Many people had imaginary friends in childhood. And even if a child talking to someone invisible sometimes caused anxiety among others, over time they came to the conclusion that this is just one of the stages of growing up that most children go through. But is this really just an innocent play of the mind?
So different
For a long time, mental health experts believed that children make friends as a psychological defense mechanism. For example, to cope with the hardships of separation from someone with whom they have spent a lot of time together, or to do something that they are afraid to do alone. Oddly enough, it turned out that friends are not at all problematic children who want to escape from problems in this way, but on the contrary, quite obedient and prosperous. Marjorie Taylor, a psychiatrist at the University of Oregon, USA, interviewed more than 500 children, confirming that such friends were not the result of mental disorders intended to replace a missing social circle.
It was also believed that imaginary friends are a tracing of the person who invented them. However, it is alarming that they are not always the same age. For example, the author of the book "Who Framed Clariss Cliff?" Nikki Sheehan had an invented friend as a child. He was 30 years old, he wore a beard, his friend's name was Klas.
- A creature who accompanied me to school and picked up after class, with whom I played and shared secrets, who helped me make decisions. It came back to me at the age of 40. I wrote this novel about the experience of relations with him. It is noteworthy that Claes himself has not changed at all, - said Nikki in an interview.
Moreover, like real friends, imaginary ones don't always get along. Taylor and her colleagues found that about a third of people complained that their fictional friend did not always help, did not leave when asked, could speak too loudly, interfering with communicating with other people, and committed hooligan acts.
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Our second self?
American psychiatrist Julian James outlined his view of the mysterious phenomenon in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Process of the Collapse of the Bicameral Mind. Using the method of functional magnetic resonance imaging, he discovered that in an ordinary person, up to a certain age, the right and left hemispheres of the brain function independently of each other. They have to literally "communicate" with each other, transmitting information about sensations received from the outside, through the corpus callosum, which connects them. This corpus callosum is actively involved in the process of speech.
For those people whose hemispheres are working intensively, such "communication" turns into something more than just a conversation with their inner "I". An example is the story of Peter, a British accountant who survived a commissurotomy, an operation to separate the hemispheres. The patient suffered from epilepsy for a long time and decided on a radical solution to the problem. To his surprise, after a few months, the man discovered that his hands were behaving in a strange way. For example, when Peter was tying his shoelaces, his right hand tied them and his left hand tried to untie them. Psychiatrists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who became interested in the phenomenon, noticed that Peter answered the same questions differently during the interview.
For example, to the question "What did you want to become as a child?" at first he replied that he was a racer, and right there - that he was an architect, as if the halves of his brain had dissimilar plans for life. However, if James's theory is correct, it remains unclear why nature has endowed us with two halves of the brain, if each of them can exist separately from the other and perform the functions inherent in the individual. And also why comrades invisible to others are sometimes not only unlike their “masters”, but also frighten them.
So, in May 2015, a man came to the police station in Jacksonville, Florida and confessed to the murder.
Jeff Gaylord, 37, said he killed the man - stabbed him several times, then dismembered him and buried him in his backyard. Jeff claimed that the deceased "drove him crazy, urging him to commit various atrocities." The police who searched his home found no trace of the crime. The murdered was an imaginary friend of Gaylord, whom he called "Mister Happy." Jeff himself demanded a fair punishment for himself, but he was found innocent and mentally healthy. Gaylord was released from prison after paying a fine. A stranger case was described by the Indian neurologist Vileyanur Ramachandran. The patient he observed was paralyzed half of the body. The lady claimed that this half did not belong to her, but to a now deceased person, who occupied one-half of the woman's body.
The dark side of imagination
And not so long ago, communities began to emerge on the vastness of the American and European Internet, practicing the creation of imaginary companions, called tulpa. This word originated among Buddhist monks and denotes a kind of double, brought to life by the power of thought. The first tulpa managed not only to see, but also to create the French traveler Alexandra David-Neel in 1927, while traveling through Tibet, little explored in those years. As a result of several months of meditation, a lama appeared next to her, who accompanied the woman in the mountains, now appearing, now disappearing. Later, Alexandra had to resort to the help of monks to banish the image, when a few months later the tulpa Lama turned from a good-natured guide into an aggressive pursuer and tried to kill her by throwing her into the abyss. The novices explainedthat the dark side of her personality gradually went beyond imagination, embodied in a fictional companion.
Tulpam practitioners call themselves tulpa breeders. Most are urban middle-class adults who cite their loneliness and social fears. They use imaginary companions not only for communication, but also for sexual and romantic interactions, although this is considered taboo among Buddhists. On the pages of their forums and blogs, such people report on the improvement of their personal lives through the practice of making imaginary friends and girlfriends, distributing guidance on "making them." These tulpamans managed to reveal a secret that was carefully hidden by the Tibetan monks, which David-Neel managed to touch.
How to create life
The first and foremost step to creating a tulpa is to immerse yourself in a state of hypnotic meditation using isochronous tones. Many peoples have extracted such tones from sacred musical instruments for centuries. Tibetans - from singing bowls, Chinese - from gongs, Europeans - from bells.
Isochronous tones are sound waves with a frequency of 160-180 hertz, affecting the mind so that it begins to work in theta rhythm. Science has long known that there are five different rhythms or waves on which the human brain operates: alpha, beta, gamma, delta and theta waves. Scientists have found that when theta waves are dominant, the left and right hemispheres begin to function separately. It is in the state of theta meditation that the individual is invited to revive in his imagination the image of the being that he would like to see as his companion.
Despite this explanation, tulpa breeders themselves differ in their views on the origin of the phenomenon. A poll organized by Wired magazine with 118 respondents showed that 36% believe that they are communicating with "divine powers", 50% believe that tulpa are a manifestation of the properties of the human psyche, and 14% even say that they are in contact with the ghosts of once living people. Despite the fact that the number of active participants in such movements in each country so far has no more than a couple of hundred participants, this trend is gaining momentum. The question of whether they have a rich imagination or are those who know how to communicate with supernatural forces, while also remains open. One thing is clear: having imaginary friends does not depend on age. Simply, unlike children,some adults choose to hide their existence carefully.