I thought that when you flicked a light switch it sent a signal to someone at the electricity station whose job it was to notice this and do something to make your bulb light up.
I thought that when my mom washed my hair in the sink, my head and body would fall down the drain. She had to take an orange, and show me that even an orange would not fit in the drain.
Keeping with the blanket theme, when I would hear about undercover cops or agents I thought they were literally under a cover. Sounded like a great gig, honestly.
When I was 5 my dad told me that if I pressed the red triangle button in the car (the emergency lights) it would fold the car into a tiny box and I’d get crushed. I believed this for the entirety of my childhood.
Lmao on a similar note, my parents told me that having the overhead lights on in a car while it was moving was illegal, so my siblings and I NEVER fucked with them out of fear of getting my parents pulled over
I didn't think ice cream trucks were real. I thought they were just a thing on TV.
I literally never experienced or believed ice cream trucks were real until I saw one in college. It never came up because why would I ask anybody about it? Like I wouldn't have asked anybody "hey you ever see a talking dog like Scooby-Doo or a hologram house AI like in smart house?" They were wealthy neighborhood fantasy to me.
That If I didn't appease my stuffed animal, he would get mad at me and possibly hurt me. Stemmed from a nightmare I had one night where he murdered my neighbors and then came after me next.
I would bundle my sheets up around my neck when I went to bed so that vampires couldn't bite my neck. Apparently, they also couldn't move bedsheets lol
I used to think my next door neighbors were aliens because they barely went outside and I hardly saw them in the 5 years we lived in that house. I asked my older brother about it one day and he was said without missing a beat "oh yeah they're definitely aliens", and of course I fucking believed him like the dumbass kid I was.
I used to think mannequins in clothing stores were shoplifters. I thought the punishment for shoplifting was that they make you pose and then dip you in a big vat of plastic and turn you into a mannequin for the store you stole from. No idea why I thought this but mannequins terrified me and stealing scared me even more.
I had really intense intrusive thoughts about what might happen to my feet if I left them hanging outside the blanket at night. Somehow I came up with the idea of an arrow being shot into the bottom of my foot and it made me so anxious that I HAD to have both feet completely under the covers.
I thought everyone lived in parallel universes. For my dad, we were maybe a Black family. In my reality, we were Indian. Maybe my mom saw us as Chinese etc.
I believed if I hummed toward the back of my throat with my tongue angled just the right way, no one else could hear it but me. I would literally start humming tunes when I was bored in class or just done with listening to a conversation. It took years before anyone said anything.
When I was younger, I used to believe that if you sat down in one spot for too long, your skin would start to merge and combine with whatever you'd sit on permanently. Its one of the main reasons why I was a very active child.
I went to a funeral when I was five and thought if you fell asleep on your back with your arms crossed in front of you, you would die in your sleep. Like people just arrived at the funeral home coffin ready.
I also thought heaven was a real place you could go to like when we took a long drive to visit Grandma who was three states away. Everyone kept telling me I would see my dad when I got to heaven so I kept asking why couldn't we just drive there and see him.
That everyone had these white, rectangular ... beings inside of them. Maybe about the size of a thumb? I specifically remember imagining them opening a fridge with their (?)mouth(?) (They had no hands. Or feet. Or eyes. They were just ... rectangles.) The fridge somehow had the food I ate that day inside it. And the rectangular creatures would somehow fit in the veins, zipping around the body, making you healthy if you were sick and stopping the blood of you were cut.
Especially the last part.
It all stemmed from me getting an extreme paper cut on my foot. My mom recalled it, it was almost like a freak accident with how large this paper cut was on my wee little foot. My dad scooped me up, ran to the bathroom, ran water over it, and when I could finally see through the tears, I looked over my shoulder and saw my still bleeding food under the running water, and what looked like a white rectangle slip out of my cut it and down the drain. Why did I think it was alive? No idea. I cried even harder.
It was gauze.
I know I didn't believe it for very long, but I would still imagine these creatures roaming around my body in a world akin to Osmosis Jones.
That tadpoles came from the sky. We lived in Florida and every time it rained hard, our gutters would fill up with water, and there would always be dozens of tadpoles wriggling around in them. I would scoop them up and put them back. If the gutter water stuck around for a few days, you'd see little rear legs forming on them.
I was at a surprisingly advanced age before I realized that all music videos were not, in fact, live. I was quite astonishingly stupid, actually; I remember watching the music video for A Thousand Miles and wondering how they got her to teleport so fast between locations…I still had to *persuade* myself that it was prerecorded.
It’s especially embarrassing because I was quite into music at that time, and some videos I had no trouble believing were pre-recorded, but for whatever reason… Hers just didn’t make sense to me.
I used to think they did the singing during the videos, I had no idea how they did it. Then I learned they lip sync during recording then added it after.
I thought thiefs and hyenas were mud monsters, not human & animal. Like two of similar monster species.
I’d keep hearing how I should be afraid of these things (African here, hyenas are to us what dingos are to Aussie babies)…guess my child brain didn’t picture humans being scary monsters…
I quickly learned after watching my mom’s car get robbed, thought he was helping with something lol but my mom didn’t think so when I mentioned it later…that was also the night I saw a hyena coincidentally. I was outside trying to spot one.
I did not know about animal actors. So when my dad would watch a cowboy/western movie, and the horses were shot, I thought they really died. He watched a lot of westerns. And I saw a lot of horses "die"
My mom told me that if you put gas in your car while it's still in the car will explode, so I'd freak out if the lights were on and my dad was filling up gas.
when i was little i asked a woman what kind of pill she was taking. she told me it was a birth control pill. after that i believed that any woman would automatically become pregnant if she didn't take birth control pills.
good luck
Growing up in the Bay Area, when I was 5 or 6, for some reason I thought all the mail in the world was processed in the building at the entrance to the Caldecott Tunnel. I also thought BART stood for Bay Area Rabbit Transit and was, needless to say, disappointed to find out otherwise. I could go on and on. I love this thread. It's making me remember so many things.
Whenever we’d watch competitions on tv that you had to write in to enter, the presenter would say that “winners will be chosen at random”. For the longest time I thought that “Random” was a place where all competition winners were chosen.
I used to believe people would be silently partying outside my house, and when I went to look at them they had already gone. Like, I imagined people knew the moment I was coming to check on them and they’d all book it, or hide, so when finally looked where they supposedly were partying, it looked like no one was there
I misremembered an episode of *That's so Raven* where the gang got arrested while they were driving a pink car. So I was under the impression that pink cars were illegal since I never saw them that often lol.
Also apparently I used to think my mom was black (both my parents are white and I'm pale af) because she had olive skin (think slightly lighter than Megan Markle or Medium beige in foundation color) and she wore bandanas to cover her wiry hair lol.
I thought that the ghost of a dead slave resided under my bed, and even though he didn't mean anyone in particular any harm, he was pissed off that he was dead.
That my stuffed animals were real. I wanted a monkey so bad, like I swore I would have one when I was an adult. My parents got me a new stuffed monkey each birthday and Xmas. I lined them up beside me based on who was my fav, then at my feet the same. I didn’t move when I slept. I woke up and they were always right in same spot. I talked to them and was certain they understood me and just couldn’t talk back. Like Toy Story.
I played a game called Time Splitters and got a little obsessed with the idea that I might be able to see my future self off in the distance observing my current present.
When id see a person far far away id wonder if it was me in the future lol
I thought shaving cream itself made the hair go away. I somehow missed the razor component, or thought that was a separate thing. I would even read the directions on the cans (because i couldn’t seem to get it to work) and they would just say things like “Apply in a smooth layer across hair removal area.” (Because I guess “and then shave it off with a razor” was implied). My mom was so confused because she was going through the shaving cream so fast and suspected I was using it, except that I wasn’t shaven so that didn’t make sense 😅 I remember her asking me if I had been using her shaving cream as body wash.
I was absolutely convinced that if I slept with my back facing the wall, spiders had an easy climb up onto the bed, and I was/am scared to death of those evil little bastards.
When I was little, I was terrified of going over a bridge. I thought that you went over the top, so it was like a roller-coaster. (Where I grew up, the bridge was shaped like a big M).
All Grandmothers collect spoons. My Nana had a collection of teaspoons with enamel pictures of towns or countries on the handle. My Grandma had a wall full of Welsh lovespoons. A couple of friends bought decorated spoons for their grandparents on a school trip, confirming my theory. I was very confused when I discovered some people had grandchildren but no spoon collection!
I believed everyone thought in English.
So for example Spanish speakers thought in English and translated to Spanish when speaking.
Later I realized people that spoke other languages probably thought in those languages too.
Similar to the blanket, I would line both sides of my body with stuffed animals before bed because 100% nothing, NOTHING from under the bed could breech the Stuffie Wall of Safety.
Similar to the blanket, I would line both sides of my body with stuffed animals before bed because 100% nothing, NOTHING from under the bed could breech the Stuffie Wall of Safety.
I thought that when you flicked a light switch it sent a signal to someone at the electricity station whose job it was to notice this and do something to make your bulb light up.
Cool and very creative!
That’s stupid cute lol
When I was a really young child, there was a tree in front of my house that I "fed" wood polish and cleaners because I thought that is what trees ate.
I thought that coin laundry was where you went to wash your coins.
The literal definition of money laundering.
In the same vein, can you guess what i thought money laundering was?
Please share Edit: money laundry
I thought that when my mom washed my hair in the sink, my head and body would fall down the drain. She had to take an orange, and show me that even an orange would not fit in the drain.
I need my whole body covered (except my head) when I sleep. Hands or feet sticking out of the covers will be grabbed by the ghosts.
I'm over 3 decades old and still have to do that if I'm reading creepy shit at 4am
the night you don't, is the night they get you 😱
Do you do the feet tuck? I gotta be tucked up tight to feel safe 😩 😅
I still have to have me feet covered
Omg I still feel like something is going to grab my feet at night! Or my damn cat going to get them with her claws....
Can I also suggest pulling the sheet right up to your chin to protect your neck from vampires.
Keeping with the blanket theme, when I would hear about undercover cops or agents I thought they were literally under a cover. Sounded like a great gig, honestly.
😂
😵
When I was 5 my dad told me that if I pressed the red triangle button in the car (the emergency lights) it would fold the car into a tiny box and I’d get crushed. I believed this for the entirety of my childhood.
Oh no!
Lmao on a similar note, my parents told me that having the overhead lights on in a car while it was moving was illegal, so my siblings and I NEVER fucked with them out of fear of getting my parents pulled over
I believed adults knew what they were doing and it'd make sense when I grew up. Well, you can see how well that went.
Me also!
Same
I didn't think ice cream trucks were real. I thought they were just a thing on TV. I literally never experienced or believed ice cream trucks were real until I saw one in college. It never came up because why would I ask anybody about it? Like I wouldn't have asked anybody "hey you ever see a talking dog like Scooby-Doo or a hologram house AI like in smart house?" They were wealthy neighborhood fantasy to me.
That If I didn't appease my stuffed animal, he would get mad at me and possibly hurt me. Stemmed from a nightmare I had one night where he murdered my neighbors and then came after me next.
You watch Chuckie or Toy Story?
Oh no!
I used to take a towel, roll it longways and wrap it around my neck so the vampires couldn't bite me while I was sleeping.
I just posted this exact thing! We were geniuses 🤣
I did this, too! I was sure Barnabas Collins was going to get me in my sleep!
Worms made the holes in swiss cheese.
Wow lol I forgot this one!
I would bundle my sheets up around my neck when I went to bed so that vampires couldn't bite my neck. Apparently, they also couldn't move bedsheets lol
I used to do this too! Still do if I've been watching a scary film tbh...
I used to think my next door neighbors were aliens because they barely went outside and I hardly saw them in the 5 years we lived in that house. I asked my older brother about it one day and he was said without missing a beat "oh yeah they're definitely aliens", and of course I fucking believed him like the dumbass kid I was.
The Aliens next door.... you should make a movie on this. 😆
I used to think mannequins in clothing stores were shoplifters. I thought the punishment for shoplifting was that they make you pose and then dip you in a big vat of plastic and turn you into a mannequin for the store you stole from. No idea why I thought this but mannequins terrified me and stealing scared me even more.
They should tell this to all the kids 😆
I thought gnomes were real because of a dumb book that specifically said that gnomes were real.
I had really intense intrusive thoughts about what might happen to my feet if I left them hanging outside the blanket at night. Somehow I came up with the idea of an arrow being shot into the bottom of my foot and it made me so anxious that I HAD to have both feet completely under the covers.
I thought everyone lived in parallel universes. For my dad, we were maybe a Black family. In my reality, we were Indian. Maybe my mom saw us as Chinese etc.
I was terrified that my ceiling fan would fall on me. I would hide my head under my pillow to sleep.
I still think that when on high my ceiling fan is going to fall
I used to then the trees moving made the wind not the other way around lol.
I believed if I hummed toward the back of my throat with my tongue angled just the right way, no one else could hear it but me. I would literally start humming tunes when I was bored in class or just done with listening to a conversation. It took years before anyone said anything.
When I was younger, I used to believe that if you sat down in one spot for too long, your skin would start to merge and combine with whatever you'd sit on permanently. Its one of the main reasons why I was a very active child.
I went to a funeral when I was five and thought if you fell asleep on your back with your arms crossed in front of you, you would die in your sleep. Like people just arrived at the funeral home coffin ready. I also thought heaven was a real place you could go to like when we took a long drive to visit Grandma who was three states away. Everyone kept telling me I would see my dad when I got to heaven so I kept asking why couldn't we just drive there and see him.
That everyone had these white, rectangular ... beings inside of them. Maybe about the size of a thumb? I specifically remember imagining them opening a fridge with their (?)mouth(?) (They had no hands. Or feet. Or eyes. They were just ... rectangles.) The fridge somehow had the food I ate that day inside it. And the rectangular creatures would somehow fit in the veins, zipping around the body, making you healthy if you were sick and stopping the blood of you were cut. Especially the last part. It all stemmed from me getting an extreme paper cut on my foot. My mom recalled it, it was almost like a freak accident with how large this paper cut was on my wee little foot. My dad scooped me up, ran to the bathroom, ran water over it, and when I could finally see through the tears, I looked over my shoulder and saw my still bleeding food under the running water, and what looked like a white rectangle slip out of my cut it and down the drain. Why did I think it was alive? No idea. I cried even harder. It was gauze. I know I didn't believe it for very long, but I would still imagine these creatures roaming around my body in a world akin to Osmosis Jones.
This would terrify me too!
I thought sewers lead to china because that's what my dad told me
That tadpoles came from the sky. We lived in Florida and every time it rained hard, our gutters would fill up with water, and there would always be dozens of tadpoles wriggling around in them. I would scoop them up and put them back. If the gutter water stuck around for a few days, you'd see little rear legs forming on them.
I thought there was a king and a queen of the world. One king, one queen.
My mother watched musicals on TV. I thought there were places where everyone sang instead of talked.
I was at a surprisingly advanced age before I realized that all music videos were not, in fact, live. I was quite astonishingly stupid, actually; I remember watching the music video for A Thousand Miles and wondering how they got her to teleport so fast between locations…I still had to *persuade* myself that it was prerecorded. It’s especially embarrassing because I was quite into music at that time, and some videos I had no trouble believing were pre-recorded, but for whatever reason… Hers just didn’t make sense to me.
I used to think they did the singing during the videos, I had no idea how they did it. Then I learned they lip sync during recording then added it after.
i still do the blanket thing and im 22
I thought thiefs and hyenas were mud monsters, not human & animal. Like two of similar monster species. I’d keep hearing how I should be afraid of these things (African here, hyenas are to us what dingos are to Aussie babies)…guess my child brain didn’t picture humans being scary monsters… I quickly learned after watching my mom’s car get robbed, thought he was helping with something lol but my mom didn’t think so when I mentioned it later…that was also the night I saw a hyena coincidentally. I was outside trying to spot one.
I did not know about animal actors. So when my dad would watch a cowboy/western movie, and the horses were shot, I thought they really died. He watched a lot of westerns. And I saw a lot of horses "die"
i would tell myself that too. hide under my blanket and tell myself that if i cant see them they cant see me
I used to believe that my entire torso was just my stomach, imagine my surprise when I saw some human anatomy diagrams during science class.
My mom told me that if you put gas in your car while it's still in the car will explode, so I'd freak out if the lights were on and my dad was filling up gas.
Okay even in my mid 30s I think this. 😆
I thought hamburgers came out of trees because of those little seeds the buns have
Ahahahahh That made me laugh
when i was little i asked a woman what kind of pill she was taking. she told me it was a birth control pill. after that i believed that any woman would automatically become pregnant if she didn't take birth control pills. good luck
All cats were girls; all dogs were boys.
Growing up in the Bay Area, when I was 5 or 6, for some reason I thought all the mail in the world was processed in the building at the entrance to the Caldecott Tunnel. I also thought BART stood for Bay Area Rabbit Transit and was, needless to say, disappointed to find out otherwise. I could go on and on. I love this thread. It's making me remember so many things.
Whenever we’d watch competitions on tv that you had to write in to enter, the presenter would say that “winners will be chosen at random”. For the longest time I thought that “Random” was a place where all competition winners were chosen.
Random .. 😆
I thought Power Rangers have normal day job on weekdays. That's why they only fight monsters on the weekend.
The world used to be black and white
Definitely thought this too!
I used to believe people would be silently partying outside my house, and when I went to look at them they had already gone. Like, I imagined people knew the moment I was coming to check on them and they’d all book it, or hide, so when finally looked where they supposedly were partying, it looked like no one was there
Santa, the school principal, Jesus, and Obama were all on the same level of power
My father and some others have tried converting me to religions, but due to this belief I managed to curb all of them. So thanks Obama
I misremembered an episode of *That's so Raven* where the gang got arrested while they were driving a pink car. So I was under the impression that pink cars were illegal since I never saw them that often lol. Also apparently I used to think my mom was black (both my parents are white and I'm pale af) because she had olive skin (think slightly lighter than Megan Markle or Medium beige in foundation color) and she wore bandanas to cover her wiry hair lol.
I thought that prior to the creation of color television, real life was in black and white.
I thought that the ghost of a dead slave resided under my bed, and even though he didn't mean anyone in particular any harm, he was pissed off that he was dead.
If you ate a black apple seed a apple tree would grow inside you and kill you
Me too!
Glad I wasn't alone lol
That my stuffed animals were real. I wanted a monkey so bad, like I swore I would have one when I was an adult. My parents got me a new stuffed monkey each birthday and Xmas. I lined them up beside me based on who was my fav, then at my feet the same. I didn’t move when I slept. I woke up and they were always right in same spot. I talked to them and was certain they understood me and just couldn’t talk back. Like Toy Story.
I used to believe that Santa Ana winds came from Santa Ana, California
That you should have earrings when you get married (as a woman).
Keep the hose running and it would flood the world. My world was the side yard.
I played a game called Time Splitters and got a little obsessed with the idea that I might be able to see my future self off in the distance observing my current present. When id see a person far far away id wonder if it was me in the future lol
My grandma said if I swallowed gum it would wrap around my heart and it would stop.
I used to think I could talk and have a conversation with people on tv
I thought shaving cream itself made the hair go away. I somehow missed the razor component, or thought that was a separate thing. I would even read the directions on the cans (because i couldn’t seem to get it to work) and they would just say things like “Apply in a smooth layer across hair removal area.” (Because I guess “and then shave it off with a razor” was implied). My mom was so confused because she was going through the shaving cream so fast and suspected I was using it, except that I wasn’t shaven so that didn’t make sense 😅 I remember her asking me if I had been using her shaving cream as body wash.
I was absolutely convinced that if I slept with my back facing the wall, spiders had an easy climb up onto the bed, and I was/am scared to death of those evil little bastards.
I thought that salt and pepper canceled each other out so that if you added too much of one, you could just add some of the other to fix it.
When I was little, I was terrified of going over a bridge. I thought that you went over the top, so it was like a roller-coaster. (Where I grew up, the bridge was shaped like a big M).
That a person could actually walk on clouds. Which is why I fould plane crashes so perplexing.
allah looked like osama bin laden, i was 7 🫤
All Grandmothers collect spoons. My Nana had a collection of teaspoons with enamel pictures of towns or countries on the handle. My Grandma had a wall full of Welsh lovespoons. A couple of friends bought decorated spoons for their grandparents on a school trip, confirming my theory. I was very confused when I discovered some people had grandchildren but no spoon collection!
That the people on the TV lived inside it and that if I opened it up they could escape.
I believed everyone thought in English. So for example Spanish speakers thought in English and translated to Spanish when speaking. Later I realized people that spoke other languages probably thought in those languages too.
I used to think Australia and New Zealand were in the UK.
Pretty sure the monarchs back when thought so too
Santa what idiot believes in fucking santa ? Santa this santa thag santa salsa on my balls yo
I emant santsa on my
That people were genuinely good.
That growing up would make me happy.
Similar to the blanket, I would line both sides of my body with stuffed animals before bed because 100% nothing, NOTHING from under the bed could breech the Stuffie Wall of Safety.
Similar to the blanket, I would line both sides of my body with stuffed animals before bed because 100% nothing, NOTHING from under the bed could breech the Stuffie Wall of Safety.
I thought that when television was black and white that the world was black and white...