Hei, auRa! Mita kuulu?*
Speaking of imaginations… I saw 13 Ghosts on TV when I was five. There is a four-post bed with a canopy on it, and the canopy would lower along the posts to smother the person in the bed. I had a bunk bed at the time, and I usually slept on the lower bunk… :eek:
[sub]*I don’t actually speak Finnish. My mom married a Finn.[/sub]
Mitäs tässä, ihan hyvää. 
Oh, I just remembered another one. My parents are avid readers, and we have an immense amount of books around the house. For some as-yet-unexplainable reason, I was convinced that my parents had written all these books. Never mind that it said “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare” on the front, those were definitely penned by my father. No doubt about it. (It never occured to me to question why my parents would wish to write books on such subjects as Finnish History from 1917-1987…)
…and now they’re all coming back to me… oh, god, I have been so weird as a child.
I was about 9 when the gulf war was on, and I thought that if there was a war in any country the whole place would change into desert.
I also used to think the whole world was black and white until the early 50s. Frightening. Really.
I use to think teachers could only marry another teacher. The other one was a teacher at another school, of course. Sometimes they were at the same school and I thought their kids were the smartest people on earth.
When I found out you had “8 pints of blood”, I assumed there was some inner reservoir filled with blood (ostensibly ready to be pumped out of the next wound). You could sometimes hear the blood sloshing around.
Yes you could! Really!!
I believed that whenever the lights went out, docile but deadly alligators would come out the wall behind my bed and wait underneath it. If I had to get up before the sun was up or without one of my parents turning on a light, the alligators would get me and rip me to pieces – unless I was able to lean off of the bed to open the door, then make a running leap from the bed into the hallway, where magic bed alligators couldn’t go.
Growing up in a pentecostal church, communion was open to any child whose parents felt understood the spiritual significance of the ritual. It was also passed through the pews (in ornate silver platters and cup holders which were, I thought, the most expensive things in the world) and then taken in unison, bread then wine (well, grape juice). My mother let me begin to take communion when I was about seven, when I could appropriately summarize its importance to her. But I thought that I was going to get in trouble with Jesus because I would hold the wafer in my mouth and use the juice to “moisten” it. It was my secret sin for about three years, and every Sunday I waited for a lightning bolt out of heaven to zap me for intermixing the wafer and juice. I wasn’t disabused of that notion until I went to church with my aunt and uncle who were Episcopalian, and saw that the wafer was dipped into the juice. No one in their church had been zapped so I figured that I was on steady spiritual ground
I also believed, growing up as a black child in the south during the latter days of the Jim Crow era but the beginnings of the black pride era, I believed that white people were afraid of black people because they *thought]/i] we had some kind of germs that they didn’t want, but in reality, what we had was automatic protection from the sunburns and heatstroke that seemed to plague whites in the hot Mississippi summers. “So there! Haha!” was what I thought.
I thought that too. It explained to me why some stations played “rock,” others “oldies tunes,” still others “country,” etc. You can’t expect a band to play every kind of music!
I thought the word chaos was pronounced “chah-ohss.” There was also a word “kay-oss” which meant the same thing. Imagine my surprise to find they were actually the same word. At an even younger age, I insisted on pronouncing “the” as “thee.”
I thought pizza was evil and not to be eaten. (Actually, that may be true.)
I thought teachers all went on vacation somewhere, like Florida, after the school year ended. (You didn’t see them around anywhere, did you?)
Yeah, I know now. Where were you when I was four? 
errrrr… i still do. I consider my shopping at thrift stores as part of a community outreach program.
I’m saving all the poor stuff from being thrown out
I thought that, if you were going to adopt a baby, you went to a nursery with losts of cribs and babies and picked one out like at the store.
I thought all babies were born by c-section and that Joseph cut Mary open with an axe to deliver the baby Jesus.
I always wondered how they translated foreign languages into English to send them along the telephone wires.
Even when I was but a lad, I had a beyond-my-years interest in the womenfolk. This, combined with a lot of reading, meant that I knew things about the bodies of women which I don’t suppose most little boys my age did. I was, oh, 10 or so
So imagine my surprise when a friend of mine, considered by me to be a true genius (He was, and is), told me that women only have one hole, from which they not only urinate and defecate, but also menstruate and have babies.
I remember trying to explain it to him, would babies really float around in there with logs of crap and piss? Eventually I think I found him a diagram and convinced him. I’m pretty sure that I had to remind him that WE had two holes, and didn’t have babies.
Okay, so it’s not something weird I believed. But it counts. It DOES.
Could it be considered weird that I can never remember, ever, thinking that girls are icky? I mean, it sure seemed like everyone else had that phase where girls were stupid and horrible to touch, but I sure always wanted to.
I vaguely remember being terrifed of dying from paralytic shellfish toxin for a number of months when I lived up in Alaska.
It got really bad when we were coho fishing and I was hysterical. Eventually my mom tracked down a fish and wildlife warden to explain that I wasn’t in danger of the shellfish toxin.
Didn’t help
Needless to say, therapy ensued.
And thus the first time I was kicked out of a therapy session came to be.
I used to think that those “Hidden Drive” signs meant that there was a magical driveway that only some people could see.
I used to beleive that older people always died before younger people. Since my brother was a year older than me, I knew that he would die a year before I did. Since I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was 4, I used to tell him that when he died I would discover his bones and put them in a museum. I always pictured randomly finding my brother’s bones out in the desert somewhere, like in the pictures in my dinosaur books, and wrapping them in plaster and hauling them back to the museum. I didn’t have a very good idea of how long a year was, but I knew I’d be really old when I did this.
I also believed the world was in black and white, and I used to think that commercials/ television programs could be taped or aired live; whatever the actors wanted to do.
When I was little, I asked my mom why the trees didn’t get cold in the winter without their leaves; she said god put an invisible blanket over them…which I believed for several years.
Also, my father has no sense of smell, and my mother or grandmother told me that when he was little, a bee came up his nose and stole it. I can still remember being in first grade and telling the other kids that story. Of course, neither of them will admit to having told me that…
I was also pretty confused about religion (still am, I suppose…) I thought I couldn’t say ‘heaven’ or ‘hell’ or ‘Jesus’…I’m not sure where I picked that up, but I remember thinking that Tiffany (Debbie Gibson?) song ‘Heaven is a place on earth’ was really bad.
p if it counts as “as a child,” since I just finally worked it out a few months ago, when I was home again for Christmas.
Long ago, my father gave my mother a Salvador Dali print. It’s of a sort of winged horse, and the body of the horse is made up of sketched circles. There are also many lines sketched in and around the horse. From childhood until a few months ago, I always thought that a friend of theirs had drawn it, and not a professional artist. I mean, * it wasn’t done! * Clearly, the person had started sketching, didn’t like the way it was going, but gave it to my parents because they expressed an interest.
When I was quite young I had this incredibly real dream in which an extremely old bearded man told me that I would be forever safe when I slept as long as none of my body was outside the perimeter of the bed and as long covered myself head to toe with the blankets. I was allowed a special exemption by the old man for my nose to stick out–after much haggling.
To this day, I still have to have something covering me at night in order to get to sleep–and I feel distinctly uneasy when a foot or hand strays outside of the perimeter of the bed.
In the American Pledge of Allegience, there’s a line-- “… and to the Republic, for which it stands…”
I always heard “Witches’ Stands”, and pictured a bleak, dark landscape, and 2 witches working at a lemonade stand. It’s no “cross-eyed bear”, but, well, what are you gonna do?