Imaginary friends

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I was looking at another topic, on creativity, and it got me thinking about this.
I am eighteen and I have an imaginary friend. I have had imaginary friends since I can remember. Bobby is very real to me, and though I know that he is not really there, I could have a conversation with him for hours.
I think this was because I couldn't interact well with people my age, or really anyone in general other than my parents, and the crushing loneliness forced me to construct a new person who understood me.
Does anyone here have an imaginary friend? Have any of you had one in the past? And do you think my retention of my friend for such a long time is psychologically unhealthy?

I am seventeen, I too have an imaginary friend. Actually I have more than one, I often make up stories and adventures involving them. I base my imaginary friends on TV characters. My current imaginary friend is called Alan. I don't think there is anything wrong with having imaginary friends as long as you know it is not real.

one thing i never understand is do you acctualy see him/her and if so if you touch him/her do you acctualu feel something or is it like your going true his/her body?!

Sometimes it's based on TV characters for me too. Bobby is actually from one of the Law & Order series.



I do actually see him, though sometimes it is more vivid than others. Sometimes he is just in my mind's eye. When he touches me it is like really being touched. Sometimes he cuddles me when I'm having a meltdown. Yay coping mechanism!

cool i always tought people who had imaginairy friends never knew taht they where fake and mostly being very insane but it seems i whas wrong 0.o

Lol...yeah, I think that's the line between imaginitive and schizophrenic.

explain what the diffrence is (im not so very well known with such sort of issuese)

If you're schizophrenic, when you see or imagine something, you don't comprehend that it isn't really there. It is so real to you that you cannot tell the difference.
If you're imaginative, the experience feels very real, but the whole time you know that your friend really is a figment of your imagination.
So the difference is whether or not you can tell the difference between reality and imagination.

I'm religious. Does that count?

I don't have an imaginary friend but I do discuss things with myself in my mind. There is no separate ego involved in this though.

yes.

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I don't have imaginary friends now...but I did when I was younger...he lived far away though ...so we had to write letters --> <--

and all of my many, many stuffed animals were my imaginary friends as well. a doctor said I was allergic to dust though, so my parents packed them all away never to be seen again. I only got to keep two....the others are still hidden somewhere from my parents moving around to new homes and such.....

I remember reading "The Velveteen Rabbit" and that gave me relief because I wanted now to focus all my attention on only one specific stuffed animal so that he might come to life. I still have him. He's a dog named Brownie....still not moving ....but I thought he could understand and I just needed to find a way to animate him.

psychologically unhealthy?

if the coping mechanism helps you, and you are not delusional, then why not? i think if it got to the point where you never wanted to speak to anyone else because you had a date with bobby then that might be a problem. but if you are alone, and lonely, and need a friend and don't have one, then chatting with yourself/bobby seems like a fine thing.

i am interested that you picked the name bobby. maybe name didn't matter, maybe you just liked the look of the law and order guy- but i also had a bobby for an imaginary friend. she was one of a pair- booboo and bobby were twins. (i had like 20 imaginary friends as a kid- all pairs). booboo was more of the ouch, the weak side of the coin and bobby was the survivor, like a cork bobbing to the surface. so i hope your Bobby is a survivor, and is a strong and calm voice of reason inside your head.

He is a survivor. And a very reasonable person, thank god. Does it make sense to describe a person as both whimsical and down-to-earth? Anyway, yes, I think it's a great name for him. It has comforting syllables.

I will be 18 in November, and I still have imaginary friends. They are all from Hellsing and Trinity Blood. The number varies depending on my mood. I recognize the fact that they are a figment of my imagination and that they are, in a sense, mental dolls that I play with as a coping mechanism. But I'm as emotionally attached to them as I would be to friends in the real world. The nice thing about having imaginary friends is that they will never leave you and they will never be mean to you.

Last edited by IdahoRose on 18 Aug 2008, 7:08 pm, edited 2 times in total.

are you really serieus so much imaginary friends 0.o lol seeing a cartoon character running in real life must be very wierd (no offence ^^)

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Last edited by IdahoRose on 18 Aug 2008, 4:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.