Imaginary Friends and Autism (please help this researcher!)

Post Reply New Topic

Now you've gone and told them our secret Should we tip off that (bogus) researcher?? Well, I'll not tell.

I also pretended to have imaginary friends. A girl I knew had one so I decided to have 3. I got as far as deciding to have them and naming them and that was it. I couldn't imagine them as friends to play with or talk to. I did make the mistake of pretending to have imaginary friends while at school. This was an attempt to appear normal. I told someone not to stand on my friend's desk, then I got made fun of.

This is Peahawk the Sweet Pea. He inspires me to eat fresh and healthy.

I never had one. Did anyone ever actually see or hear their imaginary friend? This reminds me of the tulpa phenomenon where you are creating a split personality that can be assigned an illusory physical form. It's pretty interesting, and has quite an active community.

http://tulpa.info/

This made me sad. Toilet plungers need love too.

It is of course a myth that autistic people are unimaginitive, as a quick look around this forum or any other group of high-functioning autistic people would tell you. It may be worth noting that the "traditional" idea of autism is based around studies of male children and many prominent researchers have been pointing out for some time that female autistics are frequently the opposite of this myth and tend to be absorbed in their imagination and with fictional worlds/characters. I don't particularly agree with the notion of a gender split where autistic traits are concerned, but the lack of studies of females, in which imagination is apparently seen more frequently, might be one reason why imagination in autistic people has been overlooked for so long.

I think it would be correct to say that my imagination is my most prominent special interest - I spend the majority of my time in it (and am always rather irritated when external events force me to leave it). I didn't have imaginary friends as a child as such, but I did create my own imaginary characters all the time - in fact still do in adulthood - and I think the imaginative mechanism behind that is the same.

I think it's a good thing that there are studies being done into autism and imagination. It can only help disprove the myths about the two.

Like I said in another thread, I last had an imaginary friend in my late 20's and probably still would if my husband didn't make such a good substitute!

I probably do have low "spontaneous imagination" but I can easily conjure up whatever images I like. I was never able to fall asleep before midnight and when I was a kid and had a bedtime I'd spend a couple hours every night making up stories (or rather movies) in my head. Well, I may have a spontaneous imagination too as cool images come to me when I'm tired but in that case I'm probably half asleep and dreaming.
I also remember, as a small child (3 or 4), believing that the stuff I imagined was semi-real or being confused about whether imagined stuff could become real.

I never had an imaginary friend.

This implies that trying to correlate imagination and play - especially in terms of abundance or sparsity - may be irrelevant with regard to people with autistic spectrum disorders. Non-ASD people also show wide variations in the quantity of imagination and play.

I don't think I lack "spontaneous imagination", in that I do spontaneously imagine things a fair bit -- however I have little inclination to role play or act out scenarios that I imagine (and never really did). Does it still count as "spontaneous imagination" if it's generally internal?

Is anyone emailing the researcher I quoted in my OP to put them straight that we do have imagination (I did)?

Oh, I've always had imaginary friends, ever since I was a tiny kid. I think my first imaginary friends were my stuffed animals. I also have imaginary friends now, as an adult.

My current imaginary friends are Dory, who is a stuffed dolphin, and Susie the coupe and Holloway, a character I made up myself who is based on the real-life actor Sterling Holloway.

Wilt from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends has been known to drop in and visit me every now and then, as well.

I had a whole imaginary country.

it would wage wars with other imaginary countries.

But no imaginary friend as such.

no imaginary friends. but I do have imaginary worlds.

Same here me and my world or 'Paracosm' as it is properly known have grown up together, we do everything together, I was 6 when I began to build this world. I direct my characters in their lives, they have never met me in their world I just watch, observe and feel what they feel. It plays like a movie often the same scene over and over again, once i get my teeth into a new scene I would rather replay it than watch a real movie..

Very high Spontaneous imagination 66 out of 66 for the two factor imagination test, oddly I cannot apply this to real life, my creative side drew me into architectural design and while I enjoyed designing the architecture of house I could never design to a brief with ease, a horrible clunky process.

from this imaginary to a real lab pet, cheers

a real toilet plunger they stuck into an all-too-real pile of goo in the loo it was my FRIEND, dammit