Question of the Day: Imaginary Friends

[logansrogue]

Hey all. Read an interesting article on abc.net.au about childhood imaginary friends. Apparently, children who had imaginary friends are more creative when they grow up. Imaginary friends can also be toys that you imagined a personality to and spent time with. I had a whole band of toys that I felt were alive with their own personalities. I knew it was pretend but their little spirits were real in my mind as any character I've written about.

Did you have an imaginary friend as a child? Tell me about them!

Comments

[sir-devans.livejournal.com]

I had three. One was a quiet little boy called Goggler. One was a cool guy called Michael and there was this older guy, sort of in charge when the other's listened to him, I forget his name but he was a bit of a nerd.

[nicoli-dominn.livejournal.com]

I don't recall having imaginary friends. I just pretended I was someone else a lot (usually a dude), and I still have an alter-ego, after whom my LJ ID is named.

[starfyre01.livejournal.com]

I can't say that I remember having an imaginary friend (been too long, I guess, LOL!). I do remember reading quite a bit as a kid, and I think that's where the writing bug struck, because I'd write out missing scenes (with self-insert, of course, hee)...

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

That sounds more like a ghost friend than an imaginary one. :T

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Some of them, yes. You know what? Your friendship to those kids, if they were ghosts, could have helped them pass over into the Spirit (what most people call Heaven. I call it "the Spirit" cause it's just an ineffable energy place that I don't have words for). And that's a really beautiful, wonderful thing.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Also, do a search for a show called "Psychic Kids" on Youtube. I felt a lot better about some of the experiences I had as a kid after watching that show. Might help make sense of some things for you.

[apolla.livejournal.com]

I didn't have imaginary friends exactly, though I tried the concept. What I did have was a fiercely intense imagination regarding the future...

And I had Barbie. I know that a lot of people HATE Barbie and Sindy dolls and they have a lot of good points, but man I built up a whole world for those girls with so much detail and it still rattles in my head: The mechanic sister, the chat show host sister (a bitch), so on and so forth. I lived in that world for YEARS.

Maybe I did have imaginary friends after all...

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Heh, I was the same. I had a Stormer doll and a bunch of Barbies, a C3PO and a Ken. There were love triangles and quadrangles and they had a band called "The Cool Ice Blocks" and they were in little Barbie-sized magazines that I'd make and distribute amongst all my toys and there'd be posters all over the room when a gig would be on. I'd make up a little nightclub and they'd perform with all their equipment (I got a rock band set one year) and it was so much fun! I still dream about playing those games. :)

I think we both had huge imaginations! LOL!

[melalucci.livejournal.com]

Oh my gosh, that sounds so fun! I also used to act things out with my friend Katie, and a few others. Let's see...in third grade I remember being Space Dogs at recess (and Space Cats for a while, too). Then, with Katie, we played FernGully a LOT (of course I was Crysta :-P I always took the good parts), and dolls, where we'd be single moms with exes who kept trying to get back in the picture, and Barbies. But really, we liked Skipper and Kevin much better than Barbie and Ken. We did the typical high school activities with them, always naming our characters after whatever show or movie we were into at the time (I even had Darlene and David from "Roseanne" once!), or naming the guys after our own personal crushes from real life. The guys and girls had to start out hating each other, or at least pretending to. Sexual tension was the best! We did a half-hour Barbie movie called "Four of Hearts" that is unintentionally hilarious. And I played with the Barbies on my own, too.

When I got to middle school, we also started doing scenes from Sailor Moon (guess who I was :-P we wrote part of a script for a movie and my grandma made my costume, but the project fizzled out) and the DragonLance books. I was soooo in love with Tasselhoff. LOL!! And I loved being my own female kender character.

We actually played the dolls game all the way until I was in tenth grade...but then the magic was just gone. ::sigh:: Oh! And with my cousins, I used to play Indians in my grandma's backyard with all her cool tiki accessories and stuff, and then we'd also play Sailor Moon....and XENA. I would alternate between being Gabrielle, Callisto or Velasca. ^_^ And my boyfriend was either Joxer or Autolycus. We did little plays for our relatives all the time! My favorite was when I got to be Autolycus for the preaching scene in "A Tale of Two Muses." The crowd ate it up!

...more info than you probably wanted.

[apolla.livejournal.com]

'had'? I think we still have them and I think that they continue to serve us well.

The only 'problem' I had with my doll-based world was that whenever I got a doll i REALLY liked, I'd make her one of the sisters in my Wakefield family (guess where I got THAT from!). I think I ended up with something like 21 siblings with at least four sets of twins!

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Hah! Yeah, we still have our imaginations! I don't know why I used the word 'had'.

Ah, retro-fixing shit. What isn't possible when you're a kid?

[shantari.livejournal.com]

The first fantasy world I ever created was basically my room populated by my toys. Two of my dolls were sister princesses, one was nice and one was kinda spoiled and not so nice. But then the latter got nice later on and kinda stole the show making her sister a minor character. Furniture became mountains or in the case of my bed, the castle. Oh and there was definite shipping going on. :D But mostly adventures. I don't remember any of the villains, though I'm pretty sure I hade a couple of them. It was very 80's cartoon adventureish actually. XD

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Heh, I did the same. My bedroom was Toyland. Every toy was a citizen! :D

[callistra.livejournal.com]

I did. I had an imaginary Unicorn.
I don't remember a lot about it, but I do remember patting it and talking to it a lot.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Damn. I wish I had an imaginary unicorn. :(

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

My imaginary friend was called Brinky and it really bugged me that my parents always referred to him as Blinky.

Brinky was so small that he could walk beween your pressed together thumb and forefinger and it would seem like a chasm to him. That was probably why no-one could see him. ;)

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

That is so adorable!!

[melalucci.livejournal.com]

All my favorite characters from movies, TV and books were my imaginary friends. :) The one I remember most vividly is Bright Eyes from Pound Puppies. I LOVED her. I know once when I was about four or five, my aunt took me and two other girls to a water park and I told them Bright Eyes was in the trunk...they were weirded out. Haha!! When I got a bit older (lower elementary grades), my imaginary friends were the characters in whatever thing I was most into, and I would play the role of a character myself...feel free to laugh, but the only scene I can think of at the moment was pretending I had a monster like the one in "Little Monsters," and I think his name was Howie. He was green, though, not blue. ;)

And when "Drop Dead Fred" came out, I tried desperately to cultivate a new imaginary friend, Drop Dead Stephanie, but I was too old and just couldn't keep it up.