Of course, for some people, that’s Photoshop. For others, it’s reality.
I didn’t actually know for certain, it was just a suspicion on my part. Since it didn’t appear to actually make much difference in how I was treated, I figured the situation didn’t warrant further investigation.
I used to have a Simon doll (as in Alvin’s brother). That thing went with me everywhere. I slept with it.
When I was older, like maybe 9 or 10, my friend and I had a blast kicking it and throwing it and treating it like a football. Deep down, I felt some terrible guilt about it, like I was abusing a cherished friend.
Rocks contained blood. I mean, it was so obvious. You fall and hit a rock, it breaks open and gets blood all over your hand.
Make sure your Old Glory insurance policy is paid up, and hide your Old Persons Medicine…
I recall thinking that my parents were aliens. Also, I was convinced that I had hidden Komodo Dragon powers (What kind of powers those would be I have no idea… being big and eating anything smaller than me?) that I was going unlock some day.
Ha! Totally LdOL on that. Well played.
Do you have a toxic bite, maybe?
I had a whole array of bizzarre beliefs, let me think a bit
-
I believed that I was an alien, from a planet where all the inhabitants where children, they got to almost 15 years old and then transformed into 6 years old again, was a bit dissapointed when i reached 15 i must say.
-
I (Coincidentally with the previous belief somehow) believed that i was a robot made to have the exact life of a man who had being a very important historical figure, this was not really 198~ but hundreds of years in the future and everybody around me were actors triying to imitate the events in the life of that previous person to make me grow up to be like him because they needed him again (I was a weird kid
) -
When I was a very young kid (around age 3, or 4 i dont remember exactly) I believed that my grandfathers had emerged from the primordial goo, since i had asked my fathers how life began and they told me “from primitive cells” I imagined that my grandfathers had to be originated there since i could not imagine something older than them.
I thought my parents sent me to camp because they loved me and wanted me to have a good time.
Well that’s just dumb. Everyone knows that humans are basically skin and blood. We’re human-shaped bags full of nothing but blood. Cut us, and guess what comes out?
Expressing that notion to my older siblings earned me lots of grief, of course.
When I was young, I thought the TV worked both ways. You could see and hear the people on TV and they could see and hear you watching them. I figured it was like a play where they just ignored the presense of the audience.
I also remember going to Santa’s Workshop when I was young. I knew the man that was dressed up as Santa Claus wasn’t real. (I don’t remember if I didn’t believe in Santa or if I just figured this wasn’t the real Santa.) But for some reason I decided that the guy inside the costume was actually my grandfather. He was pretending not to know me because he was playing Santa and I played along with it by pretending I thought he was the real Santa.
This was more a persistent illogical thought, rather than a weird belief.
I’d be looking straight at a teacher (they were mostly nuns) and keep thinking that she was really my mother, disguised somehow. Now, nuns in those days covered much of their faces and all of their hair, but still… My mother had brown eyes and I seem to recall one nun with blue eyes, so go figure. (This was in the days before colored contact lenses, so it there was one more reason for it to be flatly impossible, even in a single-day incident as a practical joke impersonation, back then than in these days.)
Now, mind you, I did not actually believe this to be the case. It was just a matter of the known-to-be crazy thought lasting more than the usual quickly-dismissed instant.
I always thought that I was completely alone in this childhood mental “fugue.” Then, in the '70’s, I came across Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth. Portnoy as a child actually believed his teacher to be mom-in-disguise, with the power of super-speed flight to get back home in plenty of time. (“Portnoy” was Jewish, so none of his teachers would have been nuns.) Fiction, of course, but I have often wondered how autobiographical it may have been. Or, if not in this case, perhaps he was adapting a friend’s childhood memory.
So maybe it wasn’t a unique “fugue”/bizarre belief.
- “Jack”
I believed there were monsters that came out of hiding when I fell asleep, but as long as I was completely under the covers, they couldn’t find me and eat me or whatever. After years of this, the day came (I think I was about 10 years old) when I needed more air than I could obtain underneath the blanket and I had to figure out a way to stop believing in the monsters so I could fall asleep. I remember the first few nights of this were extremely difficult to deal with.
I believed that there was a malicious rat living under my bed. Strange, because I wasn’t at all afraid of real-life rats. He was polite, though, and wouldn’t do me any harm if I had someone staying over. So, I’d always talk like there was a friend spending the night with me.
I was convinced I’d seen God on a television program. In retrospect, they were probably talking about a man who had claimed to have found God or something. All I heard was “found God.” I can still see the clip they were showing of a man walking in the woods on an autumn day, and I remember thinking, “That’s the guy everyone is making a big deal about?” So when we talked about God in Sunday School, I thought I was hot stuff because I was the only one who knew he had a red flannel shirt. I also, for some reason, thought he was married to Mother Nature.
I was…um…kind of in my own world half the time growing up, so I kind of missed the part that we’d crossed the Pacific and ended up in an entirely new country. :o
(It didn’t help that we went back to grandma’s every summer, so for me Taiwan and America were always inexplicably connected in my mind.)
I was also convinced that the back door in the porch in grandma’s house was a portal to new and exciting worlds. I had a minor letdown when we finally went through that mystical doorway only to find an alleyway that opened up into the street, but then I decided that the alleyway was the portal.
I believed that my dreams really did happen in some kind of parallel dream world, and that I could share said world with other people who were sleeping at the time. (Of course, my dream!friends tended to be skeptics who needed to be taught the magic of dreambending every time they showed up.)
I was convinced everyone thought exactly like me, so I’d pop up with weird non-sequitors that made perfect sense to my own mind but left everyone else scratching their heads. (Nowadays I have problems not explaining everything down to the last detail. As my long-suffering roommate loves to point out, I don’t need to be Wikipedia.)
My dad was a political science professor, and I thought this meant he sat around studying things in microscopes and test tubes.
I didn’t understand the concept of the American flag. I thought there was only one REAL American flag and it was in Washington D.C. flying over the capitol or whatever. I thought all the rest were just fake flags.
I thought the Pope was the President of the whole world. Everybody had to do what the Pope said, didn’t they? I didn’t really have the concept that not everyone was Catholic until about age 8. After all, *I * was Catholic, my family was Catholic, all my aunts and uncles and cousins were Catholic. All the kids at my (Catholic) school were Catholic, and so were their families. So, by extension, the whole world must be Catholic. And if the whole world is Catholic, the Pope must be the head honcho!
StG
Similar, sorta, to StGermain, I thought everyone in the world was Republican. My parents, grandparents, and everyone I knew voted for Reagan, and then for Bush. I could not understand what the point of elections were.
I grew up in northern New York along the border with Quebec. So I always figured Canada was a French speaking country because the parts of Canada I had been to spoke French. And I figured it made perfect sense: I knew North America had been settled by Europeans, so I figured that the United States was settled by people from England, Canada by people from France, and Mexico by people from Spain.