From the opening of the Wikipedia plot summary:
Dax and Odo detect an unusual particle field emanating from a planet in the Gamma Quadrant, so they beam down to investigate. They discover the field is coming from a small village's power generator, but when a villager named Colyus discovers them, he is suspicious of them. Once Odo convinces Colyus of their intentions, Colyus explains that the village is a Yaderan colony and 22 people have disappeared in the past few days without a trace. Odo and Dax offer to help investigate the disappearances, but the village leader, Rurigan, seems unconvinced that the villagers will ever be found.
This that and the other happens, but we can skip over all that. Here’s the concluding paragraph of the plot summary:
When the Dominion arrived on Yadera Prime, Rurigan explains, it destroyed life as he knew it, so he escaped to an abandoned planet and recreated the world he had lost. He has been living in this illusion for over 30 years, and now he admits that none of it was real. However, Odo points out that were it not real Rurigan would not have been able to develop feelings for the villagers - after all, they are only holograms. He argues that Taya and the others are real and deserve a real chance to live. Dax and Rurigan repair the reactor, restoring the village, including the missing people. Before he and Dax leave, Odo realizes how close he has grown to Taya and the two share a heartfelt goodbye. Taya thanks him for finding her mother and wishes him luck in finding his own parents. Before they leave, Odo demonstrates his abilities by morphing into a toy that Taya played with earlier.
This a world of holographic people Rurigan had created for himself. This is an extreme version of a theme that recurs in the Star Trek universe.
There is, of course, the holodeck, which is always available and is used mostly in a self-contained way, for recreation, but also for work. But sometimes things get out of hand, such as in the episode sequence in The Next Generation involving the Sherlock Holmes world. Moriarty discovers that he is an imaginary, a created, being and that there is a “real” world “out there.” He even manages to take over the Enterprise and escape into that world but, as I recall, but is negotiated back into the holodeck on the promise that one day when the real people figure it out, he’ll be released into the real world (there is a love interest tangled up in this as well). And then we have the episodes, in TNG and Voyager, where Reginald Barclay all but loses himself in the holodeck, (TNG), and manages to establish something real in Voyager, communication between earth and Voyager.
All of this, of course, is playing on the meddlesome problem of fiction and reality, meddlesome because we know so much about reality through mediated representations of it – writing, recordings, and images of various kinds. How do we distinguish between representations of the real and representations of the imaginary? And it’s not simply a matter of epistemology, but of emotional commitment.
Then, in a more focused way, we have Data (TNG), an android with dreams of becoming fully human. And the holographic Doctor in Voyager who ends up fighting for the rights of holograms.
Stepping out of the Star Trek universe we find, for example, the Spielberg/Kubrick film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. He presents us with a future world in which Mecha (androids) serve humans in various subordinate capacities. The Swinton’s accept young David, a Mecha specifically created as surrogate child. Complications follow.
Finally, in real life in the here and now we have companion robots, some intended as companions for young children, others as companions for old people, and then we have, of course, sexbots. Except for the sexbots most of these are only loosely anthropomorphic, or not at all – thoughsome are animal-like.
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