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I'm making a tentative return to Friday open threads, but as is probably apparent by this point, they're probably going to be somewhat sporadic.
Today's question is: what is a strange, illogical thing that you believed as a child? I'm thinking more of something that you spontaneously, independently started believing (without input from others), rather than things like the tooth fairy (which obviously required some input from parents/wider society).
Two weird things that I believed spring to mind. The first is that I thought all traffic lights were operated by an individual human being, who sat crouched inside the lights (don't ask me how I thought an adult human could contort themselves in order to fit inside a set of traffic lights), observed the flow of traffic, and switched the lights from red to green when they deemed a sufficient queue of cars had built up.
The other belief is both weird, and kind of dark if you think about it too much. For some reason, when I was a toddler, I was convinced that puppets had voices. I don't mean that I thought the puppeteers gave voice to the puppets, I mean that I believed each puppet was literally speaking with its own, conscious voice. (I knew that puppeteers were making the puppets move though.)
However, I had my own toy glove puppets at home, and these presented me with a conundrum: they showed no evidence of being able to speak independently. I resolved this conundrum with the perfect toddler logic: if puppets used in professional puppet shows could speak on their own, and my toy puppets couldn't, this clearly meant that puppets destined to be children's toys had had their voices removed before they arrived in the toy shop. So my toys had been literally rendered voiceless. This explanation, which I came up with entirely on my own, satisfied my need for an internal logic, and didn't trouble me particularly. But as an adult, it seems like a horror scenario! A better writer than I am could write a really creepy children's story using this concept — and, like a lot of creepy children's stories, it would probably seem much more horrifying to adult readers than to children, who tend to take this sort of thing in their stride.
What about you? What strange, illogical things did you believe when you were children?
Today's question is: what is a strange, illogical thing that you believed as a child? I'm thinking more of something that you spontaneously, independently started believing (without input from others), rather than things like the tooth fairy (which obviously required some input from parents/wider society).
Two weird things that I believed spring to mind. The first is that I thought all traffic lights were operated by an individual human being, who sat crouched inside the lights (don't ask me how I thought an adult human could contort themselves in order to fit inside a set of traffic lights), observed the flow of traffic, and switched the lights from red to green when they deemed a sufficient queue of cars had built up.
The other belief is both weird, and kind of dark if you think about it too much. For some reason, when I was a toddler, I was convinced that puppets had voices. I don't mean that I thought the puppeteers gave voice to the puppets, I mean that I believed each puppet was literally speaking with its own, conscious voice. (I knew that puppeteers were making the puppets move though.)
However, I had my own toy glove puppets at home, and these presented me with a conundrum: they showed no evidence of being able to speak independently. I resolved this conundrum with the perfect toddler logic: if puppets used in professional puppet shows could speak on their own, and my toy puppets couldn't, this clearly meant that puppets destined to be children's toys had had their voices removed before they arrived in the toy shop. So my toys had been literally rendered voiceless. This explanation, which I came up with entirely on my own, satisfied my need for an internal logic, and didn't trouble me particularly. But as an adult, it seems like a horror scenario! A better writer than I am could write a really creepy children's story using this concept — and, like a lot of creepy children's stories, it would probably seem much more horrifying to adult readers than to children, who tend to take this sort of thing in their stride.
What about you? What strange, illogical things did you believe when you were children?