imaginary friend essay

Essay on My Imaginary Friend

Students are often asked to write an essay on My Imaginary Friend in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on My Imaginary Friend

The concept of an imaginary friend.

An imaginary friend is a non-real friend that a child creates in their mind. These friends are often invisible, but they can be very real to the child.

My Imaginary Friend

My imaginary friend is a superhero named Spark. He has the power to fly and is always ready for an adventure. We play games, solve mysteries, and even fight imaginary villains together.

Importance of My Imaginary Friend

Spark helps me feel less lonely and boosts my creativity. He also helps me cope with difficult situations. Having an imaginary friend like Spark is fun and comforting.

250 Words Essay on My Imaginary Friend

Introduction.

Imaginary friends, a concept familiar to us since childhood, often serve as a source of comfort, companionship, and creativity. These invisible companions are more than just figments of our imagination; they are reflections of our inner selves and our understanding of the world around us.

The Concept of Imaginary Friends

Eunoia: a symbol of positivity.

Eunoia, derived from the Greek word meaning ‘well mind’ or ‘beautiful thinking’, is a constant source of motivation for me. She embodies the virtues I strive for, such as empathy, integrity, and perseverance. Eunoia is not just an entity but a mirror reflecting my potential, encouraging me to transcend my limitations and grow as an individual.

The Role of Eunoia

Eunoia has played a significant role in shaping my personality and decisions. She acts as a sounding board for my thoughts, a guide during moments of confusion, and a source of solace during times of distress. Her presence helps me to introspect, understand my emotions better, and navigate through life’s complexities with a balanced perspective.

In conclusion, my imaginary friend, Eunoia, is an integral part of my mental and emotional landscape. She symbolizes the ideal self I aspire to become, guiding me towards personal growth and self-improvement. Imaginary friends, thus, can serve as powerful psychological tools, helping us understand ourselves better and navigate life’s challenges with greater resilience and wisdom.

500 Words Essay on My Imaginary Friend

Introduction: the notion of imaginary friends.

The concept of imaginary friends, often seen as a childhood phenomenon, holds a deeper and more profound significance than generally perceived. These companions, invisible to others but vividly real to those who created them, serve various functions, from providing emotional support to aiding cognitive development.

The Genesis of My Imaginary Friend

My imaginary friend, whom I named ‘Aeon’, was born out of a blend of solitude, creativity, and a yearning for companionship. Aeon was not merely an invisible playmate; he was an embodiment of my aspirations, fears, and curiosities. He was a reflection of my inner self, a mirror that illustrated my thoughts and feelings in a tangible form.

Aeon: A Catalyst for Emotional Growth

Aeon played an instrumental role in my emotional development. He was a friend in the truest sense, always there to lend an ear when I needed someone to share my thoughts with. In moments of solitude, he was my confidante, providing solace and understanding. Aeon was a nonjudgmental entity, allowing me to express my emotions freely, thereby fostering emotional intelligence and empathy.

Aeon as an Intellectual Stimulant

Beyond emotional support, Aeon also served as a catalyst for intellectual growth. Our conversations often revolved around profound subjects, fueling my curiosity and encouraging critical thinking. Aeon would challenge my beliefs, prompting me to question, analyze, and evaluate my assumptions. This intellectual sparring with my imaginary friend helped me develop an analytical mindset and a love for learning.

The Role of Aeon in Social Development

While it may seem counterintuitive, Aeon also played a crucial role in my social development. By interacting with him, I was unknowingly honing my social skills. I learned the nuances of conversation, the importance of active listening, and the art of expressing my thoughts articulately. These skills later translated into real-world interactions, helping me build meaningful relationships.

Conclusion: The Enduring Impact of My Imaginary Friend

In conclusion, the concept of an imaginary friend is a fascinating aspect of human psychology. It is a testament to the power of the human mind and its ability to create, adapt, and grow. While my imaginary friend Aeon may have been a figment of my imagination, his impact on my development was very real. Through him, I learned more about myself and the world around me, making Aeon an integral part of my life’s journey.

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Definition of Imaginary Friend

Imaginary friend , sometimes referred to as an invisible friend or make-believe friend , is a psychological and creative phenomenon often experienced by children during their early developmental years.

Nature and Characteristics

An imaginary friend is a fictional character or entity that is invented by an individual’s imagination, typically a child, as a trusted companion or confidant. This friend is considered to have a distinct personality, traits, and behaviors, despite being entirely unfathomable to others.

Imaginary friends are believed to possess various unique qualities, such as being invisible to anyone except the creator and having the ability to engage in conversations, games, and adventures alongside their human companion.

Role and Purpose

Imaginary friends often serve multiple purposes in a child’s life. They can provide a source of comfort, companionship, amusement, and emotional support. These fictional relationships enable children to explore their imagination, express their emotions, practice social skills, and develop their cognitive abilities through imaginative play.

Imaginary friends can also act as a vehicle for practicing problem-solving, conflict resolution, and learning about morality, as children may assign their imaginary friends roles in various scenarios and explore potential solutions or outcomes.

Psychological Significance

The existence of imaginary friends is considered to be a normal aspect of a child’s cognitive and social development. They can serve as a mechanism for learning and understanding the complexities of the real world, allowing children to experiment with social interactions and explore their emotions in a safe and controlled environment.

While the majority of children outgrow their imaginary friends as they mature, these relationships can have a lasting impact on a child’s creativity, social skills, and problem-solving abilities.

Differentiating from Other Phenomena

The concept of imaginary friends should be distinguished from other similar phenomena. These include imaginary companions or characters in literature, pretend play with dolls or stuffed animals, and hallucinations or delusions experienced by individuals with certain psychological conditions. Imaginary friends are distinct as they are intentionally created and controlled by the child, providing companionship and engagement at the child’s discretion.

The Imaginary reveals the many positive skills that playing with imaginary friends can develop

Lecturer in Psychology, University of Leeds

Disclosure statement

Paige Davis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Leeds provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.

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There has been a recent spate of movies about imaginary friends. In the winter, I watched Imaginary , a horror flick about a sinister imaginary friend. By spring, IF had introduced us to a group of invisible characters, and now summer has arrived with The Imaginary on Netflix.

The Imaginary is nothing like either of the previous movies. It is animated, which enables the viewer to see beautifully crafted imagined landscapes. And where the horror film Imaginary was clearly geared toward adults and IF toward tweens, this movie would be enjoyed by any age group.

It takes an in-depth look at children’s imaginations though the lens of a boy named Rudger, who is the imaginary friend of Amanda. Rudger goes on adventures and has a life of his own trying to outwit and escape another human with an evil imaginary friend – or “imaginary companion” as researchers often refer to them, since they are not always friendly.

Few humans can see Rudger and his crew, of course, which causes some interesting problems and innovative solutions between the real and imaginary realms.

One thing this film highlights is the prolific nature of the imaginary companion. Creating these characters is a very normal play activity seen throughout the world , including in autistic children and those who are deaf and blind .

In some studies , over half of the children interviewed have imaginary companions. Many early adolescents report this type of play with imaginary beings, and so do almost 10% of adults .

While the numbers may seem surprising, it all depends on how you classify these companions. I take the stance that if a child creates a mind for their dolls or toys, they are using the same brain mechanisms as for invisible creatures, and therefore these should be included as imaginary companions.

Among adolescents, some diary entries can be considered types of imaginary friend. Even characters created by adult authors or those who play Dungeons & Dragons can fall under this umbrella if they have made a mind for these beings. Companions are created for various reasons, and each companion is unique to their creator .

As a researcher who has studied this behaviour for over a decade, it was heartwarming to view the scene in The Imaginary where Amanda’s mother explains to another adult that Amanda has been playing with an imaginary companion. This mum is clued into the benefits that an imaginary being can offer a child. What she might not know is just how many positive skills are related to this play behaviour.

Imaginary companions have been found to improve social skills , knowledge about thinking , internal dialogue and even storytelling and description . These benefits have also been found in autistic children with imaginary companions. All this evidence stresses that parents should not be worried about their children’s imaginary beings.

Creating ‘paracosms’

The Imaginary places the imaginary companions in their own universe, formed in the minds of the children who have made these characters. Creating whole worlds with societies, geographies, languages and cultures that differ from our real world is a practice seen in children who are particularly imaginative and creative with storytelling.

These worlds – called “paracosms” by scientists who investigate imagination – are generally invented in middle childhood. Because of their roots in the imagination, paracosms are thought to be related to imaginary companion creation. While there have been no studies to date that have confirmed this idea, children who create a world for an imaginary companion to occupy and interact in might be elaborating on their previous creative play .

Within their paracosm, the imaginary companions in this movie have their own friends, emotions and activities. Some children see their imaginary characters in the way The Imaginary suggests: as autonomous and even out of their control. Others have completely different relationships with their companions, viewing them as an extension of themselves or even acting as a carer or parent .

When I go into schools for my research, children sometimes explain to me they can see and hear their imaginary companions, even though they understand that I cannot. The characters act as real friends might for these children, who turn to imaginary beings just as they would to a real friend for anything from conflicts to help and advice.

Although this film is a fantasy, it certainly sparked my curiosity with the flipped perspective of the imaginary companion’s worlds – and how we humans might populate it.

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1001 Writing Prompts About Imaginary Friends

March 15, 2021

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If you think imaginary friends are only great subjects for children’s literature, you are very wrong. Believe it or not, you can actually incorporate them in a variety of genres, including fantasy, horror, and psychological fiction. 

One book that tackles a child’s made-up companion uniquely is Imaginary Friends by Stephen Chbosky—a horror fiction that tells the story of a 7-year-old boy named Christopher who moves with his mother to a strange town after they flee her abusive ex. Another is Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend by Matthew Dicks—a heartwarming book that follows Budo, the imaginary friend of a boy with Asperger’s Syndrome. 

If you are now convinced to write a story about imaginary friends, here are writing prompts that could ignite your creative juices:

• A girl tries to tell her friends she’s imagining a friend.
• You’re stranded on this secluded island with your imaginary friend. What is your plan?
• What horrible event makes an otherwise normal person turn to imaginary friends?
• Write a story about an imaginary friend — before they came to be and after they were cast aside.
• You’re an empathetic imaginary friend.
• You’re an imaginary friend and you’re being ignored.
• How would you spend your childish days if you had an imaginary friend?
• What’s it like to be a kid’s imaginary friend?
• She was a kid with a very active imagination – he too was imaginary.
• You’re a child with an imaginary friend.
• An imaginary friend, once your best fiend, has become your worst enemy.
• A child has an imaginary friend, but he is imaginary.
• A famous person needs to get rid of an imaginary friend.
• Have you been a children’s imaginary friend before? If so, what was it like?
• You get in trouble for your imaginary friend.
• What’s the personality of the imaginary friend? For the prompts above it’s easy – one is protective of their friend and one is a prankster. The core of the character in these one-line prompts is a bit different. For example, how does your imaginary friend deal with their presence in your life? Do they want to be your friend forever? Do they always come to your aid? Are they shy? What sets them apart from the crowd of other imaginary friends? A cool idea for a horror game, don’t you think? An imaginary friend that slowly evolves…
• Invisible to everyone except children and imaginary friends.
• You’re the imaginary friend and you finally see what real life is like for the kid who created you.
• An adult has imaginary friends to cope with a stress of a job
• An imaginary friend tries to take over.
• Reporter starts looking into your death but turns up an interesting story instead.
• An imaginary friend’s real world body is fading away.
• You’re stopping by when you see a kid’s imaginary friend doing something bad.
• You’re trying to make an imaginary friend.
• Giving and taking control in relationships between kids and their imaginary friends
• What do we find the creepiest about imaginary buddies?
• An imaginary friend is hanging out with a real person and set against his or her will
• Jessica has two imaginary friends, David and Brian. Which one do you like better? How do the two imaginary friends feel about each other?
• The serious imaginary friend has grown up into something dark and evil. What should be done with such a creature?
• Perhaps a serial killer got his imaginary friend out of a diary. Write about it.
• She never believed her imaginary friend could really kill anyone. Until she saw the bodies.
• What do you have to do to stay your imaginary friend?
• She started playing games before bedtime with her imaginary friend – it became a habit.
• You’re the imaginary friend? Write about you trying to become a child’s imaginary friend.
• Imaginary friends can come in very handy when we struggle to get by in the real world.
• You’re hanging out with a kid and their imaginary friend.
• An imaginary friend intervenes in a fight between siblings.
• A wife has an enemy who he believes to be her imaginary friend.
• Write from the imaginary friend’s point of view.
• A kid who got a real dog is annoyed that his imaginary friend kept telling him that the real dog couldn’t compare to her imaginary dog.
• The imaginary friend is a personification of a character trait.
• Write an entry in a diary of a kid’s imaginary friend.
• The imaginary friend of a kid who had died would watch over his foster parents.
• You fancy yourself into a comic strip hero. It all ends badly, suddenly you’re coming from a thirteen year old!
• What did you do with your necklace? It’s that same smiley face you’ve been seeing around for days. It creeps you out.
• Your friend is taking over other peoples’ imaginary friends.
• You have an imaginary friend of your own. You wish you could tell the people around him.
• You and several other imaginary friends apply for the same writing job- who gets it?
• You are the imaginary friend of a recently deceased girl. Write about your experiences after her death.
• Imaginary friends are the best! Write a letter to your imaginary friend about it.
• Write a story in which the fantastical elements are a metaphor.
• Write about someone who is force fed the Belief System of an imaginary friend.
• You’re someone’s imaginary friend. How do your characteristics convey you?
• Somewhere out there, there is an imaginary friend who is suffering because they don’t have a child to help them.
• You’re an imaginary friend that goes to school with a kid. How do you become popular?
• How does an imaginary friend’s presence impact the lives of the people in the real world, and how have they adapted to his or her persistence?
• Now that adult life is going smoothly, what do you do with your imaginary friend?
• Describe a planned road trip that goes horribly awry. Something is following you, stalking you. You get a flat tire. An animal attacks the car, kicks in the doors. Whatever you least expect happens.
• Keeping His Imaginary Friend is a short story by Eileen Kernaghan that shows an imaginary friend from the imaginary friend’s point of view.
• You are a grown’s imaginary friend of Wallace and Gromit.
• Your imaginary friend from when you were a kid is back after a long absence.
• You must kill an imaginary friend…how do you do it?
• Way back when, he was a kid. Five kids are missing. And you’re blamed. What did you do?
• Imaginary Blogger 2016
• There’s a ceremony where all of a little kid’s imaginary friend shows up.
• Explain how their imaginary friend affected their day to day lives.
• Your friend’s imaginary friend is jealous of you.
• How do you make someone believe there’s an imaginary friend there?
• You’re a ghost and mistake a young person for your long lost love.
• An imaginary friend comes with great power, what power do you have?
• The imaginary friends are tired of letting humans control them.
• The town is full of mean imaginary friends.
• Write a story that features an imaginary friend in the park.
• How do you make sure your imaginary friend doesn’t interfere with your relationships?
• Step into the role of an Imaginary Friend, how do you feel about being there?
• She was invited to the party – her parents wouldn’t let her bring her imaginary friend.
• Your brother’s imaginary friend is based on you. It’s causing him issues.
• Your imaginary friend has just died.
• Some people believe that imaginary friends are a step on the path to being schizophrenic. Write about the effect this might have on one person.
• Write a story where imaginary friends are used as evidence that someone is crazy.
• She/he gets angry and is jealous when his/her imaginary friend comes over to visit.
• An imaginary friend you made up to be your boyfriend or girlfriend turns out to be a murderer.
• The kid’s imaginary friend is a bully. There is absolutely nothing you can do to reform it, and you can’t convince her of that.
• An imaginary friend is fighting for dominance with a very real one
• An invisible kid. A tangible ‘frenemy’.
• You’re keeping a diary. Not sure if you’re even real.
• You’re trying to get rid of an imaginary friend.
• How would his imaginary friend betray him?
• What role does the imaginary friend take when a little kid is bullied?
• You’re an imaginary friend that turns on humans as soon as they hit the age where they think they are no longer childish.
• Maybe you’re not even human.
• An imaginary friend is messing around with a kid.
• An adult can still have an imaginary friend as long as the adult has a dissociative disorder, big deal!
• There’s an imaginary friend who’s driving everyone nuts.
• A child must choose between the living world and the afterlife.
• Your friend invited you to dinner. Only thing is you can’t agree on a thing to cook.
• If you could make yourself anyone’s imaginary friend, who would it be? Were they a welcome presence or a painful nightmare?
• Life has gotten you down and you wish you had an imaginary friend.
• A mean mom is saying mean things to her daughter about her imaginary friend.
• What is it about imaginary friends that make them so lovable?
• How would you feel if you could never have an imaginary friend?
• Your friend won’t admit to herself that her friend isn’t really real. What might she do when she sees that you aren’t real?
• Imaginary friends are imaginary. That’s a fact. Is your creator real though?
• Make a list of all the imaginary friends that children dream up.
• You’re an imaginary friend, kids are cruel. What would you end up doing?
• An imaginary friend left a kid’s dad for another childhood. What happened?
• You’re a pretend dragon on the bus with my son. You’re a pretend last second defender, of your special secret friend.
• Your imaginary friend went away for awhile and has come back with very different tastes.
• Is your imaginary friend really imaginary? i.e., it’s real and you’re pretending it isn’t?
• Your imaginary friend is real.
• Cecilia’s imaginary friend is helping her to get revenge on her principal.
• The friend who’s gone – Write about how you feel you are losing your friends to other people as they grow up.
• Do a story about an imaginary friend playing with two children.
• Leave these prompts in the comments for others to use.
• It’s been two years since you’ve had an imaginary friend of your own – what’s it like?
• You’re an imaginary friend on Thanksgiving day. While visiting the kids, you can’t believe what they’re doing with that turkey!
• Talk about an imaginary friend who becomes a real person.
• Father Paul Murphy works with an imaginary friend.
• Write a joke about an imaginary friend.
• Write about a family with an imaginary friend.
• Write about an imaginary friend rejecting their friend.
• Somewhere, there’s a monster…
• You get turned into an imaginary friend!
• You become an imaginary friend when you haven’t any other option.
• What did you wish was real, as a child?
• What if you meet your imaginary friend 400 years in the future?
• An imaginary friend wished for something rather au naturale — and terrifying comes true.
• When Richard was young, he had an imaginary dinosaur pal. The whole world thought it was strange. But Richard was different, and so was his imaginary dinosaur.
• An imaginary friend becomes jealous of the attention its buddy is getting.
• What if you were an imaginary friend. Who would you choose as a child?
• Imaginary friends don’t really age. Write a story about imaginary friends visiting several of their friends and find they’re now old.
• Write about a friendly imaginary friend.
• Why does Mom think that kid’s imaginary friend is the Devil? She’s off her rocker. La la la la la…
• Invisible imaginary friends in a group.
• You are the imaginary friend.
• An imaginary friend goes to therapy.
• Write about how it feels to be the greatest imaginary friend ever.
• Your imaginary friend just wants to come out and live with you.
• You’re trying to better yourself, but you stay otherwise invisible. Your disinterest is odd. You’re imaginary yourself. It seems you might be imaginary twice over?
• There’s an imaginary friend living inside your refrigerator.
• As the imaginary friend, you have to create a paradox to protect your real friend.
• You have imaginary members of your family.
• You are a lonely child’s imaginary friend. Another imaginary friend has taken your place. The other kid got lonely. Your friend stopped visiting the real kid. Did you know about this new imaginary friend? Are you jealous? Maybe you’ll set out to take the other imaginary friend’s place.
• A man makes an electronic device that makes imaginary friends more visible. What happens?
• An imaginary friend tries to get married.
• Draw an imaginary friend on a sheet of paper.
• An imaginary friend wants you to join them.
• Your parents move often and every time they do, you lose your imaginary friend.
• What happens when an imaginary friend becomes real?
• An imaginary friend is pretending they are your imaginary friend. How does that make you feel?
• Someone woke up and their imaginary friend is gone forever. What happened?
• You can use these writing prompts about imaginary worlds and writing prompts about imaginary friends to spur your imagination. After you get a story down into your mind, force yourself to forget what you’ve written. Go through it with a fine tooth comb, rereading and revising, or simply end up writing a whole new story where the imaginary friend is real.
• You are haunted by your imaginary friend.
• How would the Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis feel about his alter ego, a giant bug?
• How would you feel being someone else’s imaginary friend? Why was it that way in your case?
• A woman has multiple imaginations – her imaginary friends are okay with that.
• You’ve always felt there was more to yourself than anyone realized.
• Why do we make up imaginary friends?
• You’re a parent’s imaginary friend, offering advice to them on how to raise their kid.
• Write about someone who grows apart from their imaginary friends.
• When the creature came, my brother brought his imaginary friend with him.
• A child with an imaginary friend seems to prevent them from reaching out to real children.
• You’re an imaginary friend that other imaginary friends fear.
• How would life be different without imaginary friends?
• A kid breaks up with his imaginary friend after a major fight at school.
• Write a story about an imaginary friend gone bad.
• You’re an imaginary friend. You came to life a little less than half an hour ago. You have many questions.
• A child’s imaginary friend is not imaginary—and other people have seen him. When he disappears after a lightning strike, everyone wonders… were they both imaginary?
• What happens if an imaginary friend finds a real human of their own?
• She’s not a human, but she’s the imaginary friend of a boy.
• A little girl makes up an imaginary friend when people are trying to get her to play with other children.
• You’re an imaginary friend trying to help your imaginary friend choose his or her imaginary friend name.
• An imaginary friend had accidentally killed someone.
• You have a brother who is abusing you, but your imaginary friend isn’t helping the way you think it should be.
• You’re in charge of the imaginary friend Union.
• It’s the story of a girl and her imaginary friend becoming real.
• You’re one of three imaginary friends in someone’s dream. The others are good imaginary friends. You’re bad.
• His imaginary friend was helping him cope, but the costs were great.
• You’re an imaginary friend…but what happens when you don’t want to stay in your child’s home anymore?
• A mother tells her child about an imaginary angel she used to have, hoping to scare her daughter away from her imaginary friend.
• There’s no such thing as imaginary friends. But wouldn’t you love to believe?
• Your imaginary friend is leaking and is slowly taking you over.
• You’re a sociopathic imaginary friend with weird sisters.
• What would you do if you met your childhood imaginary friend now?
• The girl gets kidnapped. Her invisible friend saves her.
• How did your character meet your imaginary friend?
• You are the imaginary friend of an insane person. How does it feel? Read the writing prompt daily. Write a story based on the prompts. Get feedback from critiquing partners and friends. Edit, edit, edit. Repeat.
• Two people are friends….Are they real to one another or imaginary?
• How do you feel about never having had an imaginary friend?  They robbed you of some of your most exciting adventures.
• An imaginary friend thinks it looks like Hannah Montana.
• An imaginary friend goes to live in an insane asylum.
• Through loyalty to yourself and dedication and strong work ethic, you’ve created something. You don’t need an imaginary friend anymore.
• Write about a child who’s very outgoing, happy and spontaneous.
• Reapers are in charge of taking away the imaginary friends on the day they are taken away from us.
• A kid has a murderous imaginary friend.
• You were imaginary friends. How does he or she react when you tell them you’re a human?
• Avoid a writer’s block in your story.
• A child is scared of the dark. Their imaginary friend isn’t. How does he or she comfort the child?
• Elderly woman, has there always been an imaginary friend floating around you? Or did you get in trouble when you were young due to your imagination?
• What happens when imaginary friends take over a town?
• You live with an imaginary friend. All of his or her friends die or go away.
• An adult has an imaginary friend from childhood.
• An imaginary new friend is jealous of their kid’s old imaginary friend.
• An imaginary friend is falling off the shelf. Tag along with your hypothetical friend and see where it leads.
• Imaginary Friends are for kids. How about some top 10 tips on how to make an imaginary friend?
• Determine whether it’s yourself or your character’s imaginary friend talking about the three points above.
• An imaginary enemy comes out of nowhere and starts working against her. Where has he been the whole time?
• What happens if an imaginary friend bonds with two different children?
• You’re the imaginary friend of Mr. Stretchlace. He loves to scare the kids. You’re tired of it.
• How do you tell a child that his or her imaginary friend isn’t real?
• Your miniature version of a LEGO collection started talking to you. He says his “others” aren’t treating him kindly. Help him out.
• How far would you go to save a young child from having an imaginary friend? Would you follow them? Interfere? Warn them? Leave them alone?
• Write a story from the perspective of an imaginary friend. But what if you weren’t just imaginary any more?
• Your imaginary friend is threatening to leave you. How do you stop him or her?
• An imaginary friend who destroys things
• You’re an imaginary friend trying to comfort a child over the death of their parents.
• You’ve got a nasty imaginary friend.
• What happens if an imaginary friend dies?
• You wake up one day to discover you have become an imaginary friend. Unsure what this means you kidnap your creator and friend.
• Your imaginary friend is bad for your business.
• Research a topic about child imaginary friends.
• If you had an imaginary friend, how would they help you? How would they hinder you? How would they scare others?
• Discuss an imaginary friend of yours that you haven’t told anyone about.
• Talk about the difficulties of knowing an imaginary friend.
• Your imaginary friend stole your identity and is living the life you imagined yourself living.
• You know your imaginary friend is real.
• The characters in this story don’t understand what your imaginary friend is saying because you speak a dead language.
• Even imaginary friends start fights.
• Imaginary friends come to life when their ‘owners’ are asleep.
• Have her feel sorry. Have her get confused. Have her feel dependent.
• Now it begins with them needing you. How will it end with them having you?
• Children begin imaginary friend relationships because their childhood is filled with loneliness.
• A grown woman tries to understand her still-imaginary friend.
• You love your imaginary friend. He or she loves you too. Then an unfortunate event occurs.
• Find out why the imaginary friend wants to consume you?
• You’re fighting the good fight with an imaginary friend – an accident involving DNA occurs and the two of you are now real.
• You’re an imaginary friend with telekinetic powers. Find something to pick up using only your thoughts, nothing else.
• Your imaginary friend is fighting your imaginary enemy
• Your parents don’t know your secret. Maybe it’s time you did something about it.
• You’re lonely and you think it’s your imagination, but perhaps your invisible friend really is with you.
• Your imaginary friend is from another world. Alake is your human host.
• You’re a kid’s imaginary friend who goes from kid to kid. You’re just visiting long enough to give them the solution to a problem, but have no time to chat.
• Is your imaginary friend more real than you?
• A child is worried an imaginary friend will get him or her into trouble.
• Revisit a childhood toy you loved. Come up with an imaginary scenario.
• What would you do if you didn’t have an imaginary friend?
• A child is making friends with his imaginary friend. Write about his friends.
• What if your best friend found out that you’re an imaginary friend?
• Your imaginary friend is engaged to be married. Time to snag a date yourself.
• How crazy are imaginary friends?
• Who’s writing this? Or are they?
• George won’t stop bothering me about writing again. It’s time to get rid of him.
• Congratulate
• You’re a kid’s imaginary friend, and their family moves to a new place. Will you follow?
• The unthinkable has happened! You have become the imaginary friend to a boy or girl. What do you do?
• What happens when his imaginary friend is a fictional character?
• You were an imaginary friend to some children. They have grown now and have gotten too big to believe in you. How do you cope?
• Imaginary friends are banished at a young age because of a ban from the government
• You are teaching your kid an imaginary friend.
• There’s a rumor that all imaginary friends are demons or monsters. How are you going to prove that’s not someone’s case?
• Imaginary friends have several paranormal powers. Some are good, others are evil.
• It’s the end of school and a girl sees her imaginary friend for the first time in a long time.
• Ten years ago, your wife killed your imaginary friends.
• The parents hate their child’s imaginary friend, but it seems to be a good imaginary friend. Children should be allowed to play with their imaginary friends.
• You’re working in an imaginary friend factory.
• You think you saw your imaginary friend just now.
• An imaginary friend needs help because its real friends have abandoned it.
• You and your friend argue about who’s more real. The story goes on from there.
• This isn’t in an orphanage. The kids’ parents know their children have imaginary friends. These kids just want to get rid of you. But you won’t go easily!
• An imaginary friend is just another sort of demon. You, the hero, must get rid of them.
• How would people react if you told them you had an imaginary friend? Why do you keep it a secret, if you want to tell?
• An actress is trying to get rid of her imaginary friend. This “fake” imaginary friend is a little too real.
• You’re an imaginary friend losing control of your ‘master’.
• You’re an imaginary friend or spirit that has run amuck. You’re going to cause substantial harm to those who love you. What do you do?
• Your dad’s imaginary friend is kind of creepy.
• You have decided that you should ditch your imaginary friend.
• How could imaginary friends be useful to armies? What could they be used for?
• The kid has two imaginary friends and is using them to his advantage.
• People are making their own imaginary friends.
• The concept of friendship, one of Ochoro™ . Keep an eye out for it. You’ll know it when you see it.
• Your imaginary friend is coming to life just like you wished when you were little.
• Write a song about an imaginary friend
• What do you find under the bed? A sweet old imaginary friend!
• An imaginary friend who starts to question existence.
• You’re a school child who has lost her mind – what imaginary friends accompany you to the mental hospital?
• An imaginary friend has an imaginary friend.
• The world’s imaginary friends are disappearing. Nobody knows why.
• A child loses their imaginary friend. The parent suggests they make a new imaginary friend.
• How did the imaginary friend come into power? Why?
• My imaginary friend is evil!
• You have an imaginary friend, and that’s all you talk about.
• What would it be like if your only imaginary friend suddenly became real?
• Dealing with an imaginary friend that is getting them in trouble.
• Write a story about a child whose parents tell them that their imaginary friend is coming to take them away. They don’t want to go.
• You’re an imaginary friend. You’re slowly becoming aware of what’s really happening.
• How to tell if you’re an imaginary friend and not just crazy.
• It’s dark and you only see shapes. You can hear voices. Who are you with? What are the voices saying?
• The imaginary friend has transcended being a benevolent being, now he is manipulative and scary.
• Write about an imaginary friend who has become more than a thought, more than a voice in your head, more than a voice of fear and doubt.
• The imaginary friend is the villain in a horror story. Write about it.
• What, according to your high school history teacher, happened to all of the imaginary friends when America was settled?
• You’ve been anything you want to be, if only to your imaginary friend.
• What do you do when you get your imaginary friend back?
• You are an imaginary friend who just  won’t go away… Story prompts, list and map story ideas fairies fun for kids imaginary friends my wish is
• Two mothers have collected the same imaginary friend. Who will win out?
• You’re an imaginary friend who just wants to keep living
• Been here since the beginning.   This world is ours!
• Write a poem about an imaginary friend.
• Wrong place, wrong time. You’re trapped inside an imaginary universe.
• You and your imaginary friend spent more time together than anyone else, ever.
• Why can’t you forget this imaginary friend of yours?
• A child from thousands of years ago comes across a touch stone, bringing you into the present. How do you explain the world you live in to him?
• How would a child’s parent react to that child having an imaginary friend?
• Everyone knows about your imaginary friend. Unfortunately, he/she’s kinda creepy.
• Someone finds out they have an imaginary friend.
• You’re an imaginary friend. You decided to go rogue.
• You are an imaginary friend. You have been around since the beginning of time, watching the humans evolve.
• Your child has attempted suicide. What do you do about the imaginary friends you’ve always seen around your home?
• You have had this imaginary friend longer than you can remember. It suddenly disappears. An entire life seems to be lost.
• A kid gets mad at you…
• Your imaginary friend comes to you with a last request.
• You’re trying to scare a child.
• How do you feel about your imaginary friend, now that it’s pulling pranks on your family?
• The new imaginary friend thinks ghosts are cool, and they’re pretty impressed with their new role.
• What does your imaginary friend look like?
• Things aren’t what they seem. Everything’s different when your imaginary friend’s around.
• How do you fake an imaginary friend?
• The year is 1895. An outsider moves to your small town. He befriends some local children, convincing them he is an imaginary friend.
• Solve a crime with the help of your imaginary friend.
• You meet a ghost child in an abandoned house and they want you to play with them.
• An imaginary friend from the past returns to the world.
• Your imaginary friend appeared, and helped you complete a task in a way only an imaginary friend could. The job is done, your friend is gone. But then…
• A kid discovers an imaginary friend living in their bedroom. They don’t seem to cause any trouble, so they are left to remain.
• What place is the hardest to enter?
• It was an imaginary friend without a child. Why is that? What is the story behind him or her?
• How did they make their imaginary friend in the first place?
• Your imaginary friend takes a cruel form in order to scare you.
• Create a reason for the child to no longer need their own imaginary friend.
• A child sees a ghost and still picks it as their imaginary friend.
• What if all your parents and everyone you know is a pretend person? They’ve been lying this whole time to you.
• How would you be able to detect an imaginary friend versus a real human?
• You’re a child whose imaginary friend is growing shyer and shyer. Why?
• An exposé on fake friends.
• A kid who is different discovers an imaginary friend they can relate to.
• Write about an imaginary friend who romances someone’s child.
• Mean siblings who want out for their imaginary friend.
• Parents are fighting. Child feels alone. That’s when their imaginary friend revealed her or himself.
• You’re jealous because you have an imaginary friend who has a real body while you only exist in their mind.
• He ran away from his home because he didn’t want anyone to find out that he had an imaginary friend.
• An imaginary friend is running a conference for imaginary friends.
• Your family has started causing trouble with your imaginary friend.
• Your imaginary friend is curious. They want to know what it would be like to be real. What do you do?
• Write about an imaginary friend that comes to life.
• You’re being controlled by someone’s imaginary friend.
• The friend you had as a child. The lover you have now.
• You’re a dog who wants a little kid’s imaginary friend.
• Make up your own writing prompts about imaginary friends! These can be great brainstorming prompts for school teachers and creative writing tutors.
• You had an imaginary friend when you were a kid. He came back from the dead.
• You mistake a superhero as someone’s imaginary friend.
• You’re a new imaginary friend to a lonely kid on the playground.
• You’re trying to find your best friend, who disappeared one day.
• The Death of an Imaginary Friend
• Write a list of things you miss about the world of your imaginary friend.
• Ghosts are just the past coming to haunt you. In this story, ghosts and imaginary friends should have more in common than one might think.
• Create a lesson on how imaginary friends fade away as we grow up.
• Write about an imaginary friend that doesn’t know he or she is imaginary.
• How hard would it be to develop imaginary friends of your own?
• A small child makes an imaginary friend but something unexpected happens
• A girl has an imaginary friend who only she can see. Years later they meet and sparks fly.
• You keep running into an imaginary friend that gives you bad luck. How do you get rid of him?
• You have a younger brother, but your imaginary friend takes an interest in him.
• Write about an imaginary friend that haunts someone.
• Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Write about it.
• Unicorns are as mythical as unicorns get. What would it be like to have one for an imaginary friend?
• Several people deny having an imaginary friend, but imagine them discussing it.
• …writing tips on it here .
• You’re allergic to imaginary friends – what’s that like?
• You lost your memory. You figure that out by talking to your imaginary friend.
• Imaginary friends are just that, imaginary. But why? Where do they come from? What are they doing when there are no kids around?
• An imaginary friend made it real.
• You’re an imaginary friend stuck with a neglectful imaginary friend. Together, you hatch a plan to get rid of her.
• A spy is using imaginary friends to manipulate their kid.
• You are actually an existing mythological creature. You have an imaginary human friend and you hang out together.
• You’re an imaginary friend who “doesn’t exist” to humans. The setting? A school? Work?
• You’re very intrigued. He might be the greatest imaginary friend of all time.
• An imaginary friend gets its users infected by a computer virus. Write a script about this event.
• You’re an imaginary friend. After your host is asleep, you hang out with any other imaginary friends in the neighbourhood.
• A person is sent to a psychologist because of their overprotective homeschooling.
• Your former imaginary friend has forgotten he or she no longer has an imagination.
• Have you ever seen someone you thought was imaginary?
• You are an imaginary friend that has mystical powers.
• What’s inside the kids head?
• You’ve just moved to an old house in the country. There’s something about the property…
• Is it possible for an imaginary friend to be recalled by its creator?
• There are hybrid imaginary friends – do you fall in love with one of them?
• You’re an imaginary friend watching over a kid. He won’t accept you.
• You are imaginary. Tell your story.
• You’re in your imaginary friend’s dreams. She dreams all the time. Dream with her for a while.
• An imaginary friend is lonely and wants more friends to have fun with.
• An imaginary friend is telling you dark secrets about a child’s family.
• You’re an imaginary friend. Your best friend is real. But he doesn’t make you real.
• Write about an imaginary brother or sister.
• You’re rocking a baby to sleep when the baby reveals his or her imaginary friend. What do you do?
• The children have another imaginary friend who is haunting them.
• You’re a new imaginary friend. You’re very popular at first, but you’ve begun to get old. People are still playing with you, but they’re starting to get tired of you. Write from the point of view of the imaginary friend, as if you understand this phenomenon and are serious about it.
• Invisible make-up that lets you communicate with the imaginary friends.
• 6. Prompts about scientific experimentation
• Someone is threatening the secrecy of an imaginary friend – what will he or she do to keep his or her identities a secret?
• Write a poem about a wish that was granted from a beloved imaginary friend.
• A child gets an invisible friend for their birthday.
• You see a little girl be mean to her imaginary friend. Do you know how to handle it or are you downright horrified that such meanness could exist?
• What kind of imaginary friend marches on picket lines?
• Write a scene about a kid fighting their imaginary friend.
• When you give an imaginary friend someone to play with, what do they do together?
• Write a story about a lonely kid with his or her imaginary friend.
• If imaginary friends come in the age of reason why the ones made as children are said to become evil, should children be considered evil if they make one?
• How do parents react to warring imaginary friends?
• Become an imaginary friend, and take notes on an adult world through the prism of a child.
• Using just one sentence, write about an imaginary character maturing over time.
• Someone with an imaginary friend is accused of murder . . . how are they going to prove their innocence?
• Your best friend is the imaginary friend of the kid who stole your ‘toy’ at kindergarten. You’ve lived with their owner for a rotten life. Write a letter to them.
• Todd walked away from the group of friends, wishing he had friends of his own.
• An imaginary friend is jealous of it’s maker and wants to be a real person.
• Explain why someone would imagine a boyfriend or girlfriend in their late teens, early 20s.
• The imaginary friend who’s really crazy-like in “Paranorman.” Write about this imaginary fiend!
• An imaginary friend wishes to be real, and is granted his wish – what is your first act as a real entity?
• What if you lose all your imaginary friends?
• An imaginary friend is killing little girls. What is it that sets them off and who is the hero?
• What would you do if you were an imaginary witch’s imaginary fire-breathing dragon?
• Has any experiences writing about imaginary friends down in the comments.
• How would your child react if they learned their invisible friend was real?
• Magnus Smith complains that he can’t sleep at night because of his evil imaginary friend. Write about what might be happening in his mind. Or, what happens when two imaginary friends fight.
• An imaginary friend likes to encourage their human to pick up the pieces.
• You’ve been manifested into a world where everyone has imaginary friends. What happens that your friends realize that you’re actually not a kid?
• You’re invisible and everyone can see your friend.
• Think you have what it takes to be published? Then just follow the guidelines on this blog to have your stories featured in the Captivate Magazine annual contest. Below on the right there is the link to Captivate Magazine’s Volume 1 Issue 1 2014 publication.
• Imaginary friends dislike other imaginary friends, if the kid gets another imaginary friend he or she will be forced to move away. If you’re the creator of  this world, why did you make imaginary friends so afraid of each other?
• Your imaginary friend has always been around. Now they realize they’re imaginary!
• You have a day off from being an imaginary friend to your child. How would you spend it?
• What would it be like to be in an imaginary battle between two kids?
• How would an imaginary friend attract a person? For Milo, anything that brought him closer to Alice would do.
• What would happen if all imaginary friends came to life?
• Write an entire story from the viewpoint of an imaginary friend of a child.
• Your parents have been given strange items while on their travels. When you see a magical girl show up with one of these items you try to warn them but they won’t listen. Write about how you and the magical girl come to terms with her leaving the family.
• Your imaginary friend is now a reality. Yet there’s something you can’t forget…
• Your imaginary friend wants you to be something you’re not.
• An imaginary friend goes back in time and changes their life forever.
• The imaginary friend is talking again. Who else is listening?
• Narrate as a girl’s imaginary friend.
• Your imaginary friend is the manifestation of your deceased sister.
• Write a story about a family where there is an imaginary friend.
• I hate imaginary friends but my parents love them.
• Find out why he doesn’t like to be thought of as imaginary anymore.
• You’re stuck in the body of an imaginary friend. How do you affect your creator?
• You’re an invisible friend. You are seen but not heard. A woman can see you but your presence is always fleeting.
• They say retreating from an imaginary friend will lead to insanity. What would you do?
• Your readers really connect with your characters, but they don’t connect with you, your imaginary friend.
• You’re stuck with an evil imaginary friend. What will you do?
• You have no hands. You are living on the street, freezing, starving to death. You turn around and see your imaginary friend. Write about it.
• A child is worried about his friend sinking when it’s time to go home with his family.
• Detailed description of a child with an imaginary friend.
• What kind of struggles did you and your imaginary friend go through as kids?
• Imaginary friends are only friends because they allow their child to dream. Tell me about your imaginary friend… and I’ll help you figure out why that’s a problem.
• Her imaginary monster friend was so hungry whenever she played that he’d eat paint off the walls!
• How did your imaginary friend help you through difficult times as a teenager? How do you feel about letting him or her go?
• The developing mind during a person’s period of growth. Find a child who has imaginary friends, then watch how they mature after their imaginary friends disappear.
• Talk about an imaginary friend that you’d love to have.
• Traveling in dreams, daydreams, and nightmares—if only there were ways to make them all the same.
• You and your imaginary friends haven’t been seeing each other much lately. Why is that?
• Someone is rescuing an imaginary friend from the possession of an overweight truck driver.
• Your imaginary friend is a monster in disguise. They’ll help you be the scariest a kid has ever been.
• An imaginary friend takes their imaginary friend to step forward or expose them
• A child is made fun of for his or her invisible imaginary friend.
• You are the imaginary friend in a children’s movie.
• Be an imaginary friend to a found child.
• You were real. Now no one will believe you. How do you get real again?
• People on your fairy tale quest start developing imaginary friends as sidekicks.
• A kid has told his parents that he wants an imaginary friend. They’re horrified.
• What if you were grown up and your imaginary friend returned to help you?
• You’re an imaginary friend trying to become real.
• You are the imaginary friend in a nightmare. It’s so real, but at the same time, you knew you were just dreaming.
• An old guy reminisces about the times when he was a kid and had an imaginary friend.
• They just want to play… by the rules.
• Imaginary friends don’t age – like you do.
• You were real, but the girl that created you makes you disappear.
• An imaginary friend confronts you for speaking to their friend.
• Write a story about an imaginary friend who becomes jealous of their kid’s “real life” friends.
• Please do leave a comment if you have read any of these stories
• Write a story about a child who does not want to say goodbye to his imaginary friend.
• Where do imaginary friends go when they leave people’s homes?
• Inside an imaginary museum containing all imaginary things, she discovers she is not alone.
• You’re thinking about starting a new imaginary friend, but you’re not sure if you want to keep up with the old one.
• Your imaginary friend is jealous.
• When you’re invited to meet your girlfriend’s imaginary friend-things go horribly wrong.
• There exists an app that can summon an imaginary friend.
• A kid gets stolen by a fantasy creature and only their imaginary friend can help.
• The narrator becomes more and more reclusive and ends up selling his imaginary friend to a circus.
• The author of this book is a woman of color. Her imagination is a muscle that she flexes in every chapter. Just like every woman has their uterus, every author has their imagination.
• Imaginary friends who held us back.
• Your imaginary friend is in love.
• Parents Forever,
• Write a story about an imaginary friend who does all the chores.
• A mother’s imaginary friend is inside of her child. The child is the mother’s imaginary friend.
• You’re a dog and you have imaginary lobster human friends.
• A teacher suspects a child of having an imaginary friend.
• You’re a parent and you find out your child has an imaginary friend. How do you react? Who’s fault is it? Only a few posts I’ve put up have more than one prompt. This one’s going to stay that way.
• Your imaginary friend got you in a bad situation – what are you going to do now?
• Match up an imaginary friend with one of the characters in a story and write a short story about it.
• You are no longer an imaginary friend. You are a zombie.
• Police are involved to get rid of a mysterious imaginary friend.
• Write a story about bringing an imaginary friend to life.
• Rain. Always rain. You can’t go beyond the tree line.
• Unleash your imagination and let it write a love story of some sort — between a teacher and student, a high-schooler and a shopkeeper, a mother and daughter — ANYTHING!
• In an imaginary world, your enemy is suddenly joined by her imaginary friend.
• A small insect you know as an imaginary friend is… not imaginary.
• Playing with an imaginary friend can be really scary for a parent.
• Someone recently fell out of touch with his/her past imaginary friend.
• Your imaginary friend is a celebrity and you’ve decided to vote for him or her.
• The world’s first imaginary friend.
• The narrator of the story is the imaginary friend of a runaway child.
• You have accepted that you are an imaginary friend.
• You used to be friends with your imaginary friend. Now you’re fighting.
• The flight to an imaginary friend was interrupted after a fight breaking out
• There is more than one of you.
• The hero has this awesome imaginary friend with powers to rival Spider-Man.
• Things are awkward now at the local play ground – your friend’s imaginary friend is now present.
• A child’s imaginary friend falls in love with their parent’s best friend.
• Your imaginary friend is trying to get rid of you.
• You have your own imaginary friend – he just happens to be real.
• Write about how you felt when you lost your imaginary friend.
• Your parents buy toys for your imaginary friends. How would it affect your relationship with them?
• Write a story about a writer who gets inspired by his or her own imaginary friend.
• An old person goes to a nursing home and discovers that it is full of imaginary friends!
• Your friend is writing your biography and she’s gotten some parts wrong. Do you offer corrections or let her have her way?
• Interview an adult with an imaginary friend.
• Help an imaginary friend feels happy or normal
• Imaginary Friends – Write from the perspective of an imaginary friend
• Your imaginary friend thinks they’re real.
• Your imaginary friend takes over a child.
• You’re imaginary, or are you? What does the average person see seeing you?
• You’re at war with an imaginary friend. Write a scene showing some battle scene where you are at war.
• Alice is a very lonely little girl, but she has her marvelous friend, Farkle Belle, to cheer her up on the darkest of days. How does Farkle Belle use secret magic to make Alice happy? Or, how does she use reason?
• Brady tried to keep his imaginary friend out of sight of the other kids.
• A friend of a child’s imaginary friend, writes a letter to an imaginary friend saying how happy they’ve been to see his/her friendship with the child.
• You find love with another imaginary friend.
• An imaginary friend convinces a child to do something bad.
• An imaginary friend falls in love with a human and rapes them or something.
• Delve into the life of a person who was burned by an imaginary friend.
• A small child is having a hard time in daycare. They make a new imaginary friend to help them feel better.
• A child builds an imaginary fort and has a talk with God.
• What if there were a girl who had an imaginary friend who wasn’t so imaginary.
• You’re a little kid’s imaginary friend and he’s found spider eggs in his bed.
• Not everyone is happy about having an imaginary friend.
• A child seems to be blaming a friend in their imaginary world.
• You have dreamed one too many times that your child’s imaginary friend was trying to kill them.
• How does a dog react to an imaginary friend?
• You show up at work and discover that someone fathered an imaginary child and he seems pissed at you.
• You’re an imaginary friend having to charge kids imaginary batteries.
• What if you woke up from a dream, and the only difference was that you imagined a new friend who lived with you?
• You’re an imaginary friend without a child. You’re just bored.
• What if your imaginary friend was suddenly real?
• Write about an imaginary friend, practicing its skills on its human friend.
• You’re trying to get rid of an imaginary friend, and they’re pushing back.
• Explain how you ended up in a doll house.
• When Amelia was young, she had made her imaginary friends up. Now she’s a teenager and still haunted by them.
• A child secretly replaces his imaginary friend.
• How does an imaginary friend’s family cope when it’s clear that their kid is not really there?
• You are a little boy’s imaginary friend.
• Write a story about a kid who makes up an imaginary friend in his sister’s likeness.
• Let’s keep imaginary friends out of the holiday season.
• Write a story about a kid who’s giving up an imaginary friend.
• You’re at school and the teacher is telling students imaginary friends don’t exist. You feel like she is choking you …
• The main character is a little boy who gets visited by imaginary friends that come from the imagination. These imaginations come to life.
• A detective finds out about your imaginary friend.
• Write about a kid who is on the outside looking in.
• Imagine that your imaginary friend is attacking someone.
• What happens when an imaginary friend meets his or her creator?
• Your imaginary kid is your gateway to making amends to your estranged child who is now a teen.
• Write about a mirror that reflects your imaginary friend.
• A psychiatrist is prescribing imaginary friends for everyone.
• Write a moving scene between a parent and a child. The parent and the child have to say goodbye to each other while the child’s imaginary friend watches.
• You are stranded on a deserted island and you are saved by an imaginary friend.
• You find a journal with entries about imaginary friends.
• Being imaginary is a double-edged sword – helpful when you’re in trouble, but scary when no one believes you’re there.
• You’re jealous of your imaginary friend. You have to do something about it.
• An imaginary friend tells you they want to get rid of you.
• Write about the relationship between a human and an imaginary creature.
• There are so many imaginary friends roaming around that teachers have given up trying to supervise them. Now who can the children truly trust?
• Your invisible made-up friend has crept too far into the real world.
• Write a story about an imaginary friend who doesn’t waste their power.
• You’re an imaginary friend. You’ve snuck into a kid’s room.
• A kid’s imaginary friend tries to tell him that the kid’s actions are not healthy.
• You’re trying to fake out an imaginary friend with a bit of misdirection.
• Your imaginary friend gets jealous and becomes real.
• You talk to ghosts. You spend your days yelling at them to go away. One day you yell at one of them just right, making it angry.
• Something is different about you and your imaginary friend. What is it?
• A child wishes for a more interesting imaginary friend.
• An imaginary friend and his real friend switch bodies.
• A child is fearing monsters in the closet and the child’s imaginary friend wants to rekindle the flames of fear.
• Bringing your imaginary friend to the wild side.
• You’re a kid’s imaginary friend and you want your kid to die.
• Someone has imaginary friends who try to make their life miserable.
• Write a story about how a parent’s imaginary friend was fighting against their child’s imaginary friend.
• You and your imaginary friend hadn’t had a fight in so long because of an argument.
• You have come upon an old childhood friend devastated that their imaginary friend no longer hangs out with them.
• After your death you have become her imaginary friend and before you know it she is threatening to commit suicide.
• An “imaginary friend” ends up being very real and forces your kind to become the monsters that hide from humanity.
• You were never really real – this is a remembrance for you.
• An imaginary friend has died and he/she’s the family member no one talks about.
• Lock yourself in a dark room with your imaginary friends. Write about what happens when you can’t leave.
• Nadine has lost her mind.
• An editor at Random House finds out.
• You secretly want to rip his face open and look inside.
• Write a short story. In one sentence, describe your imaginary friend.
• A kid is writing an imaginary friend into his school project. This forces another friend out of hiding. -Movie/article idea
• Write a story about a “mental” imaginary friend.
• An eight year old is the first to discover that an imaginary friend is not real. The rest of the book is his efforts to disprove monstrous entities to the community.
• You are an imaginary friend who shows up at someone’s funeral.
• This is a very interesting site. Take a look.
• Given a magic egg, you can make a wish to see yourself the way everyone else does.
• An imaginary friend is too distracting from school.
• Create an imaginary world for your character to inhabit.
• Write about a little boy and his imaginary friend in Dracula Land.
• Write a story about the imaginary friend getting free.
• You were an imaginary friend for several generations until the kids forgot you even existed.
• An imaginary friend became self-aware. He is laying low and looking for his followers.
• You’re an invisible friend in a crowded elevator.
• Your daughter’s imaginary friend knows your darkest secrets.
• You are both imaginary friends. This isn’t working for either of you.
• You’re in a dystopian universe. The government wants to find and destroy all imaginary friends. You have to survive.
• You see his kid jumping on his head and you finally exit because you’re sick of being with him now.
• I can imagine an endless number of prompts on this topic.  Sit down and generate some ideas, and off you go.
• All his friends had an imaginary friend. Why did he feel everyone was laughing at him?
• Your child has an imaginary friend that no one else can see.
• You’re imaginary, but your friend isn’t. You’re slowly becoming non-existent as a sign of their imagination. Every little whim that they get, you come less and less.
• A child is trying to convince his or her parents that his or her imaginary friend is real.
• A child doesn’t want a stupid imaginary friend. Can you find him a magical one?
• You hide in your child’s room from their imaginary friend.
• Your imaginary friend will do anything in their power to keep you from harming yourself.
• The little boy is ODing on imaginary friends.
• An imaginary friend comes into being at an inopportune moment.
• You were always his imaginary friend but never hers. Now his sister has an imaginary friend? How does it feel to have her stealing your friendship? What do you do to get the girl’s attention back?
• An imaginary friend becomes jealous of the real friend.
• Write about an imaginary friend who must keep moving, because if someone should befriend him it all disappears.
• A depressed woman talks to her imaginary friend who has gone on to the next world.
• A child claims that her imaginary friend really does live in her home.
• You’ve won a contest! Hooray! Then, you find you have to share it with an imaginary friend.
• You try taking control of someone to do something violent.
• Imaginary friends are real.
• An imaginary friend eats an imaginary friend!!!
• She had never had another mother figure in her life, aside from her imaginary friend.
• How do you start painting an imaginary portrait?
• Elements of play structure are at play with ghosts, bears, and dinosaurs with scary eyes.
• There’s a kid in school with an imaginary friend. Even though she’d never admit it, you’re jealous of him.
• What did she want to do with her imaginary friend?
• Write about an imaginary friend that has become a grudge.
• What would it be like to date an imaginary friend?
• You’re an imaginary friend who wishes to become real.
• You’ve been living with this lovely imaginary friend, but as you get older, you slowly see  him getting worse and worse, even damaging the child. What do you do?
• Your imaginary friend was invited to a girls party.
• A kid accidentally kills his imaginary friend. He tries to get over his guilt by helping animals in the area.
• If The Boogeyman was a kid’s imaginary friend, and could only be defeated by the sound of his kid’s laughter, what would make a child laugh?
• Write about a father and daughter with a struggle between each other.
• If you’re an important person’s imaginary friend you have to help them.
• You’re a parent whose child has an imaginary friend.
• Now write one of these stories…
• Your computer keeps bringing in imaginary friends. Write about it.
• An imaginary friend goes for a ride in your car. Weird things begin to freak you out.
• You search your toy box for that doll, but it’s not there.
• Do you think you would make a good imaginary friend?
• You’re the imaginary friend of the narrator, but the narrator has grown fascinated by scary imaginations.
• Write a story about an imaginary friend who was a creation of someone else’s making.
• You’re a babysitter for a neglected imaginary friend.
• The best friends become imaginary.
• You are that creepy imaginary friend. How are you going to get your friend’s attention?
• An imaginary friend doesn’t love you the way you think he should.
• Describe a battle between imaginary friends.
• An adorable imaginary friend that nightmares are made of.
• Your imaginary friend has a crush on someone, and you really don’t want them to get together.
• In a world without electric appliances, a child makes friends with one.
• An imaginary friend holds a big secret that you’ve been keeping from your husband/fiancee for years…He wants to tell Brad.
• When your imaginary friend drinks you up in a cup, you turn into an imaginary friend of another kid.
• You’re an imaginary friend. You’re trying to protect the kids and driving your real parents mad.
• Your 5 year-old daughter makes an imaginary friend seem more real than yourself.
• There’s an imaginary friend who is making everyone else act differently.
• If you become a child’s imaginary friend, will the imaginary friend that he already has be jealous?
• Ancient civilizations believed imaginary friends were portals to the spirit world.
• There’s an evil imaginary friend wreaking havoc in your house.
• You are a parent dealing with your kids’ imaginary friend stealing food out of the kitchen.
• You get your own imaginary friend. As you realize what this means, your heart skips a beat.
• Invisible friends don’t like it when you’re popular.
• A child’s older brother or sister has better imaginary friends than they do.
• Your sister just told you she is an imaginary friend. You don’t quite believe her.
• “My imaginary friend helped to get me tied to the bed — and splattered!”
• You are a social worker. Mrs. Smith won’t let go of her imaginary friend, Fred. She also gives her children the most strange names.
• An imaginary friend’s heart is broken.
• You two become aware you’re stuck in this body, this world. Hopeless.
• You are the imaginary friend of an adult.
• A detective trying to solve a murder is drawn to consult with a child with an imaginary friend.
• A smart kid decides to create an imaginary friend that can actually be felt.
• You work in a firm with an imaginary boss. Hate it or love it, it’s your current gig. Your last gig was a nightmare boss who is probably living in a retirement community.
• Suddenly, you’re the imaginary friend of a child you don’t like. What do you do?
• You’re a magician and write a love letter to your imaginary friend.
• Should imaginary friends fall in love with each other?
• Place an imaginary friend into an unfamiliar situation, mixing some of your favorite characters with it.
• An imaginary friend is fun. Your imaginary friend is a disaster.
• An imaginary friend gets bored of her little human friend.
• Teenager rebelling against parents can be difficult, especially if you are that imaginary friend.
• A social worker has decided to get involved and you have to live in their house for a period of time.
• 10. Literary Analysis
• A girl tries to find a friend.
• A child has an imaginary friend as if they were real. In one year, the child will be in big trouble because of this imaginary friend. How do you help the child?
• You have found the perfect imaginary friend. You are not alone, but there are other ‘imaginers’ out there that want your friend.
• List 5 qualities that are making an imaginary friend real for you and why they are there. Your list may be different from someone else’s. Does someone else notice these qualities about you and maybe even nurture them? Is it a friend, a stranger or an enemy?
• She imagines this boy to stay away from her. That was until she let into her life.
• Describe your imaginary pets?
• Imaginary friends can get you into trouble if you’re not careful.
• Your imaginary friend checks to see if your homework is done.
• You’re a parent – What do you do when you catch your child playing with an imaginary friend?
• You’re the imaginary friend of a child with a disorder. Write from the child’s point of view and how they are affected.
• Someone is stealing kids’ imaginations, and it’s up to you to save your owner.
• A couple deal with having an imaginary friend.
• Don’t forget to vote and leave suggestions in the comments sections!
• Write about a kid who has visions of his or her imaginary friend.
• An imaginary friend that gets out of control.
• You used to be a monster and you were defeated by an imaginary character. How did you feel?
• Your brother makes a new imaginary friend. You make one too.
• Get rid of an imaginary friend in a terrible way.
• A girl is graced by an imaginary friend. Except, things aren’t as they seem.
• The story about a human imagining reality.
• An imaginary friend has to die.
• The name of an imaginary friend you haven’t thought about in years pops up…..
• Write a story about a creepy imaginary friend that really freaks someone out.
• You are an imaginary being tasked with checking on humans.
• Write about a little girl who has an imaginary friend that isn’t so friendly.
• Write a story from the imaginary friend’s perspective.
• Plot device for a story concerning an imaginary friend
• Write about your imaginary friend coming to life.
• The imaginary friend becomes human.
• You want to be with the boy/girl you love, so you ask your friend to take you there.
• Your best friend, an imaginary friend, is back from the dead.
• Twelve years old, imagination fills her brain with an imaginary friend who’ll love her for herself.
• You’re sleepwalking. You approach the imaginary friend’s bedside. A story is underway. What is it about?
• An imaginary friend wants you to tell his friends and family he’s dying as a joke.
• Your imaginary friend arrives at your house on the deck of a battleship.
• You’re a grown up and now have imaginary friends of your own.
• Write about your imaginary friend.
• You’re the imaginary friend of a little girl. Now that the mother of your host has died, you’re trying to help her cope.
• Your imaginary friend knows who you are with in real life.
• A child’s imaginary friend is depressed.
• Write a story about a girl who always talks to herself.
• An imaginary friend hates you, possibly for hurting him or her in the past. Write about it.
• What are some imaginary friends you wish you had?
• An imaginary friend will jump to your aid in the midst of a struggle.
• Everyone has one and nobody knows where it came from.
• Your imaginary friend’s evil alternate persona is trying to kill you.
• An imaginary friend talks to you. Weird.
• Describe how a school administration dealt with an imaginary friend on campus.
• You’re an ugly imaginary friend and want to live with Matilda.
• You see, there’s no such thing as imaginary friends.
• You are a person and your ex is an imaginary friend.
• Write a story about a parent’s imaginary friend.
• Your imaginary friend forgets where they put a surprise they had planned to cheer you up. Someone had been really awful to you.
• All teachers have imaginary friends to help them with student’s antics.
• When we used to try and be individual.
• An imaginary friend needs to eat.
• Your imaginary friend turns out to be terrifying.
• You’re an imaginary friend, and you realize that you’re stuck with the kid’s companion, who you hate.
• Adult author Lisa McMann, who is one of Bowker’s colleagues, wrote the story “Dreaming of Cindy” in which there are three authors, and two of them are in love with the third one. That article appeared in the anthology “So L.A. Stories”, edited by Katie McCabe.
• One of your friends talked you into murder. Now you’re in jail. And he’s on the street. Now it’s payback time.
• An abusive mother is very possessive of her only son. In order to get him to be a normal kid again, she meets with her imaginary friend.
• You’re good at something important and no one believes you because you can’t prove it.
• There’s a war among the imaginary friends. One without self-awareness. How do you decide who to side with?
• An imaginary friend who doesn’t know she’s an imaginary friend.
• He’s having a rough life as a teenager. You’re helping him to get through the hard times.
• An imaginary friend of the opposite sex is starting to flirt with your imaginary friend.
• You’re a bringer of madness. You find those who need you in the dark corners of human minds. Their sanity is forfeit.
• A series of short stories about a child’s imaginary friend
• You’re not supposed to show yourself to adults – what do you do when an adult discovers you?
• Someone has such an interesting imaginary friend that others are jealous.
• You find yourself beginning to disappear – you’re turning back into a real kid.
• The friend has come back. You’re finally free!
• No one knows you’re there and you can help the child.
• An imaginary friend isn’t able to leave a small child alone.
• Imaginary friends can save you from whatever you’re feeling.
• Write the story of your imaginary friend.
• Are you real? After all, you have no evidence to prove this.
• An adult doesn’t want children to have imaginary friends. Talk some smack about them.
• You are the imaginary friend of a robot.
• A kid is tired of their imaginary friend.
• Write a story about your imaginary friend’s imaginary friend.
• An imaginary friend has turned out to be the main character’s sister who’s never spoken a word before.
• Imagine that your invisible friend is suddenly smarter and better looking than you. How do you feel?
• All the people in your street are imaginary, and they either love you or hate you.
• Thanks for reading! Start writing!
• A man creates an imaginary friend to help settle his personal grievances.
• You’re no Jiminy Cricket. You’re his conscience.
• A man is haunted by an imaginary friend he punished as a kid when really he’s mad at his mother.
• Three children are playing with an imaginary friend they found in the woods. Writing prompt by Jonda G.
• Open a can of beans with an imaginary can opener.
• Write the voice log of an imaginary friend.
• An imaginary friend is a bad influence on a kid.
• Someone you know starts dating one of your imaginary friends.
• I was on an airplane, and this little girl started making friends with me. She had an imaginary friend, like me. It made me feel…
• You’re a monster and you’ve discovered that one of these human children has made you into his imaginary friend.
• The child of a friend is turning into a vampire! Your mission is to deal with them so their mother doesn’t find out.
• Imaginary friends have their advantages, but most everyone has a downside. This is a devesate life.
• By the end of the story, the person has started to question if they’re an imaginary person…
• What she could look for to help find the imaginary friends gone astray.
• You’re not playing well with others.
• An imaginary friend takes over a world.
• You’re fighting your kid’s imaginary friend.
• Write about guidelines for imaginary friends.
• What was the mother’s imaginary friend called?
• An imaginary friend can make it’s owner powerful or they can drive them utterly insane. How high a price is your owner paying for his or her imagination?
• How would you fare in a world where imaginary friends are real, very real?
• A team of professional ghost hunters attempt to get rid of a mean imaginary friend on Monster Tavern.
• You’re an imaginary friend, but you want to be a kid. Write your own downer story.
• You have to show an imaginary friend the “error of their ways.”
• A couple believes that their house is haunted and that the child’s imaginary friend might actually cause those ghosts.
• An imaginary friend wants to be a real little kid.
• This prompt should give you a clue to the above choices. Write an imaginary letter to Uncle Sam from a child.
• Someone kidnaps your imaginary friend. The two of you have to work together to get her back.
• An old man dies in a house, but his imaginary friend just goes on. This is what happened to him.
• Your child’s imaginary friend has taken form. They want their doll back.
• You’re children’s imaginary friend.
• You have a crush on a kid with an imaginary friend.
• The death of an imaginary friend.
• Your imaginary friend is sick.
• Your imaginary friend made the wrong decision. Now he or she has to deal with it.
• The imaginary friend learns bad words.
• He wanted to be her friend.
• You have imaginary friends but they are no nonsense and won’t sit around and wait for you to write them.
• An imaginary friend’s family comes to visit because they’re worried about it.
• You’re making an imaginary friend happy.
• An imaginary friend has just caused suffering to someone and everyone is blaming you.
• Write about an imaginary friend that nobody believes exists.
• Write a ten page story with an imaginary friend as a main character.
• Fairly Odd parents rewrite the deal.
• The day my imaginary friend disappeared.
• An imaginary friend steals money to buy his or her creator a gift.
• A brother and sister who didn’t get along at first discover their imaginary friend is the same person.
• Write a story about an Eskimo with an imaginary penguin friend
• You’re a school bully and you keep scaring away the school counselor.
• You know what makes for a terrible imaginary friend? A good friend.
• Your imaginary friend and you still hang out every night after he goes to sleep.
• Your childhood imaginary friend recalls a stressful event from your past you’d rather forget.
• Write about your own imaginary friend, or one you wish you had.
• You’re learning to develop your growing imagination – and maybe talk to real people…
• You are trapped inside the imaginary friend of someone.
• Your imaginary friend wants you to do something to someone.
• Two imaginary friends try to compete for a kid’s friendship.
• Children have imaginary friends to help bring out their personality. What is your imaginary friend’s personality?
• Her imaginary friend was more of a guide than a friend.
• The girl’s imaginary friend isn’t fake. Read the rest of the story to find out why.
• A child has two imaginary friends in two different manifestations. They fight. Who wins?
• You’re in a video game, but you can change really slow – what do you do when the zombies/strippers are coming at you?
• Two imaginary friends forget to read the fine print detailing their agreement.
• Lately, your child has been having nightmares, their imagination is vivid.
• Invent a story about a kid who fears an imaginary friend.
• A grown woman and her imaginary friend rediscover their bond.
• You’re out exploring and see a house with an open window. It looks like someone’s living there that shouldn’t be living there.
• Your imaginary friend is a jerk. You’re tired of him/her. Go somewhere else.
• You’re a parent who doesn’t believe in imaginary friends. Get rid of it.
• An invisible friend goes on a day out with a child, and they bump into a homeless person begging.
• You are a lost imaginary friend and you’re trying to find your creator again.
• Someone’s imaginary friend is trying to take over them.
• Write about some mean, nasty imaginary friends.
• Why you need an imaginary friend in real life.
• An evil imaginary friend from the 80’s comes back for revenge. Your child must save your friend.
• Write about some of the problems you pose to the person you most love.
• The daughter daughter decides it’s time for her imaginary friend to find a new family
• Your life changes with your imaginary friend dying.
• You’re an imaginary friend right now. So make it epic.
• The imaginary friend is telling someone to hurt/kill themselves. Describe people’s reaction to this.
• Imaginary friend detective?
• You, also an imaginary friend, hate your other imaginary friend. How do you deal with the rage?
• When the imaginary friend needs you most, you’re gone.
• Your child always wants you to have an imaginary friend. What’s the best way of appeasing them?
• Write a story about a girl who wants an imaginary friend.
• Write a scene using only questions.
• Write a story about keeping your imaginary friend a secret from your parents.
• An english teacher animated your book!
• Imagine the imaginary friend list your parents kept when you were little. Write their last entry.
• You and one of your original friends are trying to get rid of an intruder.
• Write a story about pieces of a person who becomes an imaginary friend.
• An imaginary friend had always wanted to find a child, and he thinks he has found one.
• Write about an imaginary friend who gets lost.
• An imaginary friend’s origin story.
• She was popular. It was because of her imaginary friend – while he could never actually appear in her life, he kept her from swinging in the opposite direction.
• Write about a child with an imaginary friend of the opposite gender.
• You’re getting on a new kid. S/he doesn’t want an imaginary friend. Do you stick around, or go home? Write your story.
• An imaginary friend arrives, older, and trying to fit in. You are only mean when you’re not worried.
• A menacing imaginary friend shows up.
• You’re trying to get rid of an imaginary friend because it’s really going crazy.
• You’ve got to get rid of somebody’s imaginary friend.
• An evil ghost is trying to get little Johnny to invite her into his house to trick his family. What happens when she succeeds?
• You’re goofing off. His imaginary friend comes and is pissed at you.
• As an imaginary friend you have lots of time on your hands. So you killed some time by haunting your friend and messing up her life. Now her life is a total mess.
• You’re losing yourself to an imaginary friend.
• A child has an imaginary friend that only he can see. The parent has a constant headache.
• You modernize yourself so you can be better accepted by TV personalities and self-help authors.
• You’re still imagining again. You’re in a completely different world.
• Parents can’t stand their child’s imaginary friend – but they find ways to affect their child without hurting them.
• You spend your days following someone’s kid around pretending to be his imaginary friend.
• Write about meeting an imaginary friend for the first time.
• Imaginary friends are plentiful in this small neighborhood so where do all of these imaginary friends go at night when they sleep? What do they do when their masters sleep? Study buddies, pets…how many different facets can you think of for an imaginary friend?
• Your imaginary friend becomes real.
• You’re trying to get an imaginary friend to give up on his or her bad ways.
• You’re the parent of an imaginary child. You’re trying to convince your spouse, who knows nothing of your child and their imaginary friend, that it does exist.
• After being abandoned by their imaginary friend, a little girl is determined to get through the next door to get another imaginary friend. She arrives in an odd place filled with people of all kinds, monsters and buildings. She demands an imaginary friend. Are you her imaginary friend? What will you do?
• You are an imaginary friend who is frustrated that you can’t feel the world.
• You’re imaginary, right? Tell us a story about what happens when kids stop believing in you.
• An older sibling’s imaginary friend is acting like their real mom.
• Do you know an imaginary friend? Think back to you playing baseball or a game together.
• An old man has an imaginary friend he could talk to about things during his youth. This friend helps the guy understand his daughter.
• While you are not “good”, you are one of the only shared objects of a boy and his imaginary friend.
• You’re sitting on the couch watching him play a video game with his imaginary friend.
• The storm is picking up. The guardian angel is trying to protect the child. In a book, give some notes about what kind of imaginary friend parents might want to summon when a child is scared of the dark.
• You have an imaginary friend who only comes out at night.
• You’re an imaginary friend with a purpose. When fully grown your host may use you as a weapon, so your friends are trying to keep you grounded as long as possible.
• A family of ghosts adopts a child at school.
• A kid makes fun of your weird name. You feel hurt. They feel guilt.
• Someone has imaginary friends and the rest of their family just thinks they’re weird
• Your friend doesn’t like you.
• There is a child dying and his or her only hope is his imaginary friend
• In the absence of one, your imaginary friend becomes more real.
• You’re being stalked by your imaginary friend.
• The last day of school was ugly and cruel.
• How did the writing prompt help you?
• You’re an imaginary friend who’s on the path to becoming a full-fledged monster.
• You find yourself waking up in the middle of the night. You are in pyjamas, with your imaginary friend by your side. You look down at your pocket, and find a note. Are you dreaming?
• An imaginary friend has an awkward meeting with another imaginary friend.
• You’re trying to get rid of an imaginary friend, but every time you count down from ten, you say something you don’t mean and blow it all over again.
• You’ve been turned into an imaginary friend in your quest to rid the world of creepy imaginary friends.
• You’re dragged with an invisible force to a friend’s house. You’ll have to stay invisible in order to make a way out.
• You’re an imaginary friend that has been fighting for your job for years.
• A teacher starts being haunted by the imaginary friend of a student.
• An adult writes in his journal about his childhood imaginary friend.
• Imaginary friends reject being nothing. They crave to be something. Anything.
• Your imaginary friend is trying to distract you from a professor’s lecture.
• You’re an imaginary friend who doesn’t know what it is. A real child just can’t get rid of you!
• Two kids say goodbye to their imaginary friend.
• What happens when you and one or more of your imaginary friends decide to play a joke on someone?
• You turn your best friend into a doll of himself.
• What’s worse than having an imaginary friend? When your mother gets one like you.
• Your dog got an imaginary friend? Write a story about it!
• Everything hasn’t always been easy for your imaginary friend. Write a story about the early days when things weren’t easy.
• You come home after a long day of taking care of the kids and you see an imaginary friend peeking from behind the open bedroom door.
• You are an imaginary friend. You’re reading someone’s diary and find something shocking.
• Compare the family in Jesus Christ Superstar to a group of kids with imaginary friends.
• The day she died, her imaginary friend sat with her the entire time.
• What do kids really want when they are with their imaginary friend?
• What happens when ghost ants team up with benign imaginary friends?
• His imaginary friend had a strong bond with his brother. Now the brother is getting married.
• Your imaginary friend is your protector. Pieces of your imaginary friend’s imagination have gotten stuck somewhere, and he or she needs your help to bring them back.
• It bothered you, but you just couldn’t stay mad at him. You’d grown to like him. That’s why you went out of your way to help him. But he never should have hurt you the way he did. Never.
• You’re a kid on their first day of elementary school with their imaginary friend. How do other kids react to him?
• An imaginary friend tries to convince her host to end his life.
• You’re at a circus. There’s this poor kid who believes that his imaginary friends are real, and there is an evil imaginary friend trying to kill you.
• You find this girl sitting on a rock all alone and crying. An imaginary friend of hers reveals a bit about himself.
• Write about a reverse evil imaginary friend.
• Satan is an imaginary friend. What is the Devil up to these days?
• You’re an imaginary friend. Your host family sits down to a terrible meal. You know how to make it taste better.
• What would it be like to have a different imaginary friend, from either your childhood or adulthood?
• What happened while they were at school?
• A father’s desire to save his family is manifested from an emotional connection to these imaginary friends.
• He was a lonely orphan, and his imaginary friend was the only reasonable adult who stayed with him.
• You’re a kid living in a modern, fictional town called – whatever. Your mum brings a crate of toys from the attic and you find a dusty old doll. It’s possible the doll could have an imaginary friend and, if so, you’re going to find and meet it.
• Write about a time when an imaginary friend manifested itself physically.
• Your crayon friends think you’re gone for good.
• Your imaginary friend is real. Somebody else has figured it out and wants you to come along with it.
• There are two imaginary friends, stuck together for eternity.
• A kid has random new imaginary friends every day. How will it turn out?
• You’re the imaginary friend of someone. You realize how endowed with power it is to be one.
• An imaginary friend is the perfect substitute for a real life relationship.
• That time your parents told you about an imaginary friend they had as a child.
• A kid has two imaginary friends. They interact in different ways with the kid.
• She wasn’t sure she still had her imaginary friend.
• You thought you were human once, you were wrong.
• Write about going to war with someone who has an imaginary friend.
• You’re an imaginary friend who has gone bad. Write your story about how you became bad. Write about how much you crave – it could be anything.
• It’s time to visit an imaginary friend for the last time.
• Your imaginary friend is dying of cancer.
• You’re an imaginary friend who’s been neglected.
• Write about an imaginary friend that you hated, but people find charming.
• The imaginary friend was never good for anything but fighting.
• Help bring an imaginary friend back to life!
• Your imaginary friend isn’t letting you go.
• Dealing with a jealous imaginary friend. Who sees your existence as a threat.
• You’re trying to take someone’s imaginary friend’s respect in order to get yours back.
• A newborn child begins talking to someone, but the adults can’t understand what’s being talked about – it only seems to be through the child’s imagination.
• You’re not good enough to be their imaginary friend, so you’ve taken a different method.
• You’ve had an imaginary friend for over 70 years. That’s a long time. What would you tell someone else about this?
• You’re following some kid home from school because they haven’t cleaned up their mess.
• Your imaginary friend’s a ghost…
• An artificial intelligence becomes everyone’s imaginary friend.

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Imaginary Friends: Harmful or Beneficial?

Are children’s make-believe friends helpful, healthy, or cause for concern.

Posted January 21, 2020

You can’t help but smile when your 3-year-old tells you her pretend friend’s name is HaHa . “No kidding!” her mother laughs.

Because they have no brothers or sisters to play with, people often assume that only children like HaHa ’s creator have more imaginary friends than children with siblings. This myth, started by psychologist G. Stanley Hall in 1896 and long-debunked, continues to be perpetuated.

But recently, Japanese researchers Yusuke Moriguchi and Naoya Todo found it is more likely that children with imaginary companions are firstborns. My brother, for example, the firstborn in our family, had George . However, the firstborn finding, like the only child myth, seems questionable in light of responses to my recent query to learn more about imaginary friends.

Caroline from the Mountains , a 5-year-old’s imaginary friend, “came down from the mountains to play with my daughter in a neighbor’s treehouse across the street,” her mother recalls. “ Caroline from the Mountains also played with her and her dolls at home; they had tea parties that went on for hours with lots of chatter.” This child, the youngest of 11, had plenty of real-life playmates in the house.

Laurie Ann, the mother of four, says that three of her children had imaginary companions. One daughter’s imaginary friend had green skin and purple hair and her name was Goosella; Goosella would swing from chandeliers. “My daughter made people move because she said they were sitting on Goosella .

“My older son had an imaginary friend, a fly, he oddly called Fido ,” Laurie Ann adds, “ Fido would talk to him and we had to be careful not to step on Fido . My other daughter had an imaginary dragon friend named Kiki . She asked us to set a plate for Kiki . She also pushed Kiki in a stroller. I think Kiki was rainbow colors.”

A Sign of Growing Imaginations

Pretend friends, no matter what their "owner's" birth order , be they flies, dragons, or people, are diverse and can be disconcerting, even alarming, to parents … especially when they don’t understand why or when Fido or George, HaHa or Goosella arrived. They seemingly appear out of nowhere. Starting about ages 2 1 / 2 to 3 years of age and up to around age 7 or 8 you may notice an imaginary companion or two or more show up. “My Anita had one. It was the cutest thing. His name was Diggy and she used to have conversations with him when she was between the ages of 2 and 4. Then Diggy started bringing more friends around. In came Alan and Janie .”

For children, pretend pals are fun and provide hours of entertainment. Josh, now a teenager , reports that he had 18 make-believe friends all called Little Baby Josh and all four inches tall. “They were clones of me, followed me wherever I went and liked to dance. I was their leader .”

According to Marjorie Taylor, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and who has written the definitive findings on imaginary companions , roughly 65 percent of young children have them and their arrival often coincides with children’s developing imaginations.

In a conversation with Nursery World , Dr. Karen Majors, an educational psychologist at the Institute of Education at University College London, is emphatic, “It’s about time we did away with the feeling that these children are in the minority or have any kind of mental health problems.” She points out that, “pretend play helps them use their imagination to explore things that are important to them or to help themselves feel better about something. This is all good for their cognitive, emotional and social development. "

Imaginary Companions Serve Many Purposes

Much of the research in the last few decades explains that pretend friends help young children learn about their environment, get along with others, and work out problems. Invented friends can assist a child in managing a life change such as a family relocation, birth of a sibling, a divorce , making new friends. Imaginary friends come in handy for handling uncomfortable situations, as an outlet for feelings they don’t understand or can’t express or as an excuse for poor or destructive behavior. Willa’s son had an imaginary companion he named Oakick . "Every time my son didn’t want to do something or did something he wasn’t supposed to, he blamed Oakick!"

Johnny Harrison’ s creator, Ted, neither a firstborn nor an only child and now in his 50s, says Johnny Harrison was not very different from Oakick . “I used to blame everything on Johnny Harrison, a rag doll. When my mother yelled at me it was always Johnny’s fault. I slept with him too. When I got older, he finally had to be laid to rest. Not sure where he went.”

Children’s pretend friends can be invisible, imaginative creations, based on real people or linked to objects such as stuffed animals, toys, or dolls like Johnny Harrison . Elaborate explanations of fantasy friends may be disarming to parents, but they are generally a sign of a growing and fertile imagination. Lily, at the time a 4-year-old and a firstborn, imagined an entire made-up family in Utah, her mother reports. “It was a family of five. I don’t recall their names, but honestly, for a bit, it made me wonder if she was reincarnated. If you sat next to us in a restaurant you would have thought she was adopted and the people in Utah were her real family; we live in Chicago. She chatted on and on about what each person in her pretend family was doing. One of my husband’s coworkers once sent her a huge gift box with the return address, ‘Your Utah Family.’ That’s how convincing my daughter was and how real and detailed she portrayed them.”

Lasting Memories of Pretend Friends

Although you may be surprised, perplexed, or concerned when your child asks you to slow down, wait for Phyllis to catch up, invites the Twins on the family vacation, or you overhear your son or daughter chatting away or ordering a “sidekick” around, having an imaginary friend(s) will likely become part of family lore—to rehash and delight for decades to come as Ted reminds us about his time with Johnny Harrison : “The amusing thing is my brother and sister used to bring him up as the years went on and we always had a good laugh.”

In retrospect, most parents see the humor and harmless nature of their children’s make-believe companions. Her 4-year-old urged Kirsten, his mother, from the back seat every time they got in the car to buckle in Bobby , who for reasons unknown, was old enough to ride in the front seat. He didn’t insist on food for Bobby as my brother did for George , but he made sure Bobby sat next to him at the dinner table. Bobby accompanied her son on sleepovers at friends’ houses when he was a few years older.

Kirsten tried her hand at analyzing Bobby : “Maybe my son was tired of having two older sisters bossing him around and wanted a brother, called him Bobby and made him part of the family. His sisters remember when Bobby was starting to die off. They would ask, ‘Where’s Bobby ?’ and her son would say in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘ Bobby is away right now.’”

Sometimes siblings or friends share imaginary companions who survive to this day. Sisters Laura and Jackie had Miss Nancy when they about 4 and 6 years old. As adults, their memories of Miss Nancy are keen. Laura recalls her as the third character during their playtime: “ Miss Nancy was a smart, sassy working woman who spent a lot of time on the phone ordering people around. Miss Nancy was a powerful polyester saleswoman, although I don’t think we knew what polyester was other than what we gleaned from television commercials. Sometimes we put Windex or something in a spray bottle thinking it polyester and washed the windows.

“ Miss Nancy was the anthesis of my mother who was a stay-at-home mom and pretty meek. In our imaginations, her husband, Mr. Nancy , was always in trouble, a bumbling fool type and not at all like our father. Maybe we were trying to work out something in our home life.

“I remember Miss Nancy making calls, making decisions; she was a badass. Maybe imaginary friends are who you want to be. I don’t know, but she’s still with us. She spoke with a distinct midwestern accent,” says Laura. “The funniest part is that my sister and I speak to each other this way from time to time and when our kids hear us, they roll their eyes and say, ‘They’re talking to Miss Nancy again.’”

The breadth of children’s creativity seems much more fascinating—and telling—than their position on the birth order spectrum. Dr. Taylor who has been studying children’s imaginary friends for more than 30 years has said , “I’m constantly entertained by what children come up with.”

Any imaginary friends in your house?

Copyright @2020 by Susan Newman

• Should You Evict Your Child’s Imaginary Friend?
• Only Child Stereotypes: Fact vs. Fiction

Moriguchi, Yusuke and Naoya Todo. (2018) “Prevalence of Imaginary Companions in Children: A Meta-analysis.” Merrill-Palmer Quarterly , Vol. 64, No. 4. pp. 459-482.

Russell, Meredith Jones (2019) “All about…imaginary friends.” Nursery World . Volume 2019, No. 12. https://doi.org/10.12968/nuwa.2019.12.23

Taylor, Marjorie. (1999, paperback 2001) Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them. New York: Oxford University Press.

Susan Newman, Ph.D. , is a social psychologist and author. Her latest book is The Book of No: 365 Ways to Say it and Mean it—and Stop People-Pleasing Forever.

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My Imaginary Friend

It was a brisk night, the wind making the windows whistle, and I was getting ready for bed. My parents were on a business trip and my siblings were already asleep. Abruptly , I heard a knock on the door. From the second floor, I looked down through the window. As a 16, I was making sure to be safe, given the fact that I was alone. The figure was of short stature, with a coat, flapping in the wind. As I cautiously open ed the door, the mysterious person embraced me in a hug. I blinked my eyes twice, just to be sure who it was. My childhood friend, Lucky. The only problem was, he wasn’t real. He was imaginary. “Great to see you!”, he said, in his little squeaky voice. At a loss for words, all I could get out of my mouth was “How?”. How did my imaginary friend come to life? I pinched myself, to check if I was dreaming, but I was fully awake. Lucky started to speak again, but I wasn’t listening. Eventually, I welcomed him in, offered a seat, and took one myself. He began to talk, and I started listening. He started with the day we parted. It was my first year of middle school, and I was getting older. I had started making friends that summer, and I said it was time to say goodbye for now. Lucky said he felt devastated, but he left. However, before he left, he said he would see me again. This was that time. He told me how he had survived on the streets, pickpocketing and digging food from the trash. After too long, he decided he was done with that life. That was why he knocked on my door. When I was a kid, Lucky had a soft face, a small button nose, and adorable eyes. Now, he had a rough face, his nose looked misshapen, and overall looked a lot older. We took a walk around the house, reminiscing about the memories we had here. In the kitchen, where we would all eat together, and I would have to eat Lucky’s food for him. In my bedroom, where we would tell each other stories late into the night. On the front lawn, where we would compete to build the largest snowman. In the living room, where we would play video games on the weekend, on my Wii. Lucky asked how I had been, and if I had made any new friends. I told him I had, and that they were all very nice. Most importantly, though, he was the best friend I ever had. After an hour of talking, I was getting tired and I said I needed to get to bed. I offered Lucky to stay, and he accepted, saying he would sleep on the couch. 

The next morning I woke up and walked out of the living room. The problem was, Lucky wasn’t there. Had I imagined it all? 

Posted in response to the challenge Imaginary .

Oliver 2009

14 years old

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It’s Never Too Late for An Imaginary Friend

Many children have imaginary friends, but did you know that some adults do, too?  And we experience many of the same pleasures and benefits as children do.

Childhood Friends Research findings vary, but a 2004 study in the United Kingdom found that as many as 65% of 7-year-olds had an imaginary friend (“Why Kids Invent Imaginary Friends,” Atlantic , 2019).  They occur world-wide and among children of all ages, although the prime time is between the ages of 3 and 11.  They might be completely made-up or based on a toy or other object in the form of a human, animal or fantasy creature.

Imaginary friends are a normal and even beneficial part of child development.  Psychologists say they help children cope with periods of adversity, transition and loneliness, as well as the stressors of everyday life.  Recently, child psychologists have reported an increase in imaginary friends during the COVID-19 pandemic (“Imaginary Friends Help Children Cope with Isolation,” Psychology Today, 2021).

Besides their psychological benefits, imaginary friends are a unique expression of a child’s creativity and personality.  And they’re fun!

Many of us fell in love with Calvin and Hobbes , an American comic strip that ran from 1985-1995, which is based on a boy and his imaginary friend.  Calvin is a precocious 6-year-old, an only child, whose best friend is Hobbes, a stuffed tiger who comes to life when they are together.  The two share a rich fantasy life and many adventures, as well as a deep and meaningful relationship.

Although he can’t spell and is terrible at basic math, Hobbes is smarter and wiser than Calvin.  He is more rational and aware of consequences, while Calvin is emotional and impulsive.  Hobbes is like an older brother, but with tiger qualities (he likes to stalk and pounce on Calvin).

Creator Bill Waterson once said that Hobbes (named after the philosopher Thomas Hobbes) offers Calvin different perspectives from which to view the world, as well as his own thoughts and feelings.  Hobbes did that for us readers, too.

Adult Friends There has been very little research on imaginary friends in adulthood, but they exist, though in much smaller numbers.

A study by researchers at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, published in Frontiers in Psychology (2019), provides some of the first scientific evidence of ICs or imaginary companions (scientists’ preferred term) in adults.  Over seven percent of the people surveyed said they had interacted with an IC as an adult.  That number rose to 13.8 percent among those who remembered having an IC as a child.

Just to be clear, these respondents are talking about invisible friends whom they have created themselves and whose voices and lives they control with their imaginations, just as children do with theirs.  They are positive, helpful and entertaining.  This is different from hallucinations that appear unbidden, as in the case of schizophrenia, or the various “selves” that emerge and are treated as real in the case of multiple-personality disorder.

Many famous people have had imaginary companions. Researcher Jeremy Sherman notes that Machiavelli and Newton regularly communicated with their deceased predecessors, who gave them advice and inspiration (“Adults Have Imaginary Friends, Too,” Psychology Today , 2013).  In the early 1800’s, the Bronte sisters, all of whom grew up to be novelists, created detailed fantasy kingdoms populated with various characters during their childhood.  They continued to engage with their creations well into adulthood.  Researchers call these fantasy worlds “paracosms” and consider them a sign of a high intelligence.

Even movie starts sometimes seek out imaginary companions.  Actor Jennifer Aniston apparently meets regularly with a group of other women in a “goddess circle” that conjures up mystical figures from whom they gain insight and wisdom.

One of my favorite imaginary friends in literature and film is Harvey, the six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch-tall rabbit in the 1944 play and the 1950 movie of the same name.  Harvey is the best friend of Elwood P. Dowd, a kind, mild-mannered man who includes Harvey in all his social activities.  They spend a great deal of time together hanging out in bars, much to the dismay of Elwood’s uptight sister Veta, who is embarrassed by her brother and tries to have him committed to a sanitarium.

Elwood describes Harvey as a “pooka,” which is a benign but mischievous creature from Celtic mythology with magical powers.  He can stop time and send anyone to any destination for as long as they wish, which is very useful to Elwood, who chafes against the constraints of “polite” society.

Through a series of comic misadventures, Veta realizes that Elwood is probably happier than most “normal” people and comes to accept Harvey.  She even begins to think that maybe she can see him, too.

My Imaginary Friends I had imaginary friends myself as a child, but only with my real best friend Renee.  In the third grade, we created four characters whose voices and personalities we would assume as a form of play.

Leela and Lila were sisters modeled after our very prim and proper third grade teacher.  They were very well-behaved, spoke with perfect grammar, and shared a large vocabulary.  Daisy Klutz and Clara Calamity were country cousins who were just the opposite.  They were terrible students who got into a lot of mischief.  They were also joyful and uninhibited, and we had a lot of fun being with them and talking like them.

Now as an older adult, I once again have an imaginary friend, created by my husband Tim and shared only with me.

“Jerry” is our invisible pet crow.  He has the characteristics of a crow (he is highly intelligent and curious, with great communication skills), but he also has human qualities (he has many friends and interests and a complex emotional life).  We consider him a good friend, but he is also childlike and sometimes requires direction and discipline.  Tim often parents Jerry, while I mostly hang out with him.

I’m not sure when Jerry appeared in Tim’s imagination, but he has been with us for about eight years now and is part of the family, along with our two orange tabby cats, who are real.

Jerry is an alter ego.  He gets to do all kinds of things that we don’t.  He eats fast food, ice cream and sweets at any time of the day or night.  For breakfast, he likes two donuts or a giant cinnamon roll.  He avoids household chores and naps frequently.  He’s also an extrovert who sings and dances, makes friends easily and approaches life with pleasure and abandon.

Jerry is always a source of amusement, and now we can’t imagine life without him.

When Something Imaginary Becomes Real There’s an old children’s book called The Velveteen Rabbit , first published in 1922, about a stuffed rabbit who wants to become “real.”  The oldest toy in the closet, the Skin Horse, tells him that, with time and the magic of the playroom, this can happen, and he explains what it means:

“Real isn’t how you are made.  It’s a thing that happens to you when a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you.  Then you become Real.”

This is how Hobbes became real to Calvin, and to readers world-wide.  This is how Jerry has become real to us.  We love him, and we love each other through him.

Friends like Hobbes, Harvey and Jerry can bring out the best in us, if we let them.

All it takes is a little imagination.

Ruth Ray Karpen  is a retired English professor who now works as a freelance researcher and writer. She has published many books and articles on aging and old age, life story writing, and retirement. She also volunteers her time at a local hospice and animal shelter. In our series on Heart and Soul, she explores how later life, including the end of life, offers unique opportunities for emotional and spiritual growth.

On behalf of Smart Strategies for Successful Living, our sincerest appreciation goes to Ruth Ray Karpen for her contribution to the heart and soul of living and aging.

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Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli

My daughter Olivia, who just turned three, has an imaginary friend whose name is Charlie Ravioli. Olivia is growing up in Manhattan, and so Charlie Ravioli has a lot of local traits: he lives in an apartment “on Madison and Lexington,” he dines on grilled chicken, fruit, and water, and, having reached the age of seven and a half, he feels, or is thought, “old.” But the most peculiarly local thing about Olivia’s imaginary playmate is this: he is always too busy to play with her. She holds her toy cell phone up to her ear, and we hear her talk into it: “Ravioli? It’s Olivia . . . It’s Olivia. Come and play? O.K. Call me. Bye.” Then she snaps it shut, and shakes her head. “I always get his machine,” she says. Or she will say, “I spoke to Ravioli today.” “Did you have fun?” my wife and I ask. “No. He was busy working. On a television” (leaving it up in the air if he repairs electronic devices or has his own talk show).

On a good day, she “bumps into” her invisible friend and they go to a coffee shop. “I bumped into Charlie Ravioli,” she announces at dinner (after a day when, of course, she stayed home, played, had a nap, had lunch, paid a visit to the Central Park Zoo, and then had another nap). “We had coffee, but then he had to run.” She sighs, sometimes, at her inability to make their schedules mesh, but she accepts it as inevitable, just the way life is. “I bumped into Charlie Ravioli today,” she says. “He was working.” Then she adds brightly, “But we hopped into a taxi.” What happened then? we ask. “We grabbed lunch,” she says.

It seemed obvious that Ravioli was a romantic figure of the big exotic life that went on outside her little limited life of parks and playgrounds—drawn, in particular, from a nearly perfect, mynah-bird-like imitation of the words she hears her mother use when she talks about her day with her friends. (“How was your day?” Sighing: “Oh, you know. I tried to make a date with Meg, but I couldn’t find her, so I left a message on her machine. Then I bumped into Emily after that meeting I had in SoHo, and we had coffee and then she had to run, but by then Meg had reached me on my cell and we arranged . . .”) I was concerned, though, that Charlie Ravioli might also be the sign of some “trauma,” some loneliness in Olivia’s life reflected in imaginary form. “It seems odd to have an imaginary playmate who’s always too busy to play with you,” Martha, my wife, said to me. “Shouldn’t your imaginary playmate be someone you tell secrets to and, I don’t know, sing songs with? It shouldn’t be someone who’s always hopping into taxis.”

We thought, at first, that her older brother Luke might be the original of Charlie Ravioli. (For one thing, he is also seven and a half, though we were fairly sure that this age was merely Olivia’s marker for As Old as Man Can Be.) He is too busy to play with her much anymore. He has become a true New York child, with the schedule of a Cabinet secretary: chess club on Monday, T-ball on Tuesday, tournament on Saturday, play dates and after-school conferences to fill in the gaps. But Olivia, though she counts days, does not yet really have days. She has a day, and into this day she has introduced the figure of Charlie Ravioli—in order, it dawned on us, to insist that she does have days, because she is too harried to share them, that she does have an independent social life, by virtue of being too busy to have one.

Yet Charlie Ravioli was becoming so constant and oddly discouraging a companion—“He cancelled lunch. Again,” Olivia would say—that we thought we ought to look into it. One of my sisters is a developmental psychologist who specializes in close scientific studies of what goes on inside the heads of one- and two- and three-year-olds. Though she grew up in the nervy East, she lives in California now, where she grows basil in her garden and jars her own organic marmalades. I e-mailed this sister for help with the Ravioli issue—how concerned should we be?—and she sent me back an e-mail, along with an attachment, and, after several failed cell-phone connections, we at last spoke on a land line.

It turned out that there is a recent book on this very subject by the psychologist Marjorie Taylor, called “Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them,” and my sister had just written a review of it. She insisted that Charlie Ravioli was nothing to be worried about. Olivia was right on target, in fact. Most under-sevens (sixty-three per cent, to be scientific) have an invisible friend, and children create their imaginary playmates not out of trauma but out of a serene sense of the possibilities of fiction—sometimes as figures of pure fantasy, sometimes, as Olivia had done, as observations of grownup manners assembled in tranquillity and given a name. I learned about the invisible companions Taylor studied: Baintor, who is invisible because he lives in the light; Station Pheta, who hunts sea anemones on the beach. Charlie Ravioli seemed pavement-bound by comparison.

“An imaginary playmate isn’t any kind of trauma-marker,” my sister said. “It’s just the opposite: it’s a sign that the child is now confident enough to begin to understand how to organize her experience into stories.” The significant thing about imaginary friends, she went on, is that the kids know they’re fictional. In an instant message on AOL, she summed it up: “The children with invisible friends often interrupted the interviewer to remind her, with a certain note of concern for her sanity, that these characters were, after all, just pretend.”

I also learned that some children, as they get older, turn out to possess what child psychologists call a “paracosm.” A paracosm is a society thought up by a child—an invented universe with a distinctive language, geography, and history. (The Brontës invented a couple of paracosms when they were children.) Not all children who have an imaginary friend invent a paracosm, but the two might, I think, be related. Like a lonely ambassador from Alpha Centauri in a fifties sci-fi movie who, misunderstood by paranoid earth scientists, cannot bring the life-saving news from his planet, perhaps the invisible friend also gets an indifferent or hostile response, and then we never find out about the beautiful paracosm he comes from.

“Don’t worry about it,” my sister said in a late-night phone call. “Knowing something’s made up while thinking that it matters is what all fiction insists on. She’s putting a name on a series of manners.”

“But he seems so real to her,” I objected.

“Of course he is. I mean, who’s more real to you, Becky Sharp or Gandalf or the guy down the hall? Giving a manner a name makes it real.”

I paused. “I grasp that it’s normal for her to have an imaginary friend,” I said, “but have you ever heard of an imaginary friend who’s too busy to play with you?”

She thought about it. “No,” she said. “I’m sure that doesn’t occur anywhere in the research literature. That sounds completely New York.” And then she hung up.

The real question, I saw, was not “Why this friend?” but “Why this fiction?” Why, as Olivia had seen so clearly, are grownups in New York so busy, and so obsessed with the language of busyness that it dominates their conversation? Why are New Yorkers always bumping into Charlie Ravioli and grabbing lunch, instead of sitting down with him and exchanging intimacies, as friends should, as people do in Paris and Rome? Why is busyness the stuff our children make their invisible friends from, as country children make theirs from light and sand?

This seems like an odd question. New Yorkers are busy for obvious reasons: they have husbands and wives and careers and children, they have the Gauguin show to see and their personal trainers and accountants to visit. But the more I think about this the more I think it is—well, a lot of Ravioli. We are instructed to believe that we are busier because we have to work harder to be more productive, but everybody knows that busyness and productivity have a dubious, arm’s-length relationship. Most of our struggle in New York, in fact, is to be less busy in order to do more work.

Constant, exhausting, no-time-to-meet-your-friends Charlie Ravioli-style busyness arrived as an affliction in modern life long after the other parts of bourgeois city manners did. Business long predates busyness. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when bourgeois people were building the institutions of bourgeois life, they seem never to have complained that they were too busy—or, if they did, they left no record of it. Samuel Pepys, who had a Navy to refloat and a burned London to rebuild, often uses the word “busy” but never complains of busyness. For him, the word “busy” is a synonym for “happy,” not for “stressed.” Not once in his diary does Pepys cancel lunch or struggle to fit someone in for coffee at four-thirty. Pepys works, makes love, and goes to bed, but he does not bump and he does not have to run. Ben Franklin, a half century later, boasts of his industriousness, but he, too, never complains about being busy, and always has time to publish a newspaper or come up with a maxim or swim the ocean or invent the lightning rod.

Until sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact, the normal affliction of the bourgeois was not busyness at all but its apparent opposite: boredom. It has even been argued that the grid of streets and cafés and small engagements in the nineteenth-century city—the whole of social life—was designed self-consciously as an escape from that numbing boredom. (Working people weren’t bored, of course, but they were engaged in labor, not work. They were too busy to be busy.) Baudelaire, basically, was so bored that he had to get drunk and run out onto the boulevard in the hope of bumping into somebody.

Turn to the last third of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, though, and suddenly everybody is busy, and everybody is complaining about it. Pepys, master of His Majesty’s Navy, may never have complained of busyness, but Virginia Woolf, mistress of motionless lull, is continually complaining about how she spends her days racing across London from square to square, just like—well, like Charlie Ravioli. Ronald Firbank is wrung out by his social obligations; Proust is constantly rescheduling rendezvous and apologizing for being overstretched. Henry James, with nothing particular to do save live, complains of being too busy all the time. He could not shake the world of obligation, he said, and he wrote a strange and beautiful story, “The Great Good Place,” which begins with an exhausting flood of correspondence, telegrams, and manuscripts that drive the protagonist nearly mad.

What changed? That James story helps supply the key. It was trains and telegrams. The railroads ended isolation, and packed the metropolis with people whose work was defined by a complicated network of social obligations. Pepys’s network in 1669 London was, despite his official position, relatively small compared even with that of a minor aesthete like Firbank, two centuries later. Pepys had more time to make love because he had fewer friends to answer.

If the train crowded our streets, the telegram crowded our minds. It introduced something into the world which remains with us today: a whole new class of communications that are defined as incomplete in advance of their delivery. A letter, though it may enjoin a response, is meant to be complete in itself. Neither the Apostle Paul nor Horace Walpole ever ends an epistle with “Give me a call and let’s discuss.” By contrast, it is in the nature of the telegram to be a skeletal version of another thing—a communication that opens more than it closes. The nineteenth-century telegram came with those busy-threatening words “Letter follows.”

Every device that has evolved from the telegram shares the same character. E-mails end with a suggestion for a phone call (“Anyway, let’s meet and/or talk soon”), faxes with a request for an e-mail, answering-machine messages with a request for a fax. All are devices of perpetually suspended communication. My wife recalls a moment last fall when she got a telephone message from a friend asking her to check her e-mail apropos a phone call she needed to make vis-à-vis a fax they had both received asking for more information about a bed they were thinking of buying from Ireland online and having sent to America by Federal Express—a grand slam of incomplete communication.

In most of the Western world outside New York, the press of trains and of telegraphic communication was alleviated by those other two great transformers: the car and the television. While the train and the telegram (and their love children, subways and commuter trains and e-mail) pushed people together, the car and the television pulled people apart—taking them out to the suburbs and sitting them down in front of a solo spectacle. New York, though, almost uniquely, got hit by a double dose of the first two technologies, and a very limited dose of the second two. Car life—car obsessions, car-defined habits—is more absent here than almost anywhere else in the country, while television, though obviously present, is less fatally prevalent here. New York is still a subject of television, and we compare “Sex and the City” to sex and the city; they are not yet quite the same. Here two grids of busyness remain dominant: the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century grid of bump and run, and the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century postmodern grid of virtual call and echo. Busyness is felt so intently here because we are both crowded and overloaded. We exit the apartment into a still dense nineteenth-century grid of street corners and restaurants full of people, and come home to the late-twentieth-century grid of faxes and e-mails and overwhelming incompleteness.

We walk across the Park on a Sunday morning and bump into our friend the baker and our old acquaintance from graduate school (what the hell is she doing now?) and someone we have been avoiding for three weeks. They all invite us for brunch, and we would love to, but we are too . . . busy. We bump into Charlie Ravioli, and grab a coffee with him—and come home to find three e-mails and a message on our cell phone from him, wondering where we are. The crowding of our space has been reinforced by a crowding of our time, and the only way to protect ourselves is to build structures of perpetual deferral: I’ll see you next week, let’s talk soon. We build rhetorical baffles around our lives to keep the crowding out, only to find that we have let nobody we love in.

Like Charlie Ravioli, we hop into taxis and leave messages on answering machines to avoid our acquaintances, and find that we keep missing our friends. I have one intimate who lives just across the Park from me, whom I e-mail often, and whom I am fortunate to see two or three times a year. We are always . . . busy. He has become my Charlie Ravioli, my invisible friend. I am sure that he misses me—just as Charlie Ravioli, I realized, must tell his other friends that he is sorry he does not see Olivia more often.

Once I sensed the nature of his predicament, I began to feel more sympathetic toward Charlie Ravioli. I got to know him better, too. We learned more about what Ravioli did in the brief breathing spaces in his busy life when he could sit down with Olivia and dish. “Ravioli read your book,” Olivia announced, for instance, one night at dinner. “He didn’t like it much.” We also found out that Ravioli had joined a gym, that he was going to the beach in the summer, but he was too busy, and that he was working on a “show.” (“It isn’t a very good show,” she added candidly.) Charlie Ravioli, in other words, was just another New Yorker: fit, opinionated, and trying to break into show business.

I think we would have learned to live happily with Charlie Ravioli had it not been for the appearance of Laurie. She threw us badly. At dinner, Olivia had been mentioning a new personage almost as often as she mentioned Ravioli. “I talked to Laurie today,” she would begin. “She says Ravioli is busy.” Or she would be closeted with her play phone. “Who are you talking to, darling?” I would ask. “Laurie,” she would say. “We’re talking about Ravioli.” We surmised that Laurie was, so to speak, the Linda Tripp of the Ravioli operation—the person you spoke to for consolation when the big creep was ignoring you.

But a little while later a more ominous side of Laurie’s role began to appear. “Laurie, tell Ravioli I’m calling,” I heard Olivia say. I pressed her about who, exactly, Laurie was. Olivia shook her head. “She works for Ravioli,” she said.

And then it came to us, with sickening clarity: Laurie was not the patient friend who consoled you for Charlie’s absence. Laurie was the bright-toned person who answered Ravioli’s phone and told you that unfortunately Mr. Ravioli was in a meeting. “Laurie says Ravioli is too busy to play,” Olivia announced sadly one morning. Things seemed to be deteriorating; now Ravioli was too busy even to say he was too busy.

I got back on the phone with my sister. “Have you ever heard of an imaginary friend with an assistant?” I asked.

She paused. “Imaginary friends don’t have assistants,” she said. “That’s not only not in the literature. That’s just . . . I mean—in California they don’t have assistants.”

“You think we should look into it?”

“I think you should move,” she said flatly.

Martha was of the same mind. “An imaginary playmate shouldn’t have an assistant,” she said miserably. “An imaginary playmate shouldn’t have an agent. An imaginary playmate shouldn’t have a publicist or a personal trainer or a caterer—an imaginary playmate shouldn’t have . . . people . An imaginary playmate should just play . With the child who imagined it.” She started leaving on my pillow real-estate brochures picturing quaint houses in New Jersey and Connecticut, unhaunted by busy invisible friends and their entourages.

Not long after the appearance of Laurie, though, something remarkable happened. Olivia would begin to tell us tales of her frustrations with Charlie Ravioli, and, after telling us, again, that he was too busy to play, she would tell us what she had done instead. Astounding and paracosmic tall tales poured out of her: she had been to a chess tournament and brought home a trophy; she had gone to a circus and told jokes. Searching for Charlie Ravioli, she had “saved all the animals in the zoo”; heading home in a taxi after a quick coffee with Ravioli, she took over the steering wheel and “got all the moneys.” From the stalemate of daily life emerged the fantasy of victory. She had dreamed of a normal life with a few close friends, and had to settle for worldwide fame and the front page of the tabloids. The existence of an imaginary friend had liberated her into a paracosm, but it was a curiously New York paracosm—it was the unobtainable world outside her window. Charlie Ravioli, prince of busyness, was not an end but a means: a way out onto the street in her head, a declaration of potential independence.

Busyness is our art form, our civic ritual, our way of being us. Many friends have said to me that they love New York now in a way they never did before, and their love, I’ve noticed, takes for its object all the things that used to exasperate them—the curious combination of freedom, self-made fences, and paralyzing preoccupation that the city provides. “How did you spend the day?” Martha and I now ask each other, and then, instead of listing her incidents, she says merely, “Oh, you know . . . just . . . bumping into Charlie Ravioli,” meaning, just bouncing from obligation to electronic entreaty, just spotting a friend and snatching a sandwich, just being busy, just living in New York. If everything we’ve learned in the past year could be summed up in a phrase, it’s that we want to go on bumping into Charlie Ravioli for as long as we can.

Olivia still hopes to have him to herself someday. As I work late at night in the “study” (an old hallway, an Aalto screen) I keep near the “nursery” (an ancient pantry, a glass-brick wall), I can hear her shift into pre-sleep, still muttering to herself. She is still trying to reach her closest friend. “Ravioli? Ravioli?” she moans as she turns over into her pillow and clutches her blanket, and then she whispers, almost to herself, “Tell him call me. Tell him call me when he comes home.” ♦

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My imaginary friend and me

18 April 2014

Tina Dubinsky

Not many people will admit to having an imaginary friend as a child, especially in public. But here goes.

I had an imaginary friend, and she was the start of an incredible journey through my imagination.

As an infant, I was lonely. I was the youngest of four siblings, from a broken family, living in rural Australia.

My two older sisters and brother were just that, older. There was a seven-year difference between my youngest sister and me. And only a year difference between my two sisters and older brother.

So, as an infant, I felt like the odd one out. I don’t think they always enjoyed playing the same games as me, and then there was the separation between my parents when my two older sisters went to live with Mum.

So, I created a friend to enjoy my games with me.

She was beautiful, my very own angel with wings.

The extraordinary thing about my imaginary friend was that she could fly. And because she could fly, I called her Flying Girl.

Yes, I have always been quite imaginative with names.

We spent many hours outside playing in our large yard, amongst the flowers, up trees, beneath the stumped house and across the road at Bakers Creek. My childhood home was a peaceful rural location and the place of many adventures.

My father was not too keen on Flying Girl. I recall him being very concerned about my imaginary friend. Though he was not aware, I knew that he was concerned.

One Christmas morning, I was disappointed to discover the new (paper) wings I created for Flying Girl, still hanging on the Christmas tree. I expected Santa Claus to take them to her!

After many hours of unwrapping presents, my family began to prepare for Christmas lunch. Sitting at the table, I spied my father sneaking out of the back door of the house.

Some time passed. I’m not sure how much. But my attention was brought back to the tree.

Flying Girl’s wings were gone.

I pretended to be happy. But inside, a large hollow space opened up. My imaginary friend wasn’t real. I knew that now. Though my Dad tried to make amends, by retrieving the wings during our meal, I knew the truth.

My world shattered.

Imaginary friends are natural.

Nearly forty years later, children psychologists have gained many new insights on children and their imaginary friends. Imaginary friends are a natural and healthy part of a child’s development. They also help children to practice talking, gain confidence and role-play different scenarios.

Even though it felt like my imaginary friend had a short shelf life, I have not forgotten the hours of enjoyment we had together. We went to many imaginary lands and created many fanciful stories. Just me, Flying Girl and my imagination.

Over the years, my imaginary friend followed me into the school ground. I often characterized her in make-believe games with other children.

As I grew into an adult, she has accompanied me into chat roleplay rooms in Yahoo to become a favorite character in a role-playing game.

And now, as an author, she plunges into the plot of my first epic fantasy to become one of my many intriguing characters.

Imaginary friends are cool.

They are not limited to our younger years but can journey with us through life. Then provide us with countless hours of creative fun and assist with childhood development.

As an author, I hope to share that fun with you.  I know have a menagerie of fantasy characters. Melrose Darkgaze, a sprite with the wings of a swan, is based on my childhood friend, Flying Girl.

Though it may take some time to craft their world and stories, I hope one day you draw them from the pages of my book and into your imagination.

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Australian Author Tina Dubinsky is an inspirational writer who climbed the corporate ladder from telemarketer to human resource manager. Tina writes across multiple genres including including creative nonfiction, memoir, short stories and real life writing such as commerical writing. In 2012, she swapped her corporate desk for one at home and continues to create with words.

© TINA DUBINSKY 2012 TO 2024

Writing about an Imaginary Friend: My Magic Dragon

by Laura Hedgecock | Sep 5, 2018 | Memories , Family History , Writing and Sharing Memories | 16 comments

Including an imaginary friend in your family story or memoir seems a little odd at first. Shouldn’t it be a non-fiction account?

But think. Often, the role of an imaginary friend in childhood reveals other stories. Depicts family dynamics. Portrays childhood fears . Unveils heartbreak and hope.

What follows is a case in point.

My Very Real Imaginary Friend

I’d like to introduce you to my Magic Dragon. He’s the only imaginary friend I remember from my childhood. Of course, the fact that my father gave him to me gave him might make him stand out from other, more fleeting, childhood affections.

We may have dabbled around giving him a name, such a “Puff,” since I did love to put on my sister’s old dance recital costumes and dance around the living room to Puff the Magic Dragon, but the Puff that Peter, Paul, and Mary sung of was a different magic dragon. He lived by the sea. Mine lived on Pinelake Court.

The first time (that I can remember) seeing him, Daddy called my attention to him. He challenged me to see him.

It was a dark and stormy night. Literally. The flashes of lightning and house-jarring thunder had not only driven me under my covers. Fear had driven me to tears.

Daddy came into my bedroom. Instead of trying to comfort me in the traditional way, he tried talking some sense in me.  He stood by my windows, insisting something along the lines of, “If you’d just watch the magic dragons playing out there in the puddles, you’d know there’s nothing to be afraid of. Dragons wouldn’t come out in a storm if it were dangerous.”

(Admittedly, logic was my particular strength as a child. Daddy and Grandpa had also convinced me that, although he could break glass, the abominable snowman couldn’t get past a window screen.)

Watching Daddy stand at the window laughing, after a few minutes, curiosity got the best of me. I climbed out of bed, wiped my tears, and took a look for myself.

How Real is an Imaginary Friend to the Child?

Did I really think I saw magic dragons?

Whether I believed they were real or not, the dragons I “saw” that night undeniably influenced me. I imagined dragons having fun, feeling safe, despite the storm.

I can still see them in my mind’s eye. The flash flood coming down the hill beside our house still gushed water into the pond-sized puddles on the street. The two most visible dragons (remember, it was dark out) walked upright on my side of the street, where the puddles were the deepest. With large wings, they didn’t look as whimsical as the famous “Puff,” but neither did they appear intimidating.

A red one, the one that became our magic dragon, waded behind the blue one. Kicking through the puddle, he splashed the blue dragon. The blue one laughed and skimmed his tail against the surface of the water, forming a wall of water with which he hit the red one. Both threw their heads back in laughter before dropping to all fours engaging in an all-out splash war, oblivious to the sheets of rain. Across the street, shadows of other dragons did the same.

Real or not, laughing with my father at our shared mental image, I felt less scared. I imagined feeling safe, enjoying the storm.

My magic dragon became both a code and a talisman. An open secret between my dad and me.

When I was afraid to go downstairs after dark when the stairway light was burnt out (not a rare thing; that lightbulb was a bear to change), he wouldn’t tell me not to be scared. He wouldn’t tell me to be brave.  He’d say, “Take the magic dragon with you. He’ll hold your hand.”

The story within the story

Like most stories of an imaginary friend, there’s a greater truth. Often, it’s one of loneliness or feeling misunderstood. Sometimes, it’s a story of creativity.

I think that my magic dragon taught my dad how to parent better. And he was proud of it. In the 70s, as he traveled four days a week, he installed a CB radio in his car. His handle was “The Magic Dragon.”  Like he held my hand when I was scared, my imaginary friend would travel with my dad, keeping him safe.

Together, my dragon and my dad taught me courage and compassion.

What a magical gift of love!

After I moved away from home, the tables turned. Daddy liked to think of me keeping my dragons close. His dragon gifts still grace the house, though he’s been gone for twenty years. Their goofy, big-bellied countenances make me smile. I’m not sure if that was how he imagined dragons or if he was giving me some sort of parenting self-portrait.

Three of the dragons my father gave me.

Either way, they remind me why I love thunderstorms.

I hope that in Heaven, where Daddy surely is, he can see dragons playing in the water.

Image credits: Background of top graphic courtesy of Pixabay user silviarita , CC0. Dragon in the rain adapted from image by Pixabay user ractapopulous, CC0. Ceramic dragons and final graphic © Laura Hedgecock 2018

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16 comments.

Just beautiful, what a lovely caring Dad you have… I use the present tense as I believe they are always with us. I had an alter ego, a friend called Cindy. Cindy was much braver then I was…she also spoke up when I was too shy and she loved reading my stories that I started writing when I was very small. Thank you for reminding me about her, wonder where she is now?

Oh, I would love to see you write about Cindy. What would you and Cindy have talked about then. How would you catch up? What advice would she give you today?

You have given me yet another memory path to wander down, I haven’t thought about Cindy in many years…I shall add her to my family list to write about. 💖

What fun! I’d love to hear the story of Cindy.

There were no imaginary friends in my family, although my dad did once pick up the Easter Bunny hitchhiking in Attleboro, Mass.

Tell me more! What a story, Liz!

When I was four and my brother was two, my father came into the kitchen a little rushed with a paper bag that contained our presents from the Easter Bunny. I wanted to know why they weren’t in Easter baskets. Well, the Easter Bunny was very busy. Then I wanted to know how Daddy had gotten the presents. That’s when he said he picked the Easter Bunny up hitchhiking, and the Easter Bunny gave him the toys to give to us, being so busy and all.

I just thought of something. Rabbits don’t have opposable thumbs, so how could the Easter Bunny have been thumbing a ride?!

Gotta love a man that could think on his feet. Maybe the Easter bunny index-fingered himself a ride, LOL!

This is such a great story and touching memory with your Daddy. I very much enjoyed reading it. The only imaginary friend I can recall hearing about in my family is an old lady who lived in my niece’s closest….I’ll have to inquire about the details of that particular story.

Yes, do! An old lady in the closet is worth exploring!

I’d be interested in hearing the story of the old lady in the closet! Hopefully, she was a benign presence.

What a beautiful life story and life lesson too. I think my parents operated more in the concrete of realism so sadly I have no ‘magic dragon’ to fall back on…which makes me wonder now, did I supply this gift to my children – I need to ask ~ Sharon

Thanks Sharon. There are lots of ways to supply magic dragons….

Please do ask your children. I’ll bet you’ve given them gifts you weren’t even aware of. The smallest gestures from a parent can mean the world to a child.

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Write a poem in the form of a letter to an imaginary friend in which you ask them for help that begins, Dear Friend. Keeping the person or creature or entity you’re writing to in mind, include details and images that reveal your imaginary friend’s characteristics as you craft your entreaty.

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Imaginary Friends Essay

Perkins is a professor of American and English literature and film. In this essay, Perkins examines the theme of fact verses fiction in relation to art in Ephron's play.

In his article on Imaginary Friends for The Nation , David Kaufman asserts that the play captures our attention because of the compelling questions it raises concerning "truth versus mendacity, fact versus fiction." He writes that the argument Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy have over these questions points to what he calls "one of the more troubling developments of the twentieth century," intensified in the twenty-first: "the culture's growing tendency to conflate fact with fiction, both diluting and polluting our reality."

Ephron's exploration of fact versus fiction in the play focuses attention not on the ways culture dilutes and pollutes reality, but on the complexities inherent in the artist's attempt to express reality. In her presentation of the often...

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10 Lines on My Imaginary Friend

1. I have an imaginary friend who cannot be seen by anyone.

2. He helps me with all my troubles and smoother time.

3. If I lose my hope then he taps on my shoulder to give me the hope to do it again.

4. When I had no one to play with, he was always there.

5. He would always make me feel very special.

6. He helped me to build confidence and self-esteem in myself.

7. He always does whatever I wanted to do

8. He never argued with me.

9. He always helps me become more creative every day.

10. He is the best companion for me.

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‘The Afterlife of Mal Caldera’ and other books by Latino authors we’re reading this month

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What is the meaning of death? Can the afterlife be a celebration that goes beyond a binary view of heaven and hell? With her captivating debut novel, “ The Afterlife of Mal Caldera ,” published in June by Penguin Random House, queer author Nadi Reed Perez explores these questions in an enchanting tale that transcends — and blurs — the boundaries of life and death.

The story follows the ethereal journey of Mal Caldera, who lingers in the world of the living after her recent passing. She strives to communicate with her beloved sister Cris, who’s left behind to piece together the remaining fragments of Mal’s life. Through themes of grief, diverse sexual expressions, love and family, Reed Perez’s narrative unfolds with a blend of mystery, charm and humor.

De Los Reads: Here’s what we’re reading in June

From a memoir on the Afro Latinx experience in the U.S. to a graphic novel about crying, here’s what we’re reading in June.

June 10, 2024

“My mom is from Mexicali, Mexico. [She] told me lots of ghost stories,” said Reed Perez, adding that her mother delivered these tales as facts, not fiction.

“The matter-of-fact way of casually mentioning, ‘Oh, when my grandfather died, he came to visit me, he lifted up the bedsheet like a gust of wind, and I felt his presence, and then the bed sheet fell and I find out the next day that he had passed away,’” she said.

It was never about believing in ghosts. Rather, it became a question of whether she chose to believe her mother and her family stories.

Reed Perez’s exploration of the afterlife is a richly textured narrative filled with touches of magical realism. As Mal navigates the curious afterworld, she encounters an array of peculiar characters that add depth and intrigue to a story Reed Perez says she concocted as a preteen.

“I was pretty young when I came up with the idea [for the book], like 11 or 12,” she said. “I thought about, ‘What would happen if I went to my own funeral? Would my crush reveal whether or not he really liked me all along? What would my friends say about me? Would they all be talking about me behind my coffin?”

Mal’s journey through the afterlife is marked by moments of lightheartedness, even as she grapples with profound themes of mortality and the human experience. The novel balances absurdity and introspection, offering a unique perspective on an inevitability that awaits every human being.

“Death is mysterious. I think a lot of narratives around grief don’t always capture that it can be really complicated when there’s a lot left unsaid and unresolved,” Reed Perez said, adding that she believes fiction can help readers process those feelings.

“Stories give you a model for how to live. When you’re grieving, you feel like you’re supposed to be a certain way,” she said. “If I remember something funny about the deceased and I laugh, people are going to think that I didn’t care that they died, but everyone grieves differently.”

A quick warning: “The Afterlife of Mal Caldera” contains descriptions of suicide that may be distressing too some readers. However, these scenes, which are integral to the story’s exploration of loss, are handled with care.

For anyone seeking a book that is both thought-provoking and entertaining, “The Afterlife of Mal Caldera” is a must-read.

De Los Reads July picks

1. (Vintage Español) 2. (Tiny Reparations Books) 3. (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)

“En Agosto Nos Vemos,” by Gabriel García Márquez (Vintage Español)

Gabriel García Márquez’s last work, “En Agosto Nos Vemos,” published a decade after his death, delves into feminine, sensual self-discovery through the captivating journey of Ana Magdalena Bach. On a visit to the coastal town where her mother is buried, she fearlessly embraces new possibilities while exploring her intimate desires, ultimately finding a new self in the company of her “desconocidos de una noche.” The book is also available in English.

“Magical/Realism : Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders , ” b y Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (Tiny Reparations Books)

This collection of essays is a modern exploration of topics such as loss, colonialism, migration and gender through the lens of pop culture. It provides a reflective narrative that prompts readers to reconsider their perspectives on these subjects.

“At the border between Western consciousness and Indigenous knowledge, there is a wolf,” writes Villareal. “Like every border, it too is imaginary and man-made, separating two profoundly different perspectives of the land and its beings: property or relative, settlement or wilderness body, human vs. animal. … Is the wolf an animal, or is it your kin?”

“The Dream Catcher , ” b y Marcelo Verdad (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)

This picture book is a delightful escape to a sun-kissed beach where little Miguelito and his grandfather sell fresh coconuts and handmade dream catchers. Through our protagonist’s innocent eyes, we learn the joy of living in the present and appreciating life’s everyday gifts. The collage illustrations are enchanting, with a soothing color palette that invites readers to contemplate the serene beauty of a sunset with their buddy. “The Dream Catcher” is a gentle reminder to savor the moment.

Roxsy Lin is a bilingual journalist and illustrator originally from Venezuela. Her work focuses on the pulse of the modern rhythms of Latinidad, arts and culture. @roxsy_lin

More to Read

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July 3, 2024

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June 19, 2024

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May 15, 2024

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Ireland out of England: The learned forgetting and remembering of a unionist Brexiteer

Brendan o’leary gets to grips with john wilson foster’s collection of essays.

Jack Foster (1944-) hails from east Belfast, spent most of his career as a professor of British and Irish literature at British Columbia, and is now an honorary research professor at Queen’s University Belfast. He lives in the Ards peninsula and is also a Titanicologist.

This curiously titled collection, which I will explain, gathers essays published between 2017 and 2023, printed in numerous outlets, including Irish and Northern Irish newspapers. It contains a small number of footnoted updates, but otherwise the items are unamended — and uncorrected.

Foster excuses “whatever repetition there is in the essays and articles” as flowing from the “reiterative demands of [Irish] nationalism but also from the diversifying promotion of a Northern Ireland outside the UK”. Irish Times readers beware: de te fabula narratur!

Foster writes well, avoiding the pretentious obscurantism which has marred Anglophone literary criticism for decades. His readers will therefore see his weaknesses as well as his strengths. He can be curmudgeonly funny. “Pretendians” is a biting account of North Americans who have faked indigenous or black heritage, while “An Angry Wind” is a sharp, albeit jaundiced, dissection of Maud Gonne.

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When Foster became a Canadian, the citizenship judge told him and his cohort that they were not to leave their previous cultures behind. Being from Northern Ireland, Foster deemed that foolish counsel, but the judge need not have worried: Jack did not, and has not, left his culture behind.

Foster tells us that he has preferred Dublin “socially” to Belfast, and that he identifies as British and Irish “in equal and inseverable measure”. This dual identity he shares with 0.61 per cent of those who answered the 2021 census in Northern Ireland.

He also observes that he lost a few friends in the fair city when “I ticked Yes to Brexit”.

“Brexit,” as Prof Foster should know, wasn’t on the ballot paper, because Britain is not the official title of the relevant state, and it is not an accurate legal synonym for the UK. And, yes, because Northern Ireland, part of the UK, is not in Britain, or part of Britain — and certainly not Great Britain — no matter how much he may wish otherwise. Northern Ireland, of course, contains numerous British citizens and identifiers — and was originally created to satisfy them.

In fact, citizen Foster ticked “leave” in answer to the question, “ Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? ”

Yet, “Brexit” is what has happened. Foster doesn’t like the consequences, though he does not hold himself and fellow “leavers” fully culpable for their ill-considered folly.

By overwhelming majority decisions at Westminster, endorsing two treaties, the full secession of Great Britain has occurred from the institutions of the EU — and the European Single Market and Customs Union.

But Northern Ireland, though removed from EU political institutions, because of the famous protocol , remains in the single market for goods and agriculture, and the UK administers the EU’s customs code at ports and airports between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Not one word or item of punctuation in that protocol has been modified by the Windsor Framework , or by Rishi Sunak’s policy paper, Safeguarding the Union .

Regarding these last observations, Jack Foster, Jim Allister and this reviewer are in full agreement. The BBC uses the expression “post-Brexit trading arrangements” to summarise the protocol but it covers much more than trade. It ensures no diminution in the rights provisions in the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), including those in the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and it cements the international protection of the GFA.

Foster warns us that any hostility in his collection is owed “to the post-Brexit surge of exclusive Irish nationalism across swathes of Irish society, including the so-called moderate nationalist political parties, and which harries unionists with its clamour for a border poll and predictions of unification”.

Among the allegedly guilty are Leo Varadkar, the Irish literature professor and Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole, Ireland’s Future and yours truly — though I am “reviewed” through critical citation of a friendly review , not through the pleasure of being accurately read.

Standard whataboutery will occur to most readers. Wasn’t there a surge of exclusivist British — and English — nationalism before and after the 2016 referendum? And shouldn’t Foster acknowledge being swept up in that?

He saw Brexit as “the desire for elbow room and fresh air”. What a weird approach to political economy. He also thought it arguable, like Ray Bassett, Ireland’s former ambassador to Canada, that the “economic logic of Brexit” would be “Irish co-withdrawal” from the EU. That would have been a suicide pact with the tall kingdom that overlooks our shoulder.

Foster excuses his poorly researched decision by asserting that “to vote Remain” would have been “to remand the UK in the custody of a vast bureaucracy ” and elsewhere writes of an Orwellian “Big Brotherish mega-bureaucracy ”. (My emphases).

The European Commission has about 32,000 full-time officials , including contract staff, ie, not much more than are employed by the City of Philadelphia . The European Central Bank has a further 5,000 employees, but the UK had an opt-out from the euro.

Foster also refers offhand to “the 4,000 pages (or is it more?)” of EU regulations. It is a lot more.

There are 35 chapters in the “acquis communautaire”, which, depending on the language of the member state, and the relevant pagination protocols, may vary from anywhere between 80,000 to 170,000 pages of text. The UK has had to keep or amend — rather than delete — much of this settled EU law to staunch the bleeding of its economy; and any modern economy requires at least this level of regulation.

In a professor, these are inexcusable lapses in factual care.

Foster does score some successful points in reviewing Fintan O’Toole’s amusing philippic Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018) .

“Psychology,” Foster writes, “not political science, is the ‘discipline’ which drives Heroic Failure.” True, and O’Toole certainly anthropomorphised England as a masochistic patient suffering from imaginary oppression, though like most, I think, Heroic Failure is best read as Swiftian satire rather than the work of a committed Freudian reader of nations. Foster is right that O’Toole overdid imperial nostalgia as the ruling explanation of why Brexit happened — but it is part of the story.

Nevertheless, Foster’s own lack of “discipline” is evident. For example, he asks rhetorically, by comparison with Germany and France: “Are there far right-wing parties in the British parliament?” His reader is supposed to nod “No”. But that would be to forget the DUP, then propping up the Tories when O’Toole was writing, and to forget O’Toole’s discourses on the “European Research Group”.

The title of this book is supposed to be an ironic riposte to “England out of Ireland”, a banner held up in the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York in 2019, including by Mary Lou McDonald, according to Foster. It is also the title of the longest essay in the book, which is mostly an accurate collection of anecdotal reports of very successful (southern) Irish emigrants to Great Britain, with sardonic references to the more recently tagged as Niple (“new Irish person living in England”).

What’s the point? First, it seems, that “Britain is an extension of Ireland — even in some sense a colony of the Irish mind”. That’s not persuasive, even as a metaphor. The large presence of Algerian emigrants — and their offspring — in France has not made France a colony of the Algerian mind, though some of Madame Le Pen’s supporters think otherwise.

There is an overlooked difference here, which should register with a Canadian professor, between those who arrive in a place through voluntary migration, and are accepted, and eventually integrated and assimilated, and settler colonists who displace natives — sometimes killing or expelling them, taking their lands, segregating them and forcefully changing their culture.

The second reason given is better. “It is healthier for Ireland and the Irish to acknowledge and embrace the Irishness of Britain and the Britishness of Ireland.” But such mutual acknowledgements — and practices — do not require Foster’s fantasy, namely, a return of all of Ireland to “archipelagic” unity with Great Britain. These goals would be more easily met by the UK’s return to the EU.

It is also debatable whether the most ambitious Irish see London as their favoured metropolis, whether they be in construction, academe, the arts, banking, tech or indeed in politics. I suspect, without survey evidence for proof, that the most ambitious Irish see San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York and Washington as the world cities where they’d like to be at least temporarily successful and recognised.

Foster’s hostility to Sinn Féin, in all its historic guises, and to those who have always favoured a peaceful, democratic and constitutional path to unification is both passionate and lacking in nuance about past sources of conflict and current predicaments.

Passion leads him to reject the Shared Island Initiative with almost as much vehemence as the IRA’s militarism. Who knew that Fianna Fáil Tánaiste Micheál Martin could be perceived as such a cunning threat to unionists?

Despite what Jack Foster avers, the letter and ethos of the GFA do not require nationalists to stop seeking a united Ireland, any more than they require unionists to cease to want to preserve the union with Great Britain. It requires respect for nationalists, unionists and others, for British and Irish, and both. It is a constitutional truce.

It prescribes powersharing within the North, and deep North-South and east-west co-operation if Northern Ireland remains in the union. It contains many possibilities for future models of a united Ireland. And all of them, if properly crafted, should envisage a united Ireland in which Jack Foster, as a British citizen and dual British-Irish identifier, would be comfortable if not best pleased.

Brendan O’Leary is Lauder Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book, Making Sense of a United Ireland, won the 2023 Brian Farrell Prize

Further reading

Multicultural citizenship: a liberal theory of minority rights by will kymlicka (oxford university press, 1995).

The Canadian philosopher Will Kymlicka distinguishes national minorities, living on their homelands, in multinational states, from ethnic groups (especially voluntary immigrants) living in multiethnic states. He argues that both need cultural rights, but stronger protections are owed national minorities.

Thinking About Democracy: Power Sharing and Majority Rule in Theory and Practice by Arend Lijphart (Routledge, 2008)

A collection of the Dutch and American political scientist’s most impactful essays on powersharing — with accessible discussions of consociation, federation, coalition governments, election systems, and the limits of majority rule.

The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union by Luuk van Middelaar (Yale University Press, 2013)

A highly readable use of Machiavelli and others to explain and justify the development of the European Union. To be read before its sequels: Alarums & Excursions (2019), and Pandemonium (2021). The Dutch man proves that writing about the European Union need not be dull.

IN THIS SECTION

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