Friday open thread: bizarre childhood beliefs

[dolorosa_12]

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?

Comments

[pauraque]

When I was little, I didn't understand that people aged continuously. Instead I thought that on your birthday, you abruptly aged up. I remember this specifically because I was so looking forward to my younger brother's first birthday, when I felt certain that he would suddenly go from being a crawling, babbling infant to being a regular kid who could walk and talk and actively participate in the things I wanted to do. I also thought that his hair would suddenly grow out, though I'm not sure how that worked in my head because you would think I would have been aware that mine grew gradually, requiring haircuts at times other than my birthdays. Anyway, I was very disappointed when my brother's birthday arrived and he looked and acted exactly the same as he had the day before! I was five at the time.

[dolorosa_12]

This is so adorable! It reminds me a bit of another memory from my childhood: when my mother was pregnant with my younger sister, everyone kept saying to me that I was about to get 'a new brother or sister to play with.' With my three-year-old's logic, I interpreted this to mean that the new brother or sister would appear in the world armed with lots of toys to share with me. When I met my sister for the first time and she was your standard scrunched up newborn baby, unable to interact with me, and with no toys to be seen, I was extremely confused!

[vriddy]

I thought that house numbers indicated the price of the house. So, we used to live in a very reasonably priced £3 house, then when I was 4 we moved away to an astronomically expensive £300 house. I was extremely concerned about our financial well-being for a while after that!! Even though we never were in actual financial trouble (that I knew of!).

This is quite a fun topic!! Although the voiceless puppets are quite unsettling indeed :o

[isis]

That's kind of adorable!

[vriddy]

:D 💙💙

[dolorosa_12]

This is amazing, and completely adorable — especially the fact that £300 was an astronomically expensive amount of money to child!you.

The voiceless puppets thing is really unsettling, and I have no idea how I came up with it. What I find particularly bizarre is that it didn't seem in any way dark or disturbing to me as a child — just a kind of logical explanation for something that confused me.

[naye]

Being a child enthralled by books and other stories, I used the logic that if there could be a place where people went and had a great time after they died, why couldn't that place be those worlds I loved so much? (Yes, I had read Narnia - no, I did not actually get the allegory until much later.) Anyway pre-teen me at one point decided that going to heaven = entering your favorite fictional world.

[dolorosa_12]

This makes perfect sense! Pre-teen you had the right idea!

Like you, I didn't get the allegory in Narnia, because Christianity was not a part of my childhood in any way — my parents and both sets of grandparents are/were atheists, and state school in Australia is secular without any religious education classes (although sadly this seems to be changing in more recent times).

[corvidology]

Akin to your traffic light story, when I was so little I can't remember it myself (my mum told me) I asked her how they could get all those singers into the radio at once. :D

[dolorosa_12]

I love this so much! I think my younger sister used to think that people on TV were actually inside the TV box in some way (I guess this sort of thing was easier to believe when TVs were giant box-like behemoths).

[chestnut_pod]

The puppets are horrifying! You could truly be the next Neil Gaiman with that…

I independently decided that my mom, who had long, curly dark hair, was the Starbucks mermaid -- this must have been around age five -- and determined that she was hiding her fins from me. I spent a lot of time trying to get her wet so that her fins would appear.

[vriddy]

That is super cute :D

[dolorosa_12]

Neil Gaiman is exactly the sort of author who could write a creepy children's story about the de-voiced puppets — it's very much his kind of thing.

Your anecdote is adorable.

[isis]

When I was a child I noted how when I was being driven somewhere at night, the streetlight beams would seem to connect to the car's front as we approached, and then connect to the rear after we passed, and somehow I decided that the streetlights were actually handing off the car from one light to the next, and that's how cars worked, it was just that you couldn't see the beams during daylight.

[bluedreaming]

Oh, that’s so lovely! Like an embrace of streetlight light.

[dolorosa_12]

That is really specific, and kind of beautiful. What an incredible mind you had as a child, to come up with something like that!

[bluedreaming]

I also thought that about traffic lights! Or, well, I invented it as a way they worked; I don’t remember actually believing it, just trying to figure out how the lights worked. I imagined that there was a person in the ground beneath the light, in some kind of subterranean office, and there was a system of mirrors whereby they would monitor traffic and slide a differently coloured card beneath the light tunnel to change the light to the next colour. This would then get bounced up to the actual lights. But I couldn’t figure out why we needed three lights, though I figured maybe it was so people who had trouble seeing wouldn’t get mixed up, because the lights would be in different circles.

I also thought that the door from the basement main area into the laundry room could open into an Egyptian tomb. I’d never seen it happen, but I was convinced that one day when I was least expecting it, the door would swing open and there we’d be. It was a very effective deterrent against watching too much television, as our television was in the main basement area!

Your puppets are quite unsettling! It brings to mind the short story (which I have not read) “I have no mouth, and I must scream”.

[dolorosa_12]

I think it must be quite common for children to believe that traffic lights are manually operated, because the way they really work is quite complicated, and obviously not visible/apparent to anyone observing the lights themselves. I love the explanation you came up with as a child — it's much more complicated and sophisticated than my notion of a person contorted into the box behind the lights!

I also love the basement Egyptian tomb — I wonder what made you come up with that one!

The puppets are really disturbing, and what I find bizarre is that I didn't think such things were disturbing when I came up with them — it just seemed like the most logical explanation for something I found confusing.

[lirazel]

I actually can't think of anything off the top of my head, but I LOVE reading everybody else's answers!!!

[dolorosa_12]

Me too! I'm glad I came up with this prompt — people have such marvellous answers.

[monksandbones]

The ones I can think of for myself are pretty small-scale beliefs, but amusing! As a child growing up in British Columbia, which Canadians consistently shorten to "BC," I was used to "BC" in abbreviations and acronyms standing for British Columbia. That's true for things like BCAA (the BC branch of the AAA/CAA) and ICBC (the crown corporation that insures all cars in BC), but not so true for CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I thought that every province had their own province-specific name for their public radio station (I mainly encountered CBC through radio)!

It also took me a long time to figure out that the Saint Lawrence River flowed out of the Great Lakes, not into them.

[dolorosa_12]

Aww, that's so cute!

[lilysea]

As a child, I had read a series of memoirs by a Dutch woman whose family hid Jewish families in their home.

(They were written for an adult audience. My parents attended a church which had a self-service library full of books unsuitable for children and no supervision of which books people checked out.)

After reading the memoirs, I genuinely believed as a child that

- Nazis were still a genuine threat in Australia in the 1980s

- Nazis came and took away children for no reason (the fact that they only took *Jewish* children hadn't been clear in the memoir, partly because the author and her sister, who were Dutch Christians, also both ended up in camps as teenagers)

I used to go around the house regularly and collect any evidence that I existed - photos of me, artwork by me, toys - and hide it in the linen cupboard so that if Nazis came they wouldn't know that I was hiding in the roof cavity.

[dolorosa_12]

Oh my goodness, that is absolutely terrifying! What a frightening thing to have believed, especially the fact that it caused you to hide all the evidence that you existed.

[conuly]

When I was in elementary school, up until age 8 or so, I believed you couldn't consciously think a lie. You could unknowingly think something that was untrue, like if a little kid believed in Santa they could think of Santa as though he was real. You could think "I'll imagine that the sky is yellow". But you couldn't just think "Two plus two is five" unless you honestly believed it or caged it in somehow.

I wasn't clear on what would happen if you tried, but I was sure it was bad.

[dolorosa_12]

Oh wow, that's amazing — and perfect child logic.

I've always been really terrible at lying (to the extent that I can't play e.g. card games where you need to bluff about what you've got in your hand, because it's obvious in my face), so I can see myself believing something like that in childhood too.

[thawrecka]

I don't know that it's necessarily that illogical in the scheme of things, but I assumed coffee had a legal drinking age much like alcohol did, and that I was being very sneaky by having it sometimes as a child (though I did not like it, because my father bought International Roast).

[dolorosa_12]

Haha, I love this!

I remember that I somehow got it into my head that twelve years old was the correct age to start drinking coffee (because twelve-year-olds went to high school, and were therefore mature and grown up people), and became determined that I would try coffee immediately after my twelfth birthday, and would obviously enjoy it. I roped my mother into this ridiculous scheme, convinced her to buy me a capuccino in a cafe, and then spent over an hour trying to overcome my disgust as I forced myself to drink it. Oddly enough, being twelve years old did not magically change my tastebuds into appreciating the bitterness.

I then didn't drink coffee again until I was twenty or twenty-one years old. (I now love coffee.)

[thawrecka]

I also now love coffee! But I still can't bear International Roast.

[merit]

I remember believing that fairies lived in the garden, and very early in the morning, it was even possible to see them.

And, of course, teachers lived at schools.

[dolorosa_12]

Awww, the fairies thing is so cute! I definitely believed fairies lived in our garden as well.

I think teachers living in schools is a pretty common thing for children to believe — and it's logical for them to believe it!

[mific]

Mine's darker, and about existential angst. At about 9-10 I read a YA sci-fi book about a virulent fungus accidentally brought back from the first trip to Mars (I think it was Mars?) There was a graphic description of it smothering a spaceman in his suit and of a foot-thick layer covering a dog. My family had a dog, and I was very fond of it. I was also a protected middle class kid in NZ to whom nothing especially bad had ever happened. After that book I started getting irrationally afraid that my parents and our dog were being smothered by the fungus, and it was linked to suddenly realising that they were mortal and wouldn't live forever. I had nightmares for a while and recall waking on a family camping trip when my bed was in the back of the family station wagon, needing to check that the dog, sleeping on the front bench seat, was okay. I grew out of it, of course, but I remember that shift from unthinking naive denial into shocked realisation very clearly.

[dolorosa_12]

Oh wow, that is a terrifying and awful thing to have believed — how scary it must have been for you.

[oracne]

I had a strong feeling that inanimate objects were conscious and should be treated as such.

[dolorosa_12]

Awww, that's so cute! (And is, I would guess, a fairly common thing for children to believe, while they're sorting out their understanding of how the world works.)

[blackcatofmisery]

I don't remember my childhood, but that puppet thing is perfect toddler logic. It's so casually terrifying... like toddlers...

=^..^=~

[dolorosa_12]

Isn't it just?

Toddlers can be really casually terrifying, as you say. I can still remember the time one of my younger sisters asked us to find her a picture of the human body on the internet, so we found her a diagram (showing digestive system, circulatory system etc). But that wasn't what she wanted, she said. She wanted to see 'what it looked like under the skin if you cut it, with all the blood'! We were all rather disturbed by this request, that's for sure. (She's now a totally normal teenager, as opposed to growing up to be a serial killer, just to reassure you.)

[blackcatofmisery]

I'd worry more for your sister if she'd been interested in animal carcasses, but toddlers are like sponges of knowledge and experience. Gotta know it all and try it all, which is great! But also yeah, a child wanting to see blood is a little...off putting...