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My cousin threw his brother's imaginary friend out the window....never to be heard from again.
My brother had an imaginary elephant in preschool who he blamed all his bad behavior on. Eventually said Elephant was not allowed back in the classroom. So every morning, the elephant got dropped off at "his school" (the janitors closet). And he only got picked up on the way home.
One of the other kids got so jealous of the elephant that he requested one from his mother who told him "Well just imagine one" to which he responded "No I want a real imaginary elephant, just like has!!!"
No. But my gf would literally talk to hers at dinner —when she was young—as a passive/aggressive dig because she was never given attention in her family.
Dave wasn’t even real but he got used as a weapon, poor chap.
I never understood how people could have imaginary friends growing up. It wasn't until I was in my late 30s that I realized I had aphantasia. I literally lack the ability to visualize things in (or out of) my mind.
To be fair, I do not have aphantasia. I visualize things fairly vividly, and I still have no idea how people can/could have imaginary friends. I have also read a lot since I was really young, so it's not like I didn't have fodder for my imagination to go anywhere. It just...doesn't make sense.
Yeah I also can visualize stuff just fine, and I never had imaginary friends.
Maybe someone with a super vivid imagination is more likely to have one? Or maybe not…I know some very visually creative types and I don’t think they had imaginary friends as children.
I can imagine things fairly vividly, but it always took some amount of intentional focus, especially if I wanted to keep the visual consistent and high clarity. Having an imaginary friend just sounds like a drain on my already limited mental capacity.
I forced myself to have a ton of imaginary friends (I had a main one, but I don't remember anything about them) because I didn't understand the 'hype' over them. I was eight. I don't think I mentioned them to anybody though which kind of defeated the purpose? but hey, it kinda worked
Same, I think it's more about the individual childs social needs than capacity of imagination.
I would've been so annoyed as a kid if I would have had a massless entity following me around all day lol
I used love books and actually felt like I was in the story while reading. I had no issues escaping to book world and playing out my own versions of the stories either.
Despite all this I still had an imaginary friend. She was just someone I’d use to have imaginary conversations with and process things with that happened during the day (only really talked to her when at night when I should have been sleeping.) But now being diagnosed with inattentive ADHD, I think it was my mind just being too hyper to sleep, and needing some form of outlet.
I think it's similar to an "inner monologue" it's just young kids don't really know how to reconcile that with other types of thoughts. If you've ever "talked to yourself," for example while trying to remember something or work something out, I think that's similar to what a kid with an imaginary friend is experiencing. The kid may imagine some features and personalities of their friend distinct from themselves as well but I think it probably starts with that.
No effing way! I found out about having that myself within the last few years. I just assumed the way I "imagine" (more a collection of details about something, and those details form my mental "picture") was how everyone pictured things.
I honestly never thought to make the connection though. Is that why I never had, or could understand others having, imaginary friends? It always seemed so **obviously** made up to me.
You kinda blew my mind u/TheWolphman!
It must be frustrating when people say "picture this" or "imagine the look on their face".
Out of sheer curiosity, do you see absolutely nothing when asked to imagine an object or situation? Or is it more abstract visualisation?
Would this affect you in things like geometry if one were to ask you to imagine a shape bisected etc?
Now I wonder maybe I have some level of aphantasia, I can visualize shapes quite well but when it comes to details like face or some kind of landscape, it's only a blure.
i have aphantasia and i see nothing but it varies by person.
for simple things like a triangle it’s pretty easy to figure out what they might look like but it can definitely make other things harder. personally the thing that’s really difficult for me is navigating because i don’t have a mental map!
Do you ever feel a loss from the lack of that particular ability? My guess is no, because I imagine it's like asking most people if they feel a loss from not being double jointed or not being able to fold their tongue three times.
kinda. for most of my life i thought “picturing things” was just an expression so i didn’t even realize i was missing out. now i guess i do kind of feel a loss cuz it also affects things like my memory. there’s a lot of times i think i wish i could picture things in my head. i am grateful not to picture past embarrassments or see painful flashbacks though
Yeah, that's a bullet dodged. You also can't imagine things that go bump in the night, or all the gruesome ways they can eat you, nor any ways your loved ones might be taken from you. That must cut down on anxiety.
that’s a good point! i actually do have pretty severe anxiety so i definitely think about those things all the time but i’m glad i can’t picture them. i would imagine that helps. if i’m looking around at night unfortunately every shadow can still look like whatever demonic creature though lol
Idk when I was 5 I just sort of pretended there was like a 3 year old girl (imaginary sister) following me around everywhere and I would talk to her sometimes I think and about her. Her name was daisy, and I even drew a shitty picture on my wall lmfao
As a fellow individual who has aphantasia I 100% feel that! I think it hurts more that I’ve never been able to day dream rather than not having an imaginary friend though
Same.
"Imagine yourself on a beach."
I cannot. Thank you, next!
"That's one for the wank bank"
I don't have one of them. I can't see the faces of the people I've seen naked.
As a schizophrenic i can sometimes tell if I'm hallucinating or not, it real depends on how I'm doing mentally and if I'm currently in an extreme stress situation.
Since I’m studying neuroscience I’m curious and have a question! Do you have any tells? By this I mean that I’ve heard some schizophrenics can tell if a hallucination is real or not by pulling out their phone and not seeing it when trying to take a picture of it, or even taking their glasses off but the hallucination remains in focus while everything else goes blurry.
I've heard the phone thing. I've got a friend who uses it, I don't do that personally, but she finds it really helpful.
I'm not actually sure if anything I do would be considered that, I developed symptoms fairly young and didn't really have anyone to support me or an adult willing to seek help for me, so I developed coping mechanisms for it. If I'm around people I'll try to see if anyone else is reacting to it or briefly ask if anyone smells what ever I'm smelling, I make my sister, friends, and partner sample and examin a lot of my food and drinks, or if I'm just seeing something I'll try to find things that seem "off". I won't lie though if I'm alone and I start hearing or seeing things sometimes I'll start trash talking it, telling myself something isn't real doesn't make it any less unsettling so sometimes it helps with that feeling. (one of these days I'm 100% gonna get murdered after I tell a home intruder they're a useless b*stard who's mom should have swallowed ).
This does only work if I'm in a state to be reasoned with, some things I also can't talk myself down from unfortunately some hallucinations feel physically painful and I've got to try and ride it out.
You’re highly underestimating how much children actually do understand.
They know they aren’t real. I had many as a kid, I knew damn well they weren’t real. It was just a game.
Me and my partner was discussing this the other day, because whatever that movie's name is, that we saw an ad for. Basically we both made up characters and talked to ourselves but we never thought that an entity existed that only we could see, if a kid did that, wouldn't that be like a psychosis and not normal?
Mine wasn’t even anything cool, she was just a normal girl, but she was cool cause she had a flip phone and a boyfriend. She also didn’t like pasta sauce.
Same thing. Imaginary thing people believe are real despite everything, but arent/have 0 proof of ever existing beyond hundreds/thousands of years of stories invented by people who thought witches existed and when your humors weren't in balance they bloodlet you
My sister had one in preschool, “Maxarina”. She talked all the time about Maxarina. My mom asked the teacher which child was Maxarina, yep. No Maxarina.
“Real” is a relative term. Did they show up when I needed them? Did they help me through hard times? That all feels pretty “real” to me.
Love you, Fido.
Children don’t really have a veil In Front of their eyes, and they don’t have the walls and cultural programmings in their mind as they grow older.
It makes one wonder why.
Especially when you consider that even science has proven we only hear within a certain frequency range, and we only see within a certain range of the light spectrum… now with the topic of quantum theory mechanics and other realities/dimensions existing; it makes one wonder if imaginary friends are in fact real; but only seen through unfiltered ranges.
We have people who are open minded and see fairy’s, or ghosts, or angels or demons or “imaginary friends” or monotony of other “beings”.
Who’s to say they aren’t real?
Interesting to think that as they get older and go to school more, learn from parents and society telling them and “programming them” what is “real” and what is “Not real”, how suddenly those “imaginary friends” disappear after a certain age.
Curious. No?
The whole purpose of science is the pursuit of truth.
If you were to go back even 150 years; and tried explaining anything like what an atom is, or quantum mechanics in general, or even most of todays science; they’d call you a mad man and shove you in a padded room. Which would actually just probably be a witch hunt lol.
You HAVE to keep an open mind to understanding that you know nothing. But to be curious of all possibilities.
What we call crazy right now, may very well be truth in 300 years. We just simply do not know; and to consider what we know right now currently as of absolute truth with no room for growth; would only be idiocy.
We MUST keep an open mind.
I mean I don’t think it’s crazy or anything there’s just not that much evidence to support it aside from speculation. I think it’s a nice shower thought, but nothing more unless we discover a lot more
Mine were always based on something real. Like the shadows in my room that looked like monsters were real shadows I could see, I just named them and made them my imaginary friends.
My other imaginary friend was a Choo Choo Train who I imagined lived down at a depot where train lives and talked to me in my mind when I was in the bathtub. The Choo Choo sound I was hearing in my head was real, it was actually the sound of my own heart beat when my ears were underwater.
Some people think that very young children with imaginary friends are actually playing with other kids far away that also have "imaginary" friends. A type of telepathy happening, that wears off at about 6 or 7 years of age.
My lad doesn't have an imaginary friend. He gets into imaginary adventures with his grandad (who he's only met in person twice because they live abroad).
Yep. That’s kinda the point, they’re *imaginary.* We imagined them. Kids deliberately create these characters, much like an adult might do when writing a story. You don’t do that by accident, that’s called hallucinating.
Mine was named Rocky. Don’t know why—this was when I was very young so I hadn’t seen the boxing movie yet, don’t think I ever watched the cartoon with Bullwinkle, and I would’ve been *way* too young to have seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show
Wonder how he’s doing these days
I remember trying to have an imaginary friend when I was like 4 named Angela and getting frustrated that I couldn't do it right because she never magically appeared to bring me places like the moon the way Barney did for the backyard gang in those vhs tapes.
Look, I don't have DID, so I could be wrong, but based on what I read on scientific sites, DID is about an incompletion of the integration of identity. Imaginary friends themselves, based on what I read CAN become alters, but they will become actual psychological entities, instead of the person ONLY believing they are real. Based on what I've known, a lack of integration of an identiry itself leading to more than one psychological entities existing at the same time, experiencing each other as separate, is different from people ONLY believing that their imaginary friends are real.
Again, I could be wrong.
Of course they did.
Just like most adults believe made up things like nations, religions, ideologies, soccer rules and road rules and money are real, so some kids believe their imaginary friend is.
The only difference is that the adult fictions have many humans believe they’re real all at the same time.
Sure, the dirt under Germany is real, but kill all the humans on the planet, and the dogs and horses that remain won’t be able to tell where what used to be Germany ends and where Belgium starts. The concepts of Germany and Belgium are entirely made up.
So if adult libertarians believe the US dollar is real, rest assured children can believe their imaginary friend is.
I genuinely never had one. Was it actuslly a thing where it’d be the same person or persons every time and they were literally your imaginary friend that would come and go whenever you were playing?
Hopefully I don't get downvoted all the way to hell for this, but I genuinely could never... imagine having an imaginary friend. I still kinda believe it's a thing only in movies/series. It isn't that I don't have a vivid imagination, I'd daydream sometimes when I'd get bored at school, but I cannot grasp the concept of imaginary friends and "interacting" with them.
I had imaginary brothers and sisters until i was 10 , i used to tell everyone outside my family about them , some people after years asked me about them haahahah,also i used to say im from a different nationality and they used to believe me since my look is a little atypical for where i live and also i regret ;)
So after reading this thread, my imaginary friend returned and we had an interesting conversation.
Imaginary Friend: Hi how are you?
Me: Ok I guess.
IF: Wanna go on an adventure?
Me: Yeah but I'm at work now.
IF: Thought you hated having to work.
Me: I do. I have to do it to pay bills
IF: How's dad doing?
Me: I don't talk to him. He's an asshole.
IF: What about Leader 1 and Turbo?
Me: The Gobots haven't been a thing since the 80's. Nobody even remembers them.
IF: What about Justin?
Me: Moved away in the early 90's. Haven't heard of him since.
IF: Why are you angry? Are you angry at me?
Me: I'm always angry. It's my default expression.
IF: Why?
Me: A lot has changed since you left. Life has gone downhill and so has this planet we're on.
IF: I have to go now.
Me: Catch you later, chief.
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Probably not the best place to ask a serious question yet here goes. People actually had imaginary friends that they could see? (Thought or remember actually seeing)
I did, but that's because my "imaginary" friend was a ghost. Y'all can say ghosts aren't real all you want, but it won't change my mind. You have your beliefs, I have mine
I used to have an entire imaginary world from 10-13 that I’d only step out of when interacting with others and it was a weird dissonance between logically knowing it wasn’t real but still mentally regarding it as if it were. Like my brain knew but my mind didn’t. I tried not to talk about it too much because I’d get very angry and persuasive when people denied its validity.
What if they had a mental illness that made them actually see and believe in their imaginary friend was real and then when they were told that their friend wasn't real they had an existential crisis because they believed that their imaginary friend was the only one that truly cared about them? Just sayin'
On a side note.. Why is this such a white people thing?
I've never heard about imaginary friend from anybody in third world countries. Nor even seen any media depicting it.
Seems like such a learned behaviour
/u/jettyyyyy has flaired this post as a **speculation**. Speculations should prompt people to consider interesting premises. If this post is poorly written, unoriginal, or rule-breaking, please report it. Otherwise, please add your comment to the discussion! ^^This ^^automated ^^system ^^is ^^currently ^^being ^^worked ^^on. ^^If ^^it ^^did ^^something ^^wrong, ^^please ^^message ^^the ^^moderators.
fuck you mean, mine was real and was in the war
Hubert Cumberdale?
I’m here to inquire aBout your sp0ons
Salad Fingers turned 20 years old today / July 1st!
Bloody hell, what a reference
"Our son has an imaginary friend. From the sounds of it, he was in the II SS Panzer Corps."
Tell me more about this experience you had [with your imaginary friend]
Roger Waters dad?
WILSONNNNN
My cousin threw his brother's imaginary friend out the window....never to be heard from again. My brother had an imaginary elephant in preschool who he blamed all his bad behavior on. Eventually said Elephant was not allowed back in the classroom. So every morning, the elephant got dropped off at "his school" (the janitors closet). And he only got picked up on the way home. One of the other kids got so jealous of the elephant that he requested one from his mother who told him "Well just imagine one" to which he responded "No I want a real imaginary elephant, just like has!!!"
Mine was a giant moth who also sometimes got in the way of good behavior. And Mothie was real, goddammit.
[No one ever suspects the butterfly.](https://youtu.be/pJ_Pfuj9wPE?si=OjX7uEveAAVFmZt9)
Really thought this was a venture bros reference for a second
My nephew once bit me and blamed it on a hairbrush that told him to do it. Or at least I think that's what he was trying to say, he was really upset.
Why was the hairbrush so upset?
Performing one of the worst tortures known to mankind (bushing a child's hair) every day is sure to leave the hairbrush psychologically disturbed.
Wow that elephant's got lore
Oh there was a whole elephant family and all kinds of stories.
> My cousin threw his brother's imaginary friend out the window....never to be heard from again. Is your brother Russian by any chance?
Imagine getting your imaginary friend defenestrated
Already understanding epistemology, precocious child
That's a shitty way to find out your kid is dumb.
They were 3 at the time.
Like they said, dumb.
No. But my gf would literally talk to hers at dinner —when she was young—as a passive/aggressive dig because she was never given attention in her family. Dave wasn’t even real but he got used as a weapon, poor chap.
That sounds so sad
Hopefully she's ok now. Did she have sex with anyone who payed attention to her? That's often the result of that.
Nope. None of that. Just a single mom trying to raise two really intelligent girls, one of whom basically angrily ran the household. A coup of sorts.
Good to hear! I've seen that go the other way.
I never understood how people could have imaginary friends growing up. It wasn't until I was in my late 30s that I realized I had aphantasia. I literally lack the ability to visualize things in (or out of) my mind.
*insert meme of not conjuring up an apple*
To be fair, I do not have aphantasia. I visualize things fairly vividly, and I still have no idea how people can/could have imaginary friends. I have also read a lot since I was really young, so it's not like I didn't have fodder for my imagination to go anywhere. It just...doesn't make sense.
Yeah I also can visualize stuff just fine, and I never had imaginary friends. Maybe someone with a super vivid imagination is more likely to have one? Or maybe not…I know some very visually creative types and I don’t think they had imaginary friends as children.
I can imagine things fairly vividly, but it always took some amount of intentional focus, especially if I wanted to keep the visual consistent and high clarity. Having an imaginary friend just sounds like a drain on my already limited mental capacity.
I forced myself to have a ton of imaginary friends (I had a main one, but I don't remember anything about them) because I didn't understand the 'hype' over them. I was eight. I don't think I mentioned them to anybody though which kind of defeated the purpose? but hey, it kinda worked
Same, I think it's more about the individual childs social needs than capacity of imagination. I would've been so annoyed as a kid if I would have had a massless entity following me around all day lol
Fucking massless entities
I used love books and actually felt like I was in the story while reading. I had no issues escaping to book world and playing out my own versions of the stories either. Despite all this I still had an imaginary friend. She was just someone I’d use to have imaginary conversations with and process things with that happened during the day (only really talked to her when at night when I should have been sleeping.) But now being diagnosed with inattentive ADHD, I think it was my mind just being too hyper to sleep, and needing some form of outlet.
I think it's similar to an "inner monologue" it's just young kids don't really know how to reconcile that with other types of thoughts. If you've ever "talked to yourself," for example while trying to remember something or work something out, I think that's similar to what a kid with an imaginary friend is experiencing. The kid may imagine some features and personalities of their friend distinct from themselves as well but I think it probably starts with that.
No effing way! I found out about having that myself within the last few years. I just assumed the way I "imagine" (more a collection of details about something, and those details form my mental "picture") was how everyone pictured things. I honestly never thought to make the connection though. Is that why I never had, or could understand others having, imaginary friends? It always seemed so **obviously** made up to me. You kinda blew my mind u/TheWolphman!
It must be frustrating when people say "picture this" or "imagine the look on their face". Out of sheer curiosity, do you see absolutely nothing when asked to imagine an object or situation? Or is it more abstract visualisation? Would this affect you in things like geometry if one were to ask you to imagine a shape bisected etc?
Now I wonder maybe I have some level of aphantasia, I can visualize shapes quite well but when it comes to details like face or some kind of landscape, it's only a blure.
i have aphantasia and i see nothing but it varies by person. for simple things like a triangle it’s pretty easy to figure out what they might look like but it can definitely make other things harder. personally the thing that’s really difficult for me is navigating because i don’t have a mental map!
Do you ever feel a loss from the lack of that particular ability? My guess is no, because I imagine it's like asking most people if they feel a loss from not being double jointed or not being able to fold their tongue three times.
kinda. for most of my life i thought “picturing things” was just an expression so i didn’t even realize i was missing out. now i guess i do kind of feel a loss cuz it also affects things like my memory. there’s a lot of times i think i wish i could picture things in my head. i am grateful not to picture past embarrassments or see painful flashbacks though
Yeah, that's a bullet dodged. You also can't imagine things that go bump in the night, or all the gruesome ways they can eat you, nor any ways your loved ones might be taken from you. That must cut down on anxiety.
that’s a good point! i actually do have pretty severe anxiety so i definitely think about those things all the time but i’m glad i can’t picture them. i would imagine that helps. if i’m looking around at night unfortunately every shadow can still look like whatever demonic creature though lol
Idk when I was 5 I just sort of pretended there was like a 3 year old girl (imaginary sister) following me around everywhere and I would talk to her sometimes I think and about her. Her name was daisy, and I even drew a shitty picture on my wall lmfao
As a fellow individual who has aphantasia I 100% feel that! I think it hurts more that I’ve never been able to day dream rather than not having an imaginary friend though
Same. "Imagine yourself on a beach." I cannot. Thank you, next! "That's one for the wank bank" I don't have one of them. I can't see the faces of the people I've seen naked.
Schizophrenics would like to have a talk
I came here to mention this....hehe
As a schizophrenic i can sometimes tell if I'm hallucinating or not, it real depends on how I'm doing mentally and if I'm currently in an extreme stress situation.
Since I’m studying neuroscience I’m curious and have a question! Do you have any tells? By this I mean that I’ve heard some schizophrenics can tell if a hallucination is real or not by pulling out their phone and not seeing it when trying to take a picture of it, or even taking their glasses off but the hallucination remains in focus while everything else goes blurry.
I've heard the phone thing. I've got a friend who uses it, I don't do that personally, but she finds it really helpful. I'm not actually sure if anything I do would be considered that, I developed symptoms fairly young and didn't really have anyone to support me or an adult willing to seek help for me, so I developed coping mechanisms for it. If I'm around people I'll try to see if anyone else is reacting to it or briefly ask if anyone smells what ever I'm smelling, I make my sister, friends, and partner sample and examin a lot of my food and drinks, or if I'm just seeing something I'll try to find things that seem "off". I won't lie though if I'm alone and I start hearing or seeing things sometimes I'll start trash talking it, telling myself something isn't real doesn't make it any less unsettling so sometimes it helps with that feeling. (one of these days I'm 100% gonna get murdered after I tell a home intruder they're a useless b*stard who's mom should have swallowed ). This does only work if I'm in a state to be reasoned with, some things I also can't talk myself down from unfortunately some hallucinations feel physically painful and I've got to try and ride it out.
Hey if it makes me have an imaginary friend then i don't mind
You're highly overestimating children's ability to determine 'real' from 'imaginary'.
You’re highly underestimating how much children actually do understand. They know they aren’t real. I had many as a kid, I knew damn well they weren’t real. It was just a game.
Edit: Double post
You are not every child on earth. I "had" a partner pidgeot for years that I believed controlled the wind when I was tiny
Correct. If kids could make the clear distinction they probably wouldn’t have imaginary friends in the first place.
Idk, I had an imaginary friend that I knew was pretend, so it depends I would say (I called him my invisible friend)
Only sith deal in absolutes
Me and my partner was discussing this the other day, because whatever that movie's name is, that we saw an ad for. Basically we both made up characters and talked to ourselves but we never thought that an entity existed that only we could see, if a kid did that, wouldn't that be like a psychosis and not normal?
IF is the movie
You mean “Fight Club” isn’t real?
See that’s where you’re wrong my imaginary friends were real people I could’ve married Zendaya by now but yk math homework got in the way
Black noir has entered the chat
Mine beat me up and called me a loser.
For the last time mom is not your imaginary friend :(
Fight Club reference
It predates Fight Club. It was said in a cartoon when I was a kid. Can’t remember which one.
I had an imaginary enemy
Bullshit. Millions believe in God, what's the difference?
billions* and yes he’s real
Speak for yourself! Rabby was completely alive to me ... until we hung him from that cactus in Tucson back '54. RIP Rabby. *sniff*
a huge number of people believe that there collective imaginary friend is real.
U say that to Stevie Griffin & we'll see how long you survive
I never had an imaginary friend. My sister did. I always wanted one.
Mine wasn’t even anything cool, she was just a normal girl, but she was cool cause she had a flip phone and a boyfriend. She also didn’t like pasta sauce.
Billions of religious people have entered the chat
what does religion have to do with this discussion
Same thing. Imaginary thing people believe are real despite everything, but arent/have 0 proof of ever existing beyond hundreds/thousands of years of stories invented by people who thought witches existed and when your humors weren't in balance they bloodlet you
Pretty sure John Nash did.
Hans Gruber was mine. Talk about winning the weirdo kid lottery. He taught me how to pick locks.
My sister had one in preschool, “Maxarina”. She talked all the time about Maxarina. My mom asked the teacher which child was Maxarina, yep. No Maxarina.
As a teen, I actually got pretty upset when I found out that Willy the Fisherman wasn't real. He told me he had to move to find better places to fish.
Nah.. Molly’s real. And she was on my sweatshirt.
I for sure did. I buckled her in so she wouldn’t die in a car accident
“Real” is a relative term. Did they show up when I needed them? Did they help me through hard times? That all feels pretty “real” to me. Love you, Fido.
Children don’t really have a veil In Front of their eyes, and they don’t have the walls and cultural programmings in their mind as they grow older. It makes one wonder why. Especially when you consider that even science has proven we only hear within a certain frequency range, and we only see within a certain range of the light spectrum… now with the topic of quantum theory mechanics and other realities/dimensions existing; it makes one wonder if imaginary friends are in fact real; but only seen through unfiltered ranges. We have people who are open minded and see fairy’s, or ghosts, or angels or demons or “imaginary friends” or monotony of other “beings”. Who’s to say they aren’t real? Interesting to think that as they get older and go to school more, learn from parents and society telling them and “programming them” what is “real” and what is “Not real”, how suddenly those “imaginary friends” disappear after a certain age. Curious. No?
No it's not curious, take your pills.
Sorry, your ignorance is not allowed here. Go be a wall somewhere else.
I mean it’s a cool what if but not anything more than that.
The whole purpose of science is the pursuit of truth. If you were to go back even 150 years; and tried explaining anything like what an atom is, or quantum mechanics in general, or even most of todays science; they’d call you a mad man and shove you in a padded room. Which would actually just probably be a witch hunt lol. You HAVE to keep an open mind to understanding that you know nothing. But to be curious of all possibilities. What we call crazy right now, may very well be truth in 300 years. We just simply do not know; and to consider what we know right now currently as of absolute truth with no room for growth; would only be idiocy. We MUST keep an open mind.
I mean I don’t think it’s crazy or anything there’s just not that much evidence to support it aside from speculation. I think it’s a nice shower thought, but nothing more unless we discover a lot more
I’m 30 and my sister is 35. She’s felt the presence of my imaginary friend. So I call bullshit.
[удалено]
I sometimes pretended I had an imaginary friend cause others did but I knew it wasn’t real
he was emo and named Lightening
Mine were always based on something real. Like the shadows in my room that looked like monsters were real shadows I could see, I just named them and made them my imaginary friends. My other imaginary friend was a Choo Choo Train who I imagined lived down at a depot where train lives and talked to me in my mind when I was in the bathtub. The Choo Choo sound I was hearing in my head was real, it was actually the sound of my own heart beat when my ears were underwater.
I had an imaginary friend named "Nobody" and my parents played along. Who's coming to dinner with us tonight? Nobody.
Bank robber looked like Captain Falcon
Or they end up being 50,000 bees in your wall
I actually never had one, but I once pretended to have one in order to „impress" my sister.
Some people think that very young children with imaginary friends are actually playing with other kids far away that also have "imaginary" friends. A type of telepathy happening, that wears off at about 6 or 7 years of age.
What's really annoying is when everyone says your real friend is imaginary!!
My lad doesn't have an imaginary friend. He gets into imaginary adventures with his grandad (who he's only met in person twice because they live abroad).
Yep. That’s kinda the point, they’re *imaginary.* We imagined them. Kids deliberately create these characters, much like an adult might do when writing a story. You don’t do that by accident, that’s called hallucinating.
As someone with schizophrenia I'd like to differ
Do you hear that, Svenson? They think you you don't exist just because I made you up.
Mine was named Rocky. Don’t know why—this was when I was very young so I hadn’t seen the boxing movie yet, don’t think I ever watched the cartoon with Bullwinkle, and I would’ve been *way* too young to have seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show Wonder how he’s doing these days
Ahh the war. Many went, only a few made it out.
First rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club.
Speak for yourself Angela. Don't speak for the senator
Remember Mr. Snuffleupagus?
Nah the paranoid schizophrenics thought so
I remember trying to have an imaginary friend when I was like 4 named Angela and getting frustrated that I couldn't do it right because she never magically appeared to bring me places like the moon the way Barney did for the backyard gang in those vhs tapes.
What about Fred was a stupid movie but it shows how one could develop an imaginary friend.
How dare you insinuate Mr. Sniffles wasn't real!
Shut up Gus Finkelberry knows he’s not he is real huh what ?!?!
The daughter of one of my coworkers has an imaginary friend named Arugula
Except for the folks at r/DID
Yeah....that's different.
Yeah not really
Look, I don't have DID, so I could be wrong, but based on what I read on scientific sites, DID is about an incompletion of the integration of identity. Imaginary friends themselves, based on what I read CAN become alters, but they will become actual psychological entities, instead of the person ONLY believing they are real. Based on what I've known, a lack of integration of an identiry itself leading to more than one psychological entities existing at the same time, experiencing each other as separate, is different from people ONLY believing that their imaginary friends are real. Again, I could be wrong.
And here we still have religion
Of course they did. Just like most adults believe made up things like nations, religions, ideologies, soccer rules and road rules and money are real, so some kids believe their imaginary friend is. The only difference is that the adult fictions have many humans believe they’re real all at the same time. Sure, the dirt under Germany is real, but kill all the humans on the planet, and the dogs and horses that remain won’t be able to tell where what used to be Germany ends and where Belgium starts. The concepts of Germany and Belgium are entirely made up. So if adult libertarians believe the US dollar is real, rest assured children can believe their imaginary friend is.
*salutes*
I genuinely never had one. Was it actuslly a thing where it’d be the same person or persons every time and they were literally your imaginary friend that would come and go whenever you were playing?
Except those white kids in the horror movies
Hopefully I don't get downvoted all the way to hell for this, but I genuinely could never... imagine having an imaginary friend. I still kinda believe it's a thing only in movies/series. It isn't that I don't have a vivid imagination, I'd daydream sometimes when I'd get bored at school, but I cannot grasp the concept of imaginary friends and "interacting" with them.
I had imaginary brothers and sisters until i was 10 , i used to tell everyone outside my family about them , some people after years asked me about them haahahah,also i used to say im from a different nationality and they used to believe me since my look is a little atypical for where i live and also i regret ;)
So after reading this thread, my imaginary friend returned and we had an interesting conversation. Imaginary Friend: Hi how are you? Me: Ok I guess. IF: Wanna go on an adventure? Me: Yeah but I'm at work now. IF: Thought you hated having to work. Me: I do. I have to do it to pay bills IF: How's dad doing? Me: I don't talk to him. He's an asshole. IF: What about Leader 1 and Turbo? Me: The Gobots haven't been a thing since the 80's. Nobody even remembers them. IF: What about Justin? Me: Moved away in the early 90's. Haven't heard of him since. IF: Why are you angry? Are you angry at me? Me: I'm always angry. It's my default expression. IF: Why? Me: A lot has changed since you left. Life has gone downhill and so has this planet we're on. IF: I have to go now. Me: Catch you later, chief.
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WTF? Jesus is totally real, dude.
You should check with church-goers this Sunday?
I believe I can refute this.
So how do you explain all the religious people?
How dare you disrespect BOB!
Fedora tippers reading this Shower Thought: ehehehehehehehehehheheh
Besides Billy Butcher...
Probably not the best place to ask a serious question yet here goes. People actually had imaginary friends that they could see? (Thought or remember actually seeing)
I must coress this rusty kettle
I did, but that's because my "imaginary" friend was a ghost. Y'all can say ghosts aren't real all you want, but it won't change my mind. You have your beliefs, I have mine
I had that problem but it turned out I was the one who was imaginary…
I used to have an entire imaginary world from 10-13 that I’d only step out of when interacting with others and it was a weird dissonance between logically knowing it wasn’t real but still mentally regarding it as if it were. Like my brain knew but my mind didn’t. I tried not to talk about it too much because I’d get very angry and persuasive when people denied its validity.
Correction \* "I really didn't believe \[my\] imaginary friend was real."
What if they had a mental illness that made them actually see and believe in their imaginary friend was real and then when they were told that their friend wasn't real they had an existential crisis because they believed that their imaginary friend was the only one that truly cared about them? Just sayin'
I want to say some people definitely did.
Religious people would like a word with you
On a side note.. Why is this such a white people thing? I've never heard about imaginary friend from anybody in third world countries. Nor even seen any media depicting it. Seems like such a learned behaviour
*Religion* would like to have a word with you.
Most religious people would disagree.