No no, color film has been around all along. It wasn’t invented in the 50s. You see, before then the world was black and white, and there were color pictures of a black and white world.
Chaucer’s “The House of Fame” also articulates this theory of optics.
When I was four, I though I was a robot. I guess Terminator really stuck with me.
–
At age five, I got into a fair amount of trouble when I wrote a sign reading, “do not distrub, we are having sex” on a piece of paper, gathered a blanket, and tried to get a female classmate to get with me under the blanket. I thought having sex meant a boy and a girl - fully clothed, of course - hiding under a blanket, jiggling it and such, and giggling. It sounded like a fun thing to do, laughing under a blanket sky.
How I knew how to spell “sex” at that age, I’ll never know.
–
At nine, I was convinced that I had been abducted by aliens and that they would return for me some day. I had a really freaky experience one night involving a dream about aliens and it stuck with me. I’m still not sure what that was about, but if it really did involve aliens: I’ll be available for the trip to the homeland in late 2006 - got to get my BS first.
–
A few years later while trying to understand electronics, I became frustrated and assumed there was something magical to it - maybe someone living inside the casings that did the work. I was horrified, then, that when I broke open a component, it was full of metal.
Erm…something you want to share here Cicada? 
This actually happened to me once.Quite freaky.We were listening to the radio,arrived in town,switched it off.Several hours later when we returned,switched it back on,exactly the same song playing
(no it wasn’t set to tape by mistake :wally )
Ahem. I can’t find the old thread to link to, but as I’ve told the Dopers here…
I once had a serious relationship with a man who was… erm… smaller than a tampon. So your friend wasn’t entirely misinformed… I was an intact virgin when I slept with my next boyfriend. (I won’t go into the TMI bit here, though, but I assure you - yowch!) She might have wanted to say under two inches, though!
Anyway, on topic, I used to believe that babies came out of the mother’s bum, as well. I thought my vagina was used only for peeing. I honestly didn’t find out until I was 13 or so just where/how sexual intercouse worked! And when I did, I was shocked - not in my little pee-hole! (I did become addicted to porn shortly after finding this out, though, and I would watch those close-ups with much interest - I thought the women in porn were carefully selected for their gigantic vaginas. eep.)
On a much more innocent note, I thought when Mom and Dad kissed I could see tiny little organism passing back and forth between their lips. I even told them one day after Mom had told me she was pregnant that I could see little “bugs” going into her mouth when Dad kissed her, and they just made *another * baby.
I also used to think the baby in the womb only ate Spam. My mother had given me this little booklet about pregnancy (I was four) and I would flip through it and look at the pictures. One of the pictures showed a simple drawing of the baby in the womb, holding a short rectangular, spongy-looking object. We ate a lot of Spam around that time as Mom and Dad were trying to save money to buy a new house. And so, the baby in the picture was also eating Spam.
I used to have incredibly vivid dreams of sitting at my window at night, and suddenly leaving my body to go flying around outside, all around our little town, and I would meet with a kind lady called Emily. She would take me to pretty places and tell me nice things about myself. I did this from the time I was two until I was about 10 or so, around the same time Mom told me Santa wasn’t real. I never had those dreams again, but I wish I could still do it - it was fun! I was convinced I could actually fly around if I just really wanted to. I would tell all my classmates I could fly - I just didn’t want to right now.
I thought the world began at my house, and ended at my Grandmother’s. If we travelled further than that, that was outer space.
I insisted the only way to tell girls and boys apart was by if they had eyelashes. Eyelashes meant they were girls. Many a boy went home crying when I told them they were definately girls.
I used to be babysat by a lady with a son a couple years younger than me when I was about 7. The family’s last name was “Clark”. I only knew of one “Clark” - I asked the boy what his father’s first name was. He said “Richard.” I asked him “Do people call him Dick?” And he said yes. I then insisted his father was on the radio, and I listened to him all the time. The boy kept rolling his eyes at me and saying his father didn’t work at the radio station. So I retorted “Yeah? Where does he work, anyway?” And when he couldn’t tell me, I said “See? He just doesn’t tell anyone about it, because he’s so famous. He doesn’t want you to know. It’s his secret identity.”
Turns out it wasn’t the same Dick Clark I was thinking of
I thought that the wind was caused by trees… that trees moved and it got windy, instead of the other way around.
I thought we were inside the earth, and the sky was a dome, with the stars attached to it.
I thought mashed potatoes were inside peas.
I thought most grown-ups were deceitful, cunning, lying tricksters who… hey, wait a minute…
I thought this too and that they had eyes in the back of their heads.
I also believed when you turned off the radio the music stopped to resume later when I turned it back on. I thought this about the TV as well.
I truly believed in Bigfoot and he was living in the woods behind my house.
And, because my mother told me so, that if I did not remove my socks at night that my feet could not breath. I took this to mean they would die. I still to this day can not wear socks to bed and I always have one foot outside the blanket.
I always thought the National League was a “sub league” but not really a farm system for the American League.
Even when I consciously KNEW it wasn’t, it took my years to fully shake that feeling.
I also had a friend who I thought had a wolf living under his porch.
Same here… I **really **got confused when I heard them laughing at *The Flintstones *though. After much thought I came to the prefectly reasonable conclusion that large groups of people would gather closely together and watch the animator flip his flip book.
Obviously, my grasp on how cartoons were made was a little underdeveloped as well.
I mentioned this in the “Believed as a Kid I” thread, but since you reminded me…
My parents too me to a dairy farm when I was a toddler/pre-schooler. I knew “milk came from cows” but no the details. I saw the farm get milk from a cow’s udder. Didn’t drink it for weeks because I though milk was cow pee.
And WOW, I forgot all about the “North Pole=Cold” so “South Pole=Hot” thing until this thread. I must have had that conviction well into grade school.
A couple friends of mine and I took “digging to China” quite literally and made a mess of someone’s lawn trying to dig our way there. Whevere we found a little root we’d think it was a “piece of China” because it looked like the bean sprouts in Chinese food.
I used to believe that most inanimate objects had feelings and could move around.
I was always very careful about hurting the feelings of things.
Me too. My older brother once asked me how people have sex…
“The man wees into the woman”
Me too! So much so that I asked my mum - “What was it like when everything turned to colour?”
I had also asked on the same day, after looking at an oil painting of some tallships - “mum, do you remember those days?” (pointing at the picture), naturally assuming my mum was around in the days when people had battles in tallships. In fact I probably assumed my mum (and dad) had been around forever.
She didn’t take it as a compliment.
At a very young age I believed that girls, underneath their skirts, had skirt-shaped bodies.
I couldn’t run very well until one day when a friend told me I have to move my arms as well as my legs. From that day on running was a cinch.
I was painfully shy as a kid so I couldn’t cope mentally with the idea of liking a girl. Girls who in hindsight I must have been attracted to, I treated them as my mortal enemies in my mind. Whenever girls talked to me I froze solid!
For many years I couldn’t understand what adults meant when they said “think about it!” I sometimes replied, in all honesty “I don’t know how to think” and it really frustrated me because I knew this ‘thinking’ thing was how people behaved themselves. One day I had an epiphany. I knew how to think, and realized that if I think about things I will become more intelligent.
Years later I was just as frustrated that I thank too much.
I was kind of like this too. When I used to build lego spaceships I had to make sure everything was left/right symetrical, or the little men who represented the sides of the lego spaceship would feel bad. Top/bottom asymmetry, strangely enough, didn’t bother the little men.
I used to think that my grampa could make the windsheild wipers on the car go by saying, “Windshield wipers . . . . GO!” (You guessed it: intermittent wipers.)
I also had myself convinced that the biggest city in each county shared the name of the county (as was the case with my city). I don’t know why, but I remember thinking about that a lot.
Also, I thought that the only proper way to speak of siblings was in order of decreasing age, as though it was a rule of grammar or something. We had some neighbors named Kim and Tracy. Kim was the older of the two. Our cousins always called them Tracy and Kim, and it drove me to conniptions. To this day, “Tracy and Kim” sounds all wrong to me.
Get this: I am 25, and I still strongly believe I should be ethical in computer games! For example I’d feel very bad if I willingly killed a friend or civilian.
Except in GTA, for some reason.
I used to believe that rocks were some sort of animal with a greatly decreased metabolism, making them seem non-living. I came up with this idea when I saw a illustration of a fossil in a rock, which had me convinced that rocks had bones and therefore were alive. That was a fun argument with my mom. My mom explained the bones came from other animals, but in my logic, if that were true, how the hell did they get in the rocks?! 
I used to think that women were physically incapable of peeing standing up. Not that they didn’t do it because it was usually a messy affair, but they just couldn’t physically stand upright and let it go.
I used to think wars between countries were waged by having the citizens of each country charge each other and get in a huge scuffle using only punches and kicks.
I thought that Subways were actually sophisticated digging machines that drilled their way to the next destination
When I was in the 3rd grade, we went to this hands-on science museum for children. One of the attractions was a tube system where you could put a message in a container, and air would rocket the container through the tube to the other end of the museum. I was so impressed with this system that I insisted that all of our mail should be sent this way, which in my mind sounded like it would be much faster (ironically, in the film The Fifth Element they in fact use this method for mail delivery )
Heh, my parents had friends who lived on a farm in the Eastern Townships; at one point they showed me a cow, and I was nonplussed to see all the penises dangling down…
…turns out they’re called “udders.” Who knew?
I have to admit I used to believe Bigfoot, Nessie, UFO’s - a la extraterrestrials - and even ancient astronauts and pyramid energy were real.
I also worried, not so much believed, that when I started wearing glasses I wasn’t actually seeing what was in front of me but rather an image projected onto my glasses, so how would I know if it was real or not? I didn’t understand optics, of course.
“Didn’t you just eat? Well, don’t go swimming yet, or you’ll get a cramp! You need to wait an hour.”
The Cramp filled me with a blood-chilling fear. I didn’t have a clear idea of quite what it was, but I just knew that if I so much as put a toe in that water, even 59 minutes and 59 seconds after eating a hamburger, it would Kill Me Dead. I had heard stories about The Kid, who ate three-and-a-half Fenway Franks, and then only a half-an-hour later went for a swim in Rangeley Lake. Needless to say, The Kid expired due to the Horrible Death Cramp that struck him as soon as he was immersed. Did The Cramp hurt? Boy, I bet It did. I bet it was like the worst charliehorse multiplied by eighteen hundred gagillion times googol. My brother once pushed me off the dock into the lake after I had eaten a leg of grilled chicken, and I screamed bloody murder because I figured Death by Cramp would take me instantly. I nearly leapt strait out of the water like a Jesus Lizard on meth, and felt 100% certain that I was lucky to be alive. When I hollered like a thing posessed at my parents to discipline my brother for attempted murder, they lauged and told me to calm down. After that, I was convined they wanted to kill me too.