Between the ages of 3 and 5, I had a lot of imaginary friends. One of them was named Tina and she sat with me on the bus to preschool. A real kid wanted to sit next to me
and i told her she couldn't because Tina was sitting there, so when she pretended to pick her up and throw her to the front of the bus I cried.

Kayla

I had my imaginary friends and sisters when I was much older than most kids are when they have them. I was about 9-12 when mine were developed. I convinced people that I was a triplet. My sisters names were Leigh and Sonya. I dropped Sonya after a while and just had Leigh. Sometimes I was Leigh and sometimes I am me. I also had a "imaginary" brother named Toby and he saved my life a lot. My bestest friend was Kenzi, and I actually tried to set Kenzi up on dates and drew pics of her. I'm 27 now and I still have Kenzi around. I actually made a myspace for her and we talked back and forth. Every year, every few months or so, my daughter (7) and I have a birthday party for our imaginary friends (i didn't tell her about mine, she just had them one day at around 3 years old.) We make a cake on the special day and make cards and make presents and take pictures. I should post them up somewhere.

Lokke

When i was a little kid i had an imaginary shark/whale friend who made videogames out of malls and cows etc. just by pointing some invention in that direction and push a button, he lived in the clouds and put a banana on the sky when the moon came up
and an orange when the sun came up.
he had over 200 children and was really good at surfing
(he's norwegian name was Ola Bonga)

Weird imagination, huh?

LH from norway

We all believed in guardian angels and so my dad told us to name them. I named mine Danny (after a boy I liked) and my sister named hers Peanut Butter. We thought they would do things for us like be an alarm clock in the morning or find parking spots for us. My dad still believes it works.

Anon

I used to pretend that I was a twin named Patricia and my twin sister was named Beatrice (these were the names of two twin girls who went to my school.) In my imaginary family I had lots of younger siblings, including: Emily, the baby, Polly, Jonathan, Mary, who was a girl from school, and Dan, my real brother. I had two older siblings, Susan and Michael. I would always pretend that I had long golden hair and I was the prettiest one in the family and, well, you get the picture.

Meee

when I was seven i thought that that tingling feeling when the skin on your face tightens was my imaginary friend. I called it spirit and used to talk to it when i was at school. (I'd seen the tempest on tv and thought i had an aerial like that).

dolly

my imaginary friend was the cheshire cat (as in from Alice in Wonderland). He always used to pop up and give me riddles, an tell me to do stuff (which i always did, even if it was naughty....i mean would you argue with a cat with a mouth that size??) When people asked me what i wanted to be when i grew up, i always said the cheshire cat...he was my inspiration :P

Bexy

Okay, this is a crazy one! When I was little, I had MANY MANY MANY imaginary friends. So many, that I didn't even know them all. I had a place inside my brain called 'Imaginary Land' and when I closed my eyes I could see it. There was a short skinny man dressed like a doctor with glasses, who was balding. He was called 'Professor'. He stood oustide Imaginary land and held my key to the gates for me when I came and went. With my eyes closed, I saw myself talking to Professor, taking my key and opening the half-gold, half-silver gates to my land of imaginary friends. Then I would pick 1 or 2 or 3 of my friends and take them out, open my eyes and they would be in the real world with me. To name the only ones I ever played with: A monkey that jumped all over everything (I sat in school and glanced all over the room watching him do silly things that no one else could see, like sitting on peoples' heads), a tiny baby panda bear, 2 GIANT german shepherd with giant puppies (The mom was Midnight, the dad was Demon), A cool roller-skating girl (when I was in the car she would be outside of the window following us and keeping up, and she could skate up trees and along power lines!), my imaginary boyfriend with an australian accent names Killer (???), and an Eagle that could fly anywhere and bring me back anything.
Oh...boy.

Where did you keep YOUR friends?

Ok, this is *really* weird. I used to go to my grandmas instead of daycare. Before she lived there, a young boy called Mark took his own life in there. I would constantly sit on the stairs and jabber to no-one. Then my gran asked me would I like a drink. Response? "Yeah, can Mark have one too?" From then on I had an invisible friend named Mark, who lived on my gran's stairs. How weird is that o_O

P@r@norm@l

I used to love the TV show "Punky Brewster" and I wanted a dog exactly like Punky's, the golden retreiver. Well, I was at the age where children start developing invisible friends and such. ...Well, my imaginary friend happened to have been a dog named "Brandon". He was exactly like the dog on Punky Brewster, except he was all white and he could talk. He went to preschool with me, slept in the same bed as me, and even ran beside us while we were driving in a car (on the freeway?). Mind you, no one knew this imaginary friend/dog existed except myself. Sooo, one day, my mother was getting ready to sit down on the couch and I started screaming. Crying hysterically, and she was like "WHAT?>!?! WHAT?!?!" and I go, "YOU'RE GONNA SIT ON BRANDON!!!!!!!!" ...she looked at the couch, looked back at me and goes, "Oh, sorry, I didn't see 'Brandon' sitting there......" and she sat down at the other end of the couch. I don't think she has thought I was very "sane" since that day...

Jennifer.

I didn't so much as have an imaginary friend, more an imaginary fox. It was just a mornal fox which slept under my bed. But thats nothing, my mum had an imaginary horse.

Ana

Most kids have an imaginary friend or two -- well, I had an imaginary club, complete with both made-up children and some from books I'd read...and a menagerie of animals that we all took care of during club meetings.

Kira

When i was a child my parents forced me to whatch M*A*S*H*. Well there is this episode where hawkeye made up a person named tuttle..... and i decided he was real. Well me and my friend beleived in him until we were 12, YES 12, when my mom told me that he jumped out of a chopper without a parachute. I cried for days, but I figure if she wouldnt have told us we would have been a little...... different

QuaKo

My mother told me that when I was three or four I used to believe I had babies.

Let me explain. I had a dozen babies and apparently I could make them jump in and out of my stomach when they needed to hide or I was going somewhere.
My mother said she went to sit down beside me one day and I yelled, "NO! You'll crush my babies." I then proceeded to call them all by name and wouldn't let her sit down until they had all jumped in.
I have no recollection of this but...Wow!

Lisa

I had an imaginary friend named Bull's Eye. He was a skinny bull who walked on two legs, all black, and had one red glowing eye. I guess I was a pretty disturbed child since he would be deemed frightening by appearence.
I would talk to him and he would talk back. I remember my baby sitter's daughter, who was my age, going nuts over Bull's Eye. She told her mom about him and she said he was evil (she was very religious, must have been the whole Giant Raging Black Bull From Hell thing), and from that moment on I never gained full trust in him. I still have fun doodling him in class and addressing my thoughts to him at times. :)

NG

When I was four, I had an imaginary friend. Naturally, it was a purple cow that looked (ironically) like the calf on the milk cartons.

One day, my mother--who was totally unaware of my dealings with THE cow--came and sat down in my room while I was chatting away. I turned around when she said something and was extremely shocked to find that she had sat on my purple cow, and, in effect, had deflated her. You can only imagine how angry I was with my mother.

Things did pan out though. After all, purple cows come back to life, and mine did an hour later.

leliathomas

When i was little i use to have imaginary horses and one was blackey and one was whitey and my brother and i would tie them to the porch when we came in for lunch and hop on them and ride them to the park...take them up to the drinking fountain for a cool drink and we would gallop to make the sound we thought horses made,then when we rode them home for the night we would pretend we took the saddles and the blanket off too.We watched alot of westerns but never rode a horse lol.

ladylansing

whenever i was little, i had an imaginary turtle that i made my mom kiss everynite before i went to bed. i also had an imaginary friend named "Chelsea" and one time at a very nice restaurant, the waitress came over and asked it she could take the extra chair, there were 4, only 3 of us. well right in the middle of the restaurant, i started crying 'no no! Chelsea is sitting there!' the waitress apologized and apologized until my mother explained that Chelsea was my imaginary friend. Needless to say, Chelsea no long traveled with us to restaurant anymore!

HeL

When I was little, I used to think that I had a man inside my head that would file my memories and sort out my dreams; chosing what I would dream and what happened during the day! He had a little pinstripe outfit and a purple tie. He seemed really real! It was ages before I believed my Mum that it was imaginary!

Kerry B

When my five year old neice was going through the gibberish stage in her language development, a certain phrase, "Ponzi Wonzie," kept recurring. It didn't take long for her to develop the words that she needed to communicate, but Ponzi remained.

By the time she was two she was drawing pictures of Ponzi on the wall; a circle with a face inside it and lines radiating from it. "Ponzi is a boy, but he's a spider today."

After a while we didn't hear from Ponzi any more. Then one day last year we saw a commercial for a new cartoon on the Cartoon Network called "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends." After seeing that, Marie announced that that is where Ponzi was staying.

Since then Ponzi has been back in our lives full force. Usually he is a boy, but sometimes he is a grown up or even a spider. He has a whole changing ensemble of family and friends, and even his back story changes frequently. (She told me recently that Ponzi was Jewish and that he lived in Africa.) But Ponzi is consistently with us.

Sometimes Ponzi does things that Marie wishes she could do, like drive a car, and sometimes he does things that she does, like take swim lessons. He also does things that get Marie into trouble like making messes.

Occasionally the wind will blow open the front door and she will run to it shouting, "Ponzi! Shut the door when you come in! You'll let the dogs out!" Or if the dogs bark at nothing, she tells Ponzi to quit teasing them.

To me the most fascinating thing about Ponzi is that Marie sometimes uses him as an ice breaker. Whenever she meets some one new, particularly new adults (teachers, etc.) she opens with a Ponzi story. And when they ask who Ponzi is, she says, "Well, he's my imaginary friend."

Now when I run into people who have met Marie and Ponzi, they ask about both of them. In fact, some teenagers who work with my mother are even blaming Ponzi when they get into trouble now.

Aunt Marie