Imaginary Friends
and Other Deep Weird Encounters
Did you have an imaginary friend growing up? Are they still with you?
Last week I took part in an online panel discussion on the subject of Entity. Our host Sarah Janes of the Dream Mysteries.org opened up the discussion by asking if any of us had had an imaginary friend growing up and I shared mine. Imaginary friends are fairly common in young kids. And many of us who had imaginary companions as children later go on to encounter entities as adults. This then begs the question is the imaginary friend strictly contained to a child’s imagination or is there something more going on?
I recalled my friend quite vividly during a research and writing session many years after I last encountered him in my waking world. And it was as if he became real to me once more.
The Blue Boy
It was a sunny winter day when I first met him. I felt the warm rays of the sun streaming through the window, and like the dust particles in the air, he too became illuminated by the sun beams.
I must have been about four or five years old at that time. It was very cold outside with a lot of snow on the ground that I could see on the other side of the window pane. And I had to stay indoors to play. I was an only child at that point so maybe it was out of boredom or loneliness that I conjured him up.
I can see him in my mind’s eye as I type this.
He was a little boy and he hid behind the curtains of the big bay window in the front room of the very first house that I had grown up in. I called him blue boy, because although he was a normal looking kid in every other way, his skin color was unnaturally white with a tinge of blue. If adult me had encountered him I might have been very startled and thought him oxygen deprived or dead based on his appearance!
I remember being so happy to have a friend to play with behind the big dark curtains at the house on Cottonwood Drive. We would meet there, behind the voluminous drapery and when out of sight of any of the grownups, we would fly!
Even as a child I understood that stepping behind the curtain was a means of magical transport. And as an adult I realize the symbolic nature of peering behind the curtain to gain a deeper understanding of that which is hidden or esoteric. It was there where I first began my little experiments in bilocation that I continue to this day. With my stuffed teddy bear (who I still have, oh the secrets he possesses) clutched tightly in my hands, the blue boy and I travelled beyond the stars to strange and now forgotten to my adult mind, spaces.
Sometimes after these long shamanic dream-like travels my Mom would find me asleep, tucked away behind the curtains of that big front window. Was this all just a dream?
Decades later when I became acquainted with the 12th century account of the green children of Woolpit I wondered if there was any connection to that story and my own experience with the little pale blue boy.
The green children, a brother and sister were found by farmers working their fields at harvest time near some ditches that had been excavated to trap wolves at St Mary’s of the Wolf Pits also known as Woolpit in England.
Intriguingly European witches in later centuries who I feel a strong connection to were known to shape-shift into wolves when they conducted their night battles.
Were the green children little witches who got caught by the wolf traps?
Their skin was green, their clothes were made from unknown cloth, and initially their speech was unintelligible to the people who found them. Eventually when they learned to communicate in English they claimed to have come from a faraway land and that they were magically transported to Woolpit after wandering into a cave.
Illustration of the abandoned Babes in the Wood by Randolph Caldecott, 1879
Were they travelers from behind the curtain like we were? Made up of imagination, and bits of dust, and starlight? Maybe... but unlike the green children who emerged from a dark underground cavern, my imaginary travelling companion rode in on a sun beam.
I never knew the name of my star child or if I did it is lost deep within my childhood memories. Nor do I fully recall the strange places that we visited or the weird language that we spoke only between ourselves.
I do remember how happy I was to have a magical friend. He stopped appearing to me sometime after my sister Diana was born. Maybe I did not need him anymore.
But, I believe he is still with me.
What do you think? Did you have an imaginary friend? And if you did were they friendly like mine or more sinister? Some people feel this is a child’s connection to the spirit realm? And other’s have more frightening memories. I love to hear other people’s experiences so please feel to share. I’m open to other’s interpretations and I want this to be a safe space. We are all just learning here.
In a future post I will write more on experiments in bilocation.
I had a small troupe of odd companions in my childhood. There were three principal ones. They had names and they weren’t human and the three main ones were three different looking entities. I think my father could sometimes catch a glimpse of them. They were nice to me but sometimes played tricks. I remember their names but I cannot reveal them.
When I became a teenager I had scarier experiences with a tall white being who wasn’t evil but I did not like being taken and losing control.
I’m sure I did have an imaginary friend. I have a very strong imagination. Always have. Sometimes I wonder, since only kids tend to see them, are they really imaginary? Or are they truly spirits trying to connect. Children have a more open way of seeing things. Their minds are more open to things.