an extra place at the table. I told her that, since I now had a baby sister, that I didn’t need him anymore, so I had “sent him off to Mars.”
Zero memory of any of that.
I had numerous small imaginary friends called the Moonies. I seemed pretty attached to the idea, too. This would have been at such an early age that it seems now there was nothing malfunctional about it. I didn’t actually call on them to do real physical things, or introduce them to people, or anything like that, so I knew they were imaginary in, say, 3 year old or 5 year old fashion. This was all more than a decade before “Moonies” became the name for Unification Church people; no idea whence the name.
According to family stories, when I was three I used to talk to Minnie Mouse. They let her sit at the table during meals, unless I spent too much time talking and not enough time eating. Then my dad would pick her up by the nape of her neck and put her outside. I’d eat in a hurry and then go let her back in.