Psychologists call them “imaginary companions,” often abbreviated to ICs, and the phenomenon is far more common in adulthood than most people assume. Research estimates that roughly 10 to 15 percent of young adults currently maintain some form of imaginary companion, whether that means a fully fleshed-out character they talk to internally, a personified object, or an invisible presence they interact with in private. The topic sits at an interesting crossroads of creativity, inner speech, and mental health, and the reasons adults create these companions turn out to be different from what you might guess.
How Common Are Adult Imaginary Companions
Childhood imaginary friends are well studied and widely accepted as a normal part of development. Most parents barely raise an eyebrow when a four-year-old sets a place at the table for an invisible guest. But the assumption that everyone outgrows this is wrong. Studies of university-age adults consistently find that a meaningful minority still have active imaginary companions, and those figures sit in the range of about one in seven to one in ten participants reporting a current IC.1Personality and Individual Differences. Young adults with imaginary companions: The role of anthropomorphism, loneliness, and perceived stress Some researchers suspect the real number is higher, because admitting to an imaginary friend as an adult carries social stigma that childhood play does not. Many adults with ICs never mention them to anyone.
The companions themselves take many forms. Some are humanlike characters with names, backstories, and personalities. Others are more abstract presences, or they might be personified animals or objects. Some people carry forward an imaginary companion from childhood, updating and maturing the character as they age. Others create entirely new companions in adolescence or adulthood, sometimes without realizing they are doing it until the relationship is well established.
What Actually Triggers Adult Imaginary Companions
The popular assumption is that imaginary friends exist to fill a social void, that adults who have them must be lonely. The research tells a more nuanced story. A study of young adults found no strong link between loneliness and having an imaginary companion. Instead, two other factors stood out: perceived stress and a tendency toward anthropomorphism, which is the habit of attributing human-like qualities to non-human things.1Personality and Individual Differences. Young adults with imaginary companions: The role of anthropomorphism, loneliness, and perceived stress People who naturally anthropomorphize their pets, their cars, or their houseplants are more likely to generate a fully realized imaginary companion as well.
A separate meta-analysis looked specifically at the proposed connection between chronic loneliness and anthropomorphism and found no significant relationship between the two.2PubMed. Imaginary companions: A meta-analytic investigation on anthropomorphism and chronic loneliness That finding matters because it challenges the intuitive narrative: people do not anthropomorphize primarily because they are starved for social contact. Instead, anthropomorphism appears to be a stable cognitive style, something certain brains are predisposed toward regardless of how rich their social lives are. The stress connection is different. When life feels overwhelming, having an internal figure to talk things through with can serve as a coping mechanism, and people who already lean toward anthropomorphism are especially likely to reach for that strategy.
This distinction has practical implications. If you have an imaginary companion as an adult, the existence of that companion is not evidence that your social life is deficient. It is more likely a reflection of how your mind naturally processes the world, combined with stress management that happens to take this particular form.
The Writer’s Version and the Illusion of Independent Agency
Fiction writers have their own term for a closely related experience. The “illusion of independent agency” describes the feeling that a fictional character you created has developed a mind of its own, making decisions, saying things, or behaving in ways the writer did not consciously plan. In a study of adult fiction writers, 92 percent reported experiencing this to some degree.3Imagination, Cognition and Personality. The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own? That is a strikingly high percentage, and it suggests that the capacity to generate an autonomous-feeling internal character is not rare or pathological but sits on a spectrum that most creative people occupy to some extent.
Writers often describe their characters as “telling them” what happens next in a story, or refusing to cooperate with an outline. Some hear their characters’ voices distinctly, with recognizable vocal qualities and speech patterns. This is not the same as an auditory hallucination in the clinical sense; the writer generally knows the voice is generated by their own mind. But the experience of it can feel remarkably involuntary and autonomous, which is what makes it an “illusion” of independent agency rather than actual independent agency.
The overlap with adult imaginary companions is obvious. Both involve generating an internal figure that feels like its own entity, and both rely on a mind that can simulate another person’s perspective with enough richness that the simulation starts to feel autonomous. Where they differ is mainly in context: writers channel this ability into creative output, while people with ICs may use it for emotional processing, companionship, or stress relief. The underlying cognitive machinery is likely similar.
How Inner Speech Connects to Imaginary Companions
Everyone talks to themselves internally. That running inner monologue is something psychologists call “inner speech,” and it turns out that adults with a history of imaginary companions have a distinctly different quality of inner speech compared to those without. A large study of over 1,400 adults found that people who had ICs, whether in childhood or adulthood, scored higher on three specific dimensions of inner speech: dialogic (meaning their inner speech takes the form of a conversation rather than a monologue), evaluative (meaning it involves self-assessment and judgment), and what researchers labeled “other voices” (meaning they hear inner speech that does not feel like it belongs to their own voice).4PubMed Central. Imaginary Companions, Inner Speech, and Auditory Verbal Hallucinations: What Are the Relations?
The dialogic dimension is especially interesting. Most people experience inner speech as a single voice narrating, planning, or reflecting. People with IC histories are more likely to experience it as a back-and-forth exchange, as though they are having a conversation with someone inside their own head. This style of inner speech may be what makes it possible to generate an imaginary companion in the first place: if your default mode of thinking already involves simulating a second perspective, an IC is a natural extension of how your mind already works.
Researchers have proposed that this difference may trace back to how social interaction gets internalized during development. Young children talk out loud with others before gradually shifting that dialogue inward. For some people, the internalization process preserves the dialogic quality of the original exchange to a much greater degree, producing an inner speech style that naturally supports the creation of distinct internal voices.
What Happens in the Brain During Inner Dialogue
Brain imaging studies have looked at what happens when people engage in dialogic inner speech versus simple internal monologue. When participants generated inner dialogue rather than inner monologue, brain regions involved in processing social information and understanding other people’s perspectives lit up with significantly increased activity. These included areas in the temporal lobes on both sides of the brain, parts of the left frontal lobe associated with speech production and planning, and posterior midline structures including the precuneus and posterior cingulate, regions known to be involved in self-referential thought and perspective-taking.5PubMed Central. The brain’s conversation with itself: neural substrates of dialogic inner speech
What this means in practical terms is that when your brain generates a conversational inner voice, it recruits the same neural networks it uses to understand real people. Your brain is essentially running a social simulation, modeling another person’s perspective using the same hardware it would use if you were face-to-face with them. For people with imaginary companions, this social simulation may be particularly vivid and sustained, producing companions that feel genuinely present and autonomous rather than like a puppet the person is consciously operating.
This also helps explain why the experience can feel so real. When someone says their imaginary companion “told” them something, they are not necessarily being dramatic. The brain regions generating that companion’s speech overlap with the regions that process actual speech from other people. The subjective experience of hearing from an IC and hearing from a real person may share more neural territory than outsiders would expect.
Where the Line Sits Between Normal and Clinical
The question most adults with imaginary companions worry about is whether this means something is wrong with them. The short answer is that having an IC, on its own, is not a symptom of mental illness. But the relationship between imaginary companions and certain clinical experiences is real and worth understanding honestly.
Adults with a history of imaginary companions score higher on measures of proneness to auditory verbal hallucinations, meaning they are more likely to report hearing voice-like experiences even outside the context of their IC. In one study, people with IC histories showed reduced sensitivity to detecting real speech embedded in white noise, along with a bias toward “hearing” speech that was not actually there. This pattern of being more likely to perceive speech in ambiguous auditory input has also been found in people who experience auditory hallucinations in clinical settings.4PubMed Central. Imaginary Companions, Inner Speech, and Auditory Verbal Hallucinations: What Are the Relations?
A systematic review of the literature found that every study examining the link between imaginary companions and psychosis-like experiences reported some form of association, though the strength of those associations varied widely, from small to large.6Lancaster University. Fantasy Proneness and Imaginary Companions as Predictors of Psychosis-Like Experiences “Psychosis-like experiences” is a broad category that includes things like unusual perceptual experiences, magical thinking, and paranoia-like thoughts. Having one or several of these experiences at a mild level is extremely common in the general population and does not mean a person has or will develop a psychotic disorder.
The critical distinction is between a shared cognitive style and actual impairment. People with ICs and people who experience clinical hallucinations both appear to have brains that are unusually good at generating internal perceptual experiences. But the person with an IC typically knows the companion is not real, maintains the ability to function in daily life, and experiences the companion as something between voluntary and semi-voluntary. When internal voices become distressing, uncontrollable, or accompanied by a loss of insight into their origin, that is when the experience crosses into territory worth clinical attention. The cognitive style is not itself the problem; context, distress, and control are what separate a creative inner life from a symptom.
Personality Traits That Go Along With Imaginary Companions
Adults who had imaginary companions in childhood, whether they still have them or not, tend to differ from other adults on certain personality measures. One study found that these adults scored higher on two specific traits: achievement motivation and absorption.7PubMed. The personality correlates of adults who had imaginary companions in childhood Achievement motivation is fairly self-explanatory, describing a drive to accomplish goals and meet high standards. Absorption is more interesting in this context: it refers to the capacity to become deeply immersed in experiences, whether that means losing yourself in a movie, a piece of music, a daydream, or a book to the point that you temporarily lose awareness of your surroundings.
High absorption is closely related to what some researchers call fantasy proneness, the tendency to have vivid and elaborate imaginative experiences. This makes intuitive sense: if your mind is good at generating immersive internal worlds, it is also likely to be good at populating those worlds with characters who feel alive. The achievement motivation finding is less immediately obvious but may relate to the fact that imaginary companions can serve as internal coaches or motivators. Some adults with ICs describe their companions as figures who encourage them, challenge them, or hold them accountable, essentially a self-generated support system that channels their existing drive.
Why the Stigma Is Disproportionate to the Evidence
There is a mismatch between how adult imaginary companions are perceived culturally and what the research actually shows. In popular understanding, an adult who talks to an invisible friend is treated as either a punchline or a warning sign. The evidence paints a much more textured picture: most adults with ICs are psychologically normal people whose brains happen to be especially good at social simulation and imaginative immersion. The same cognitive traits that produce an imaginary companion also fuel creativity, empathy, and the kind of absorption that makes someone a compelling storyteller or a deeply engaged listener.
Part of the stigma comes from conflating the experience with schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders. While there is a statistical overlap in certain perceptual tendencies, as discussed earlier, having an imaginary companion is not equivalent to having a hallucination in either mechanism or outcome. The clinical community has increasingly recognized that unusual inner experiences exist on a continuum, and that where a person falls on that continuum matters far less than whether the experience causes distress or functional impairment.
Another contributor to the stigma is simply that adults rarely talk about their ICs, which means most people assume the phenomenon is rarer and stranger than it actually is. When one in seven to one in ten young adults reports having a current imaginary companion, the experience is common enough that you almost certainly know someone who has one, even if they have never told you about it.
Tulpas, Alter Egos, and Other Related Phenomena
The term “imaginary companion” is the one used most often in developmental and personality psychology, but adults who create internal characters use a variety of labels depending on their community and cultural context. In online communities, particularly those emerging over the past decade or so, the term “tulpa” has gained traction. Borrowed from Tibetan Buddhist tradition (where it referred to a being created through spiritual discipline), a tulpa in the modern Western sense describes an intentionally created mental companion that the creator experiences as autonomous. Tulpa practitioners often emphasize that they deliberately cultivate their tulpa through focused attention and practice, distinguishing this from the more spontaneous emergence of a childhood imaginary friend.
Other related phenomena include maladaptive daydreaming, a pattern of extremely vivid and time-consuming fantasy that can interfere with daily functioning. Maladaptive daydreamers often create elaborate fictional worlds populated with recurring characters, and while these characters may not function exactly like an imaginary companion in the traditional sense, the overlap in cognitive style is substantial. The key difference is whether the imaginative activity enhances daily life or competes with it.
There are also the kinds of internal dialogues that happen in therapeutic contexts. Some approaches to therapy explicitly encourage patients to create and converse with internal figures representing different aspects of themselves, unresolved relationships, or feared outcomes. The therapeutic use of imaginary dialogue lends further support to the idea that generating internal characters is a normal human capacity that can serve useful psychological purposes when engaged with intentionally.
How Stress Changes the Picture
The link between perceived stress and imaginary companions deserves a closer look, because it suggests these companions serve an active function rather than existing as a quirky byproduct of an overactive imagination. When adults report higher levels of stress, they are more likely to maintain or create an imaginary companion.1Personality and Individual Differences. Young adults with imaginary companions: The role of anthropomorphism, loneliness, and perceived stress The companion appears to function as an internal sounding board, someone to process difficult emotions with, rehearse conversations through, or simply vent to without fear of judgment.
This is not fundamentally different from what many people do when they talk to a pet, journal in letter form, or carry on imaginary arguments with an absent person in the shower. The difference is one of vividness and persistence. For most people, the imaginary conversation is fleeting and clearly self-generated. For adults with ICs, the companion has enough consistency and personality that the interaction feels more like talking with a distinct other than talking to yourself. Whether that richer version of self-dialogue is healthier or simply different from the lower-key version remains an open question. What the evidence does suggest is that it is not inherently harmful and may serve as a genuinely useful stress buffer for people whose cognitive style supports it.