Imaginary friends.

This is an interesting phenomenon. Imaginary friends.
I'm trying to think if I have any. I don't think I do. If I ever did when I was a child, they are long since forgotten.
I've known people with imaginary friends though. Some of them pretty whacky too. I can't imagine what these imaginary friends are to them either. Are they a real, personified entity? Are they an hallucination? Or maybe just an idea of a person? Small children often have imaginary friends, but what are they really? Are they ghosts, angels or demons who haunt these young unprejudiced minds? Minds that have not yet been "taught" that these things don't exist in the real world. Could they be some inter-dimensional life form that only a child can see? One that we all forget when we grow into adolescence. Are they the product of a vivid imagination or some sort of early personality disorder that resolves itself with age?
Napoleon Hill had what he considered a virtual board of directors. He called it his cabinet. There were some famous names on it too. Abe Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Edison among them. Interestingly, he actually knew Thomas Edison and had interviewed him at length for his book: "Think and Grow Rich." At one point he had to stop these imaginary board meetings he was having because he saw himself teetering on the edge delusion. He became concerned that his imaginary friends were gaining too much of a foot hold in reality.
There have been movies made about this too. Fight Club, for instance. SPOILER ALERT! This is a movie about a guy who had an imaginary friend and didn't even't know it...because he had developed a split personality. In the movie, the Narrator (who is never identified by name) has a friend he thinks he met on an airplane named Tyler Durden. Their escapades take them through all manner of dysfunctional relations and finally land them at a point of clarity. Kind of a twisted happy ending.
I sometimes wonder if more of us have imaginary friends that we don't know about. I know several women who speak of boyfriends they have, but I've known them for years and never met these boyfriends. Are they a figment designed to keep them out of relationships? Thus avoiding the risk of heartbreak. In two cases that come to mind, I have believed this to be true for quite some time. (If you're reading this, it's probably not you.) Maybe these boyfriends exist and I just haven't had occasion to meet them in years. Maybe. Maybe not.
In the end, if we do have imaginary friends, they must serve a purpose. Hopefully it's a purpose to preserve our sanity or facilitate our integration into the world around us. In most cases there's probably no harm to come from it.
Let us not forget though, every once in a while imaginary friends create the Son of Sam.