Childhood games of imagination

In My Humble Opinion
1

Reading this thread, http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=201910, made me remember that the most fun things my siblings and I did as kids didn’t require toys, though toys could accessorize the fun, so to speak. (FYI: I’m 31.)

For instance, we used to have a silk parachute (just the top part; no cables) that my older siblings found in the desert. We would spread it out, leaving quite a bit of slack, and put books all around the edges. Then we’d get a box fan and put it at one edge of the parachute, with books on top. Turn on the fan, and voila–a big dome tent.

2

If your intention of this thread could expand to include ghost stories and things of the mind in that direction, I’d love to be able to compare the stories from different parts of the SDMB audience.

If not, then things we did in the imagination realm of games and creations would have to include the time when my dad, who was a traveling insurance salesman, brought home a dozen or so oilcloth banners that had been used at some sales rally as signs. They were good sized signs. White oilcloth with black and red lettering. Strings along the top so they could be hung up inside whatever meeting hall. Maybe 8x10’ in size.

We made tents out of them in the back yard and camped out in them for several days/nights. I can still recall the smell of them. Like tablecloths. Don’t remember whatever became of them.

3

Upon rereading this post, I realize that the way it’s written makes it seem more appropriate for MPSIMS . To revise it to express my original intent, I ask this: What things did you do as a child that required mainly imagination?

4

Good idea, Zeldar. I hereby and forthwith proclaim that this thread should include all flights of childhood imagination.

I don’t know what happened to our parachute either. I think my mom threw it away. :frowning:

5

Okay, skeptic_ev, the ghost story I like better than most is one that Hal Holbrook told as part of his one-man show Mark Twain Tonight that was called “the golden arm.” It scared the living shit out of me and I was watching TV with the lights on and everything. It reminded me so much of the ones I heard around the campfire when I was a kid.

I don’t know how best to word this one delicately, but I’ve even checked in the library’s ghost story collections to try to find the one I remember having heard but just don’t remember the details of. It was called “The Blue-gummed N-word” and had some of the same scary parts that Holbrook’s had.

Another story like it was on Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. In that one, Ossie Davis, Roddy McDowall and George Macready are in one called The Cemetery, and there is a series of paintings that show Macready (already dead) leaving his grave in the family plot and making his way into the house.

Does that story (or similar ones) ring any bells with you?

6

We built a “hideout” out at the way back fence of the property out of old signs and sheets of paneling or plywood.

I can remember playing games where we would close our eyes and imagine something and picture it in our mind, then tell the others so that everyone was trying to imagine and picture same thing.

Along the same lines we would have one person start a story and the next add to it.

I can remember making tents with the sofa cushions.

Twenty five years later:

During Hurricane’s my boys like to “camp out” under the pool table pretending they are in the hold of a ship in a storm. (Being boys once they even pretended seasickness with the retching souonds. icky boys)

They’ve built shields out of wood scraps and old belts and swords out of dowels or base board trim scraps and made battles. This sort of spread down the street and around the neighborhood and they ended up with little armies and changing alliances. It went on for several weeks until they all switched to basketball.

Much time spent in the sandbox building forts or garages or mountain trails for the hotwheel cars.

7

I used to take large, long mirrors outside and hold them horizontally, mirror side up, and walk around looking into them. It was as if I was walking on the sky. I sometimes clocked myself pretty hard bumping into trees, doing this.

I also had my own talk show. I was the host, as well as all of the assorted guests. I would tape applause from the TV and intersperse it on the tape to include it in the show. I remember me interviewing Rick Springfield. It’s funny to listen to now because after a minute of talking, I would forget to do the impersonation of the voices, so it was my regular voice just chattering away to itself.

And, my friends and I used to zipper ourselves all the way up in sleeping bags until we could barely breathe, twirl around till dizzy, and roll down the stairs.

We didn’t have cable.

8

I made the dome tents out of king sized sheets and a box fan. We used our parachute outside mostly. (:o Yes I also had a parachute) Sticks were swords, guns, light sabers, and everything else. My son is 3 now. I get to watch the imagination from the outside now. It’s nearly as fun.

9

Sorry, Zeldar. My mom wouldn’t even let me watch the old King Kong movie when it came on TV. Any ghost stories we had were told to each other in the dead of night or over at friends’ houses. (David … I’m at the foot of the bed … David … I’m at the head of the bed … David … I WANT MY LIVER!)

Here’s another thing we used to do: play house. Sure, every kid does this, but we waited until the big lawn behind our apartment was mowed, and we’d use the mowed grass to outline “rooms” on the lawn.

We also played a kind of sea/pirate/sailor game. Our bunkbed was the ship, and if you stepped off it sharks got you unless you stepped on a pile of clothes or toys (islands). Also, for some reason, I decreed that we could only eat saltine crackers–plain–while playing this game.

Ooh, one more (I still do this from time to time): I laid on my back on a bed or couch and pretended the ceiling was the floor, imagining myself walking around.

Nurse Carmen: you had a parachute. That’s so cool. :smiley: But I can’t believe you never used it to make the fan/book/tent thing.

10

My brothers and I created a country in the basement of our house. We had a bank, grocery store, and even a jail cell. There was only one prisoner though, sentenced for animal cruelty (after a trial of course), but we had to let him out after a few minutes because he started to cry. We decided to hold an election for president with my next youngest brother and myself as candidates. He bribed the electorate and won so I had to settle for vice president.

A swingset in our backyard made a dandy pirate ship with the grassy yard our vast, green ocean. Mother’s garden plot became a deserted island populated, oddly enough, with lions.

I only wish I had the imagination now that I had back then. The world might look a bit brighter.

11

My siblings and I used to write plays and perform them in the backyard, complete with costumes made of random items we’d find around the house, like people’s clothes and bits of old jewelry found hiding in back corners of closets. We’d only ever make one copy of the script, though, so it turned more into a comedy of errors as we’d have to pass the thing off. Especially since my little brother wasn’t exactly proficient at reading at the time.

Most of the time, though, I used to play imaginary adventure games by myself. In elementary school, whenever I walked up the steep, narrow stairwells that led into the cafeteria, I would be a brave explorer, clinging for dear life to the rope (in the guise of a stair rail) I was using to climb up the tall mountain. When I would walk home from my middle school, especially near the start and end of the school year because it was hot and inevitably dusty, I was exploring the wild plains, nary a person (or even animal) in sight. Always fun.

12

That reminds me… I once re-enacted the entire movie My Fair Lady, playing all the parts myself, for my brothers’ amusement.
It was hideous. :slight_smile:

13

We three had the rolly-jig, which was a wooden powder box (about the size of a cardboard book box, but solidly built) with three casters underneath. We got enormous mileage out of that.

We made up inventions and stories. One was: if you took a big weather-balloon (the folks had got one from Edmonds Scientific for us)(and at this point we’d long since beaten it to death), and taped it and painted it to make a head; and got a bunch of innertubes weighted to float 2/3 underwater; and roped them all together in a line, head first; and put it in the Pacific with the north wind blowing as it always did where we were; it would float down past Santa Cruz and Monterey, and create all sorts of excitement and get in the newspapers as a sea monster.
we didn’t actually do that, we just invented it

And if people got near it they would shoot at it, and it would pop and disappear, and they would assume it had dived, and they would never figure it out.

14

Rather than an imaginary friend, I had an imaginary ranch in the back yard. My mom now says that I had a woman as foreman; I remember his name being Joe.

My dad once found me making out an inventory of animals. (In retrospect, I must have been a beaucratic child.) Reading over my shoulder, he asked “Where’s the deer?”
“You don’t have deer on a ranch,” I said.
“You’ve always got to have some deer on a ranch, so you can hunt them,” Dad advised. “When you get married, marry someone who has some property where I can hunt.”

15

[self hijack]

Tell me, Fionn, what do you do for a living now that you’re a grownup? Just curious.

[/self hijack]

16

I could walk out the back door of my house and into a fantasy world–deep forests with creatures of faerie lurking under every toadstool, haunted swamps, rivers full of merfolk, glades where sorcerers met to do battle…I could spend hours “exploring” without seeing anyone or anything to interfere with my games. Sometimes I took friends with me, and we battled tree-ogres and vine-snakes (and each other) with sticks for swords and Spanish moss for magic webs.

Of course, I still do that, only I have more friends, less space, and the swords are padded with foam, 'cause getting clobbered with a stick hurts.

17

I’m going to start a master’s in educational psychology in a couple of weeks, but I also work in a college bookstore. Where I do inventory, and some of them are books about animals, so I’ve realized my dream in a way that involves less mess. :slight_smile:

18

When living up north, we always had a ton of wilderness around our place, so my friends would spend a lot of time following the creek and exploring. There was also a big trail at our school, where there was an old shack in the middle of the woods. This was “The Hermit’s House”. We’d spend time hunting and running away from the Hermit.
One of my friends had a great balcony overlooking his back yard about three stories up. It was a great place to “Protect the fort” from the oncomming hoards. We didn’t know quite enough to be fending off against Nazis, but we knew we were the good soldiers, and there were a lot of bad ones coming at us. Somehow, we were both Rambo.
Another friend had a great rock outcropping surrounding his house that made for great western adventures. He also had an interesting thin bit of rock that ressembled a gun, so that helped a lot. HE didn’t have a t.v., but that never mattered.
Also, I had a very overactive imagination, and my stuff puppy Scrappy was incredibly hyperactive. I can’t think of a single adventure he and my frirends didn’t go on, and he’d been expelled from school on multiple occassions.
My favorite though, was building little forts in the wintertime with all the snow that was pilled up either at the edge of the driveway, or around the school playground. Although, playing with my friend’s older brother, Scott, wasn’t fun for very long. Periodically, he’d scream “Hand to Hand Combat!”, charge over, knock me down, and start stuffing snow down my snowsuit. That part was never really fun.
When we moved down south, I lost all the foresty areas and snow, but learned how to ride a bike thanks to all the flat land. That became a “battle motorcycle” on more than one occassion, and the most fun was to ride fast, turn into one of the vacant lots, and pretend to get shot by a big laser cannon. This gave you permission to jump backwards off your bike while kicking it out from under you and being “Blow’d up good!”
Then there was also Dungeons and Dragons, and I fiddled with AMptgaurd a bit my senior year of highschool, but that kinda sucked. I still have all my other post apocolyptic run ins with monsters and cyborgs adventures though.

19

This is a great thread.

Okay. One, and this is going to sound incredibly weird, but my brother and I made… well, there’s no word for it. We called them slip-towers. The idea was to take a bunch of Fischer-Price wooden blocks and build them into a large (well, maybe three feet at best) tower with a shaft down the center, a bunch of twists and turns, a few dividing branches, and some output holes at the bottom. We would then drop in a Star Wars figure and see which hole it came out. (We liked R2-D2 best, as I recall. No arms, round head, he didn’t get snagged on any outcroppings. IG-88 was the worst… way too tall.)

Our house was on the beach in a bay on Puget Sound. We spent endless hours diverting muddy, rusty drainage water through a maze of channels much like the Sound itself.

My friend Mike Spencer and I usually commandeered a metal structure on the playground that was vaguely like a rocketship, and we had plenty of space adventures there with our fictional computer (who switched from being Vic, as in “Vic-20,” or Vincent, as from Disney’s The Black Hole). Whenever we encountered pools of acid exploring the Alien Playground, we usually encountered a pool of acid because Mike was so good at the sound effect.

My brother and other friends recorded radio-show-style adventures on a tape recorder, complete with primitive Foley work (shoes on hands, thump on side of desk). My brother also shot a lot of footage with an 8M camera, which, if you know my brother, can’t be too surprising. Ask him about it sometime. :slight_smile:

Oh. And my absolute favorite, Boggleshoe.

Boggleshoe was a game invented by Brent Swift, played with athletic socks. You can carry two socks. You may choose to wield one sock as a sword, and the other worn up your arm as a shield (blows against the shieldsock don’t count). You may also wield two swords. For a time, it was fashionable to roll up one sock and stuff it inside the other. Instant flail! But then we progressed to Socks of Mass Destruction with two rolled up socks as grenades. Arms and legs were one point per hit, body was two, head was three. Nine points wins.

FISH

20

It isn’t really a game, but i hope it counts. During recess in school i would often spend the entire period on the swing and proceed to ‘zone out’. I would close my eyes or stare into clouds and after a while it became hypnotic-the movement on the swing, the noise of the children, the warmth of the sun. All created the impression that recess lasted for an eternity. It would be my own little paradise
Some people hated their childhoods, but I would never disown my happy, carefree times as a child.