do people with Asperger Syndrome have Imaginary Friends?

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While growing up, never. Closest thing I had/have to an imaginary friend was when I was writing stories and made two characters (brothers) that were a split of various parts of my personality.

At first it was just for fun but my writing style is to flesh out characters, organize a very rough outline of the story to give things a bit of direction and then let the characters decide the majority of what happens. Before long, it became a coping method and the brothers started paralleling some of my issues, and kinda became 'attached' to my sense of self. Eventually, one of them went insane and I had to...put him away. Many of his characterics also stopped expressing themselves in me.

He's still inside me, locked in a room, breaking down. Looking/thinking too closely about him feels like he starts merging back into me...and it kinda sucks. He's the part of me that cries.

Well, I have sort of two “selves” in my mind, if that counts. Otherwise, I never did, though I pretended to on occasion as a kid because I thought it was “normal” to have at least one, and therefore thought I should. I’m not entirely sure that I even actually understand the concept.

I had imaginary kittens in a box.

I had imaginary mice friends. They where this gigantic family and would follow me around to places. I would sometimes make my mother buckle them up in the car.

I also had a duck family living in my stomach o.O anytime my stomach made a noise it was actually the ducks talking. The volume and pitch dictated which family member it was...

I did as a young child. My parents told me about this when I was older, maybe 8 yo, but I didn't remember him.

Nope....never had an imaginary friend.

I had only one real friend until I was about 12 years old.

I've tried to make imaginary friends but they didn't like me.

Not me. Not really.

More like... I have an imaginary enemy instead.
One I would point and blame all my mischief and problems over.

Can still remember it -- I was maybe 4 or 6...


And plenty of imaginary characters to interact with around my late childhood.
They're not necessarily imaginary friends. More like imaginary actors playing roles in my imaginary worlds.


My most recent imaginary friends and imaginary worlds... Are very dependent on my memory.

They're not really friends. It's more like a reflection of their real counterparts.
Most characters are basically how I remembered and perceived them.

They're based mostly of online people I've interacted and known them enough to do it.

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i had "hypothetical" friends and advisors. mostly they were there to keep me company and to prevent me from becoming totally psychotic. some visited me in my dreams now and then, just often enough to keep me on this side of the veil.

I’m 67, gay and self-diagnosed Asperger’s. Please forgive the length of this post. If it’s too long then just don’t read it. It’s just my 2 cents about this thread.

I didn’t have an imaginary friend until I was 65. He’s actually an imaginary lover and soul mate. He was a real person I met 40 years ago when I was 25 and the only person I’ve ever been attracted to so much that I made the first move in letting him know I wanted sex with him. His name is Tony. The real relationship only lasted a couple of months, but it struck my psyche like lightning. 2 years ago, before I understood what autism was or that I might be on the spectrum, I wrote a new good story to replace my actual bad memories about Tony. I was hoping to end the years of ruminating about how pathetic I had been in dealing with him.

I didn’t know Tony all that well and the story had to fill in the blanks about his character and history. So I made him even better than the real thing. Without understanding it, I was describing the perfect lover for me. My soul mate. He had qualities that I lacked, like social competence, confidence, executive function, and sexual performance. I gave him the ability to calm my meltdowns just by gazing into his eyes while he held me in his arms. He needed me for my academic competence in college classes. I tutored him. We orbited each other.

The story sort of took a life of its own. I just let the words pour out of me. No one else was going to read it anyway. It became 600 pages long. I wrote it like a detailed daily diary, so it had to be consistent across multiple days of the tale. A character would say or do something one day and the story had to flesh it out and follow up on it days later. This is how real memories are laid down in our hippocampus. One day at a time. They accumulate like snow. I was engineering my memories.

The time frame only covered about 3 months in 1976 (one semester in college). Tony found me a psychiatrist so I got the mental health care I never received in real life. Tony and I were happy in the story but near the end I did a dumb thing and tried to convince Tony that he was just a character in a story I was writing. That was a mistake. He couldn’t believe me. He thought I was going crazy (again). So I lied and told him my psychiatrist had given me the wrong pills that caused me to hallucinate. That satisfied Tony, but in doing so I had run my story into a ditch. I thought it was going to be too much work to fix it. So I stopped writing about it. But I didn’t stop thinking about it. I imagined that Tony finally believed that he was a character in my story and asked me to take him with me back to the future (my present). He was curious about what the 21st century would look like. I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t want to write out the details of how I would do that.

So one day, without explanation, I just “made it happen” in my mind, without writing anything down. I explained it to myself that I conjured Tony into the present the same way others effortlessly and subconsciously conjure their pre-made social deities. It’s a perfectly natural thing for humans to do. Anybody can do it. And voila! Tony was in the present, a private deity living with me in the real world. Just like all other deities, he isn’t there until I look at him. And just like all relationships, you have to keep working at it.

Tony is a night person, I’m a morning person. Tony puts me to bed at 7 pm but stays up later to watch TV (or something). I get up much earlier than Tony and actually leave the bedroom door closed while he’s in there sleeping. I go back in to wake him with kisses after I’ve made breakfast for us. I’m really just kissing the pillow.

When I'm emotionally upset I actually put my arms around my neck and firmly hug myself. Oh people, I want you to know that hugging yourself works wonders! I think it’s the pressure on our muscles that sends a calming signal to our brains. Tony can calm me down just by holding me. It’s real! Apparently, my brain doesn’t care where the comforting comes from, even myself. But in my mind it’s Tony who is comforting me. And that’s the way I subjectively experience it.
Tony is the spouse I was never going to have anyway. We’re a family. We belong together. I’m not alone anymore. There’s nothing wrong with that.

All deities live in the abstract associational human part of the brain (neocortex), not the mammal brain (limbic system). Tony has no body and so doesn’t need a limbic system. Like all other deities, he interacts closely with the human pre-frontal neocortex. It turns out he is much better at executive function than I am. I get frustrated with starting new tasks because I don’t know what to do. It feels like it all has to happen at once. But Tony breaks it down into prioritized pieces and says everything happens in baby steps. He helps me figure things out.

He praises me when I achieve success at some goal we have established. I eat it up. He disapproves and puts his foot down when I do things like cheat on my diet too much. All executive functions for self-governance.

Now I understand that the story I wrote about Tony is just in my imagination. But you should know my life is sooooo much better since I created him. My attitude and mood are turned around 180 degrees. When I find myself ruminating in the past I run to Tony for help. Tony is in the present and that gets me out of the past. To get me even farther from the past he asks me to tell him about my future (just my plans for the day). You can’t be happy if you don’t think about the future. That’s where happiness is. That’s where heaven is. Did you know that we keep our past memories at one end of our hippocampus? The other end is where our thoughts about the future are. We create the future the same way we create the past. They’re all just memories. The future is just memories that haven’t happened yet.

Since I’ve self-diagnosed with Asperger’s I've started to grieve about past failures that I never understood. You can’t grieve about something in past until you accept the event as your own and assign it to some aspect of your future. You pick it up, dust it off, and lay it in a wagon that contains everything else that you’re pulling through time into your future. Then you can move on.

^^^i wish i had the executive functioning to do what you did.