The Cube: A fun little psych test

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I just learned about this, and it seems like a lot of fun. Try it out on people at parties, dates, or other get togethers.

Don’t read the responses to this until you’ve responded yourself. You might even want to spoiler your response.

Ready?

Imagine a white space.

Got it?

Now imagine a cube in that space.

What does it look like? Is it opaque or transparent? How big is it? Is it on the ground or floating? What color is it? Are you facing a side or an edge?

Type out your answer before proceeding.

Now imagine a ladder. Where is it? Describe it.

Done?

There are flowers in this scene. Where are they? What color are they? Are they pretty or ugly? Do they have a scent? What feelings do they give you?

Next…
There is a storm. Where is it? Is it calm or violent? Talk about it a bit.

Lastly, there is a horse. Where is it, what is it doing, and what is its mood? Name three adjectives to describe it.

Go ahead and reply now.

2

'Zat it? Or is this a different game? Just wondering.

3

Oooh! I love these things!
Okay, the cube is about 18 inches on a side and black. It’s very simple, like clip art. I see it from the corner/edge, and slightly from above. It’s floating in midair, bobbing around a bit.

The ladder (which didn’t exist until you mentioned it) is on the left hand side of the cube as I face it, leaning against the cube (which is in midair, remember). It’s wooden, very simple, with rounded sides and steps. They don’t taper at all, just end abruptly. Brown wood, unpainted, but sanded smooth. The cube stopped bobbing around when the ladder showed up.

The flowers are in a little bunch below the cube and to the right. There are only three or four of them, and they’re little clip-art like flowers, pink and purple with yellow centers, five or six petals and green leaves and stems. They’re actually my signature flower - the same doodle I make whenever I pick up a pen or crayon and doodle. I don’t think they exist in nature.

There is a storm in the background, but it doesn’t disturb the cube, ladder or flowers. Wait, no, the flowers sway a bit from some wind, but hardly in proportion to the maelstrom that’s off in the distance. It’s quite black back there, with a lot of wind and rain, and I think it’s taking place over a large body of water. Perhaps it’s a hurricane.

The horse is standing quietly next to the flowers, wearing a bridle and lead (I’m not sure of the vocabulary there) that are connected to a stake in the ground. His (yes, it’s a he) head is down as he munches contentedly on some grass growing near the flowers. He seems unaware of the storm in the distance, or possibly he’s just ignoring it.
So what’s my analysis, Dr. Freud?

4

Okay, I want to amend my answer a bit. I don’t know why, but it’s been bugging me: the cube is only black on the edges. That is, it’s not a solid cube, but a frame of a cube. Except that it flashes colors, iridescent dark rainbow hues like an oil slick, when it appears to be solid, and then that goes away again. And “18 inches” was my agonizing attempt to put it into scale with the ladder and quantify it for other people. In my head, it’s merely, “not too big, but not tiny either.”

Okay, I feel better now.

Oh, and the horse is brown with black points and pretty, like in a child’s story book.

5

Duck Duck Goose, I’m not sure if that’s it, but I’mm about 90% sure that this is a variation of that.

Remember, this is all just in good fun.

You are at your best when you have some direction in your life. Hobbies suit you. You don’t have many friends, but they are good friends. Do you lean on them when you’re having a bad time? Do you let your bad times affect them? Do they cry for you? How about your husband? How connected are you there? Would you like it better if he was a good, tamed guy? Is he already? Does he tend to ignore your problems?

How did I do? :slight_smile:

6

It gets more interesting when when you think about it, doesn’t it?

And so do you. :wink:

7

Pretty good, but a little vague. “You are at your best when you have some direction in your life.”? Doesn’t that apply to everyone? I tend to pick up hobbies, lose interest and then never finish what I started. Not many but good friends is spot on, and the bad times thing is rather ambiguous: I try desperately not to let my bad times affect them, but once in a while I can’t hide it anymore and I become a blubbering idiot literally snotting all over my friends’ shoulders. I believe I’ve even done that here on the board once or twice. :wink:

My husband and I are very well connected as partners and life mates, but not so much as romantic partners. He tends to ignore my painful emotional state and be very critical of my (admittedly true) practical failings like my laziness and inability to follow through on tasks, and that hurts - in a hurts-cause-its-true sense. I manage to hide that shit (or pretend I do) from most people, but he sees right through my pretty facade.

I do, generally speaking, like my men tame. Aggressive and hyper-masculine men are a big turn off for me. I prefer androgynes.

8

I think I did pretty well for my first time.

Yeah, everyone needs direction. Of course. But do your directions give you a clearer sense of yourself? It seems to me that when you have purpose, you become more interesting.

And it’s interesting that you like androgynous men, but you still seem to like a bit of masculinity in them. (Hey, your words, not mine.) I suppose that’s true of most modern women, though. Funnily enough, I’m meeting a friend this afternoon who likes that I’m not a “Stay barefoot and pregnant, bitch” kind of guy. I guess she doesn’t meet many guys like me. I might try the Cube with her. I can’t wait to hear how she answers the horse question.

9

The cube
A soft blue, somewhere between powder and electric. It is opaque and slightly porous, as if made of Plaster of Paris. It is 18 inches on a side. It is sitting on the floor of the whitespace, seen in 7/8 view so as to show a side, an edge and a foreshortened view of the side just to the right.

The ladder
About nine feet high, old wood with lots of white paint stains, leaning against an exterior side wall of a vine-covered red brick 1920s apartment house in Vancouver, B.C.

The flowers
Vancouver is filled with plant life and color. The flowers around the building are in neat beds. They are predominantly a delicate yet radiant yellow with tongues of red here and there. They have no noticeable scent, but they give a warm and cheerful glow to an otherwise grey morning.

The storm
Far to the north and west, where oil tankers ply the straits, the waves are whipped to swells by a huge, stinging, rain-wet wind. The skies darken. The ever-present cold of the northern waters gains a malevolent, forceful edge. The sailors know by instinct that although the storm is not yet violent, it soon could be.

The horse
It stands under old trees by a small, quaint old barn somewhere in central Europe. It is a smallish, long-haired, placid horse, almost a pony really, eating from a pile of hay. Its eyes are gentle, its manner deeply content.

10

Yeah, I do this with my students every year…there’s a little book that goes over a lot of the symbolism. It’s a fun decompressing activity sometimes. We kinda skip over the sexual symbolism of the horse, though…!

11

The cube isn’t all that large, it’s the same matte white as the background (with slight black lines on the edges), and it’s floating in midair. The ladder is propped up against the cube. The flowers are in a pot on top of the cube (the cube’s just bigger than the pot), they’re purple with a yellow middle, and I think they’re nice (but no scent). The storm is above the flowers, watering them (it’s a very small storm. Like a cartoon). The horse is halfway up the ladder, going to check on the flowers. It seems happy. I think it’s gardening rather than going to eat them.

I don’t know if it helps, but the background looks like what the inside of the cube would look like. Only bigger, obviously.

Edit: I kept mistakenly calling the cube the “box”, so I think it’s hollow.

12

Oh, you did, and I was incredibly rude not to thank you! It’s just that you brought up my favorite topic (myself) and distracted me with it! :stuck_out_tongue: So thank you, this is a lot of fun.

Y’know, when you put it like that, absolutely. I’ve had many different “lives”, and I’ve always found that no matter what I do for a job, I become passionate about it, and it becomes the focus of my life and identity in a major way: worked at a video store, I became passionate about movies and customer service; worked at a Photon, became really interested in gaming; worked running an herbal and massage school, became an alternative healing advocate and trained for five years in alternative medicine and massage therapy at my own school; work as a childcare provider, and I’m really into child development and parenting theory. None of those was my passion *prior *to the job; I’d take the job as a way of making money “for now”, and then the subject area of the job became uber-important. And then once I leave the field, poof, interest wanes, I get depressed, and I don’t have a strong sense of who I am anymore.

Verrrrry interestink…

13

The white space is a plane, of which a very large area is visible, but difficult to see details. It reaches the horizon at a point where the overcast clouds fade into a haze, also difficult to see details. The sky is clouded. Later I had to put in a storm, so the entire cloud thing changed. See below.

The cube is grey stone, lit from diffuse sunlight behind me, and to my left. The cube is seen from the corner, only two sides visible. It is much darker grey on the shaded side, but grey on both. The shadow reaches out to the right and away from me, but is soft edged, and not distinct. The ladder is built into the corner of the cube facing my left, as rungs mounted individually into the stone without exterior mounting visible. (Sunk into the stone at each end, it seems.) It goes all the way from the bottom, to the top, but has no side rails, or coaming. It gives scale to the cube, which is now about fifty or sixty feet on a side.

The flowers came with an entire landscape. Flowers don’t grow out of white ground. So, now the plane is a sandy tufted grassland, mostly sand, but with clumps of tall grass, with flowers here and there. There is now evidence of some wind, and the consequent wear to the stone cube, which has somehow become very old. The horizon just got a bit closer, being less than infinite. I can see far enough that the distant clumps of grass merge. They are wild flowers, mostly blue, and small, a few tufts of feathery inflorescences from the grass itself, and a bit of low growing ground cover with yellow and red flowers around the verges of the tuffets of grass. (They turn out to be rather large, five or six feet across on the average.)

Wow. I tried and tried to make it a rainstorm, but it so contradicts what I have pictured so far that I had to start from scratch, and it ends up being a sand storm, broad, and not too high, coming left to right, and very distant. Visibility drops sharply looking into the storm, and the grass before it is strongly bent away from it. The wind where I am is blustery, and filled with dust, I think I will go stand in the lea of the cube. It is here I find the horse. It is an Arabian, deep brown with only a couple of light stars on its ears and nose, and one white sock. It is grazing in the lea of the cube, and starts when I arrive, but does not flee. It keeps me in view, but does not challenge me. I think it is doing exactly what I am doing, sheltering from the storm.

I decide not to climb the ladder until after the storm. Might be dangerous to be caught up there. I see no entrance to the cube on either side I can see, and the wind has risen enough that I don’t want to move around it until things settle down.

Tris
14

Yeah, it is, isn’t it? I’m glad I came across it. I’m sure there are many interpretations, but I read it as your life being a little wobbly and not grounded (but free spirited and imaginative). Once you bring ambitions into your life, you stop wobbling. And you think of yourself as pretty plain and basic, but when you take a closer look, you are really pretty colorful.

My cube is nothing but black edges and corners with no walls. Pretty basic but multifaceted, with infinite possibilities. Interesting from inside and out. I think that’s a fair description of how I see myself right now.

My horse is much like Doug’s, but not quite so European, and a bit more enthusiastic. Like a puppy. :slight_smile:

15

a) It’s a translucent milky white cube. There IS no ground so of course it’s floating. I have no idea how big it is, there’s no frame of reference.

b) The ladder is a skinny wooden yellow ladder with the top extending into an upstairs window of some house or building.

c) You said “this scene” so there are pink and red roses on a kind of trellis to either side of the window. Smell noticeably sweet. Kinda pretty I guess. No particular feelings I’m too busy wondering if the ladder was supposed to include the cube. My ladder scenario and my cube scenario were separate, is that wrong?

d) Of course it’s violent, who the hell ever heard of a calm storm? It’s a thunderstorm with lots of wind. There are curtains in the window and they are blowing all about and getting soaked in the rain.

e) The horse is climbing the ladder and it’s amused. It’s yellowish-brown, it’s short, and I already said it was amused, that’s an adjective isn’t it?
Where the heck are you going with all this?

16

The cube is your self-image.

The ladder is your ambition.

The flowers are your friends and loved ones.

The storm is your problems and conflicts.

The horse is your ideal mate.

17

Solid black cube, matte finish. Three dimensonal, sitting at an angle, point/corner forward to me. Sits in foreground.

The ladder is behind the cube in the doorway of a white wall. Ladder is directly in the middle of the doorway, blocking the doorway.

I can’t seem to see any flowers in this scene at all, even though I’m trying.

There is a violent thunderstorm outside, muffled by what I guess are the thick walls in this room. It’s making the lights flicker from time to time. My feeling about the storm is neutral as I am not out in it. I don’t like the the lights flickering, though, it bugs my eyes and is giving me a headache.

There is no horse in this room. For some reason I don’t think it would be logical for there to be a horse in this room.

18

The cube is opaque, with blue and red faces in black frame. It is about a foot across and spinning in midair.

The ladder is across the room from me, leaning on the wall towards the right side of the room. It is wooden and almost reaches the ceiling.

The flowers are yellow and in a ceramic vase. They are real and smell like flowers. About this time I’m wondering if I have stepped into some kind of art exhibit and am trying to look smart while I determine the non-present artist’s concept.

There is an ice storm outside. I can hear the wind and bits of ice beating against the wall, but it doesn’t affect me inside. The light flickers occasionally. Speaking of which, there is a light bulb hanging from the ceiling which I hadn’t noticed before.

The horse is a deep chocolate brown color. It looks confused. It considers eating the flowers. I think it might be female.

Am I going to be ok?

19

Are all these things happening/existing in the same space?

20

Now there is a possibility I had not considered. Elements unrelated. Of course, knowing it is a psych test, I would never have had the nerve to even suggest it!

 Tris