Imaginary friends?

[ThatSkyWing]

Sometimes when I'm lonely I think of my imaginary friend Katie Sullivan. She has autism, like me. Has anyone else made up a person or creature to comfort them when they feel alone?

I have, I've had many imaginary friends through the years, but the one I think about the most is Flower Petals the flying stingray, she's loud and a lot like Kazooie(from Banjo-Kazooie), and she always knows the right thing to say.

 

[Daniela]

Well, when I was a realy small kid, I had a lots of them. But then only 2 stayed.

Kedrick and Sara.

Kedrick is like the cool guy...that sometimes yells at people, but sometimes is funny too. And caring. Sara is the inteligent one, a litle shy Id say. But cares a lot.
the 2 of them, acording to the times of my life have helped me a lot in a lot of things.

The funny thing is that they are a male and a female, and as a person I dont have a gender in my head. I gess maybe they have something to do about it.

 

[tree]

When I was 7, for awhile I had an invisible cat.

Probably pretending my sled was a horse doesn't count.

I liked imagining that a giant white rabbit named Bonnie
(giant sized like Harvey the Pooka) would be friends to me
when I was 10 years old.

When I was 12 I made a list of all the things DeeDee would
have. She was fancy & old. 24 years old. Which was pretty
old to have all those dolls that I wanted & didn't have, but
she had a sweater & necklace, too. She wasn't my friend.
She was probably just a Mary Sue.

In my late 20s I kept a notebook of technique for manufacturing
characters. I used numerology to assign characteristics to names that
I had selected from a name book. I assigned birthdates, rank in
family birth order, and 'flaws/conflicts' based on ideas from
A Guide to Rational Living. None of these characters were "friends."
I liked the activity of making them up, though.

I wonder what I might have done if I'd had polyhedra dice then.

 

[illud]

when I was a kid I tried so because I saw it on movies, then I started writing, so I guess those imaginary friends are just characters now.

 

[BIMOG]

When I was at primary school I distinctly remember having an imaginary companion who was called Steven. He was aged 16 but he was really just my primary school boy's idea of a 16 year old, basically just a taller version of a nine year old. It's just dawned on me, as I'm writing this, that he was approximately 7 years older than I was and in reality I did have a real brother who was seven years older than me. I wonder now if perhaps Steven was my imaginary idealized version of the older brother who I'd like to have had rather than the one I was actually stuck with.

 

[Myron]

I had imaginary friends for many years. All of them were ripped straight out of my favorite cartoons and anime. When I got into my 20s I experienced an emotional crisis that lasted for 5 years because I was so torn over whether or not I should give up having imaginary friends altogether.

Deep down I knew that I had reached the point in my life when my need for complexity in social interactions had exceeded what an imaginary friend could provide. But still, I worried that if I gave up having imaginary friends, I would be losing an important part of myself. Whether that "important part" was my inner child, my creativity, my uniqueness, or all of the above is open to speculation.

Nevertheless, I decided to use a form of "exposure therapy" to become accustomed to the idea of not having imaginary friends anymore. I'm not going to lie, it was very anxiety-inducing for a while. It took ~ 6 months, but I was finally able to let go.

I am pleasantly surprised by how much better I feel without them. Sure, I'm still interested in the lives of fictional characters, but I don't imagine interacting with them anymore. I now want to become a writer - for fun, not profit. (Yay fanfiction!) I figure that becoming a writer is still playing around with characters, but in a more grown-up way.

 

[Myway]

I still have imaginary friends, but are getting rid of them soon. I don't like people looking at me like I am crazy talking to myself.

 

[Datura]

I tried immaginary friends, but it always felt empty to me. I prefered my characters to exist in a world seperate from my own where I could replay scenarios over and over again, fine tuning them until they were perfect, or fleshing out the lore and mechanics of the worlds they inhabited. I suppose I have never outgrown this.

Perhaps the closest thing I have to an immaginary friend is this recurring fantasy I have of watching TV with Shakespear. I am always eager to find out what he thinks of the shows I like. Ultimate it's kind of exhausting though as I need to constantly eplain cultural references and modern technology to him.

 

[joshodude1308]

My imaginary friends are much like the friends you stop talking to once you leave school. I really need to get back in contact with them...