[rngname22]

There are also online communities where people (the posts read as children/teens but that may be my own bias) actively discuss and strategize about how to essentially 'summon' / 'create' / manifest a second internal person in their mind. Like, they essentially actively _try_ to create an 'imaginary friend' that is more than just imaginary but is almost a split personality like entity. The goal is for the 'thoughts' / internal monologue of that second entity to feel like they are thoughts that are not generated by the host, but instead truly feel to be generated by an external entity.

That community is called tulpas and the subreddit bears the same name.

By one token you could seemingly accurately describe the discussion there as unchaperoned children and teens actively trying to become mentally ill through meditation and self-talk.

On the other hand, I remember when I was a kid we used to talk about how maybe if we wished hard enough we could become more powerful like the characters in Dragonball Z. And I remember a web forum where kids talked about how maybe Digimon was real and there was a parallel universe where Digimon existed and how the forumbase could merge that world with our own if they wished hard enough.

So maybe kids have always been quite out there and it just looks more alarming when you are an adult.