Here’s a somewhat related book that I’m currently reading. It’s fascinating:
What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty
[QUOTE=SHAKES]
I’ve never admitted this to anyone before now.
Every once in a blue moon I try to use my non existent telekinetic powers. Or as I like to call it my “Inner Jedi”
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Along the same lines, I will occasionally check to see if I have developed any superhuman powers or test to see if anyone around me has any. I have strained my eyes checking for x-ray vision, jumped and strained upward in an attempt to fly and exerted my will to try and use telekinesis. All out of sheer boredom of course.
I will also occasionally think “If anyone around here is a mindreader, please let me know” and variations there of.
Also, I firmly believe that if I skip a class, something really, REALLY, REALLY important will be covered and I’ll fail the next test because of it.
When I was about five years old and having nightmares, my father informed me that if I ever had a really bad nightmare and woke up from it, in order to keep myself from having another one, I should flip over my pillow. If I was having nightmares, the pillow was flipped to its wrong side and I must flip it over to have good dreams.
It works. I’m not going to question it. I know pillows have no effect on my dreaming, but it’s worked for over twenty years, I’m not going to screw with it now. 
[QUOTE=Ensign Edison]
I still get scared if I read too many “true” ghost stories, even though I know beyond any doubt they’re a bunch of baloney.
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Me too.
As a teen, I stayed for with a friend in an isolated old house for a weekend, the first night of we spent locked in his bedroom, with furniture pushed against the door, and armed with a cross and a statue of Mary, due to the ghostly moanings that lasted for hours (I already told this story in detail a couple times on this board).
Though I’m fully convinced there was a rational explanation for the moanings, and that we would have found it out had we investigated instead of being scared shitless, there’s still no way you would make me spend a night alone in this house.
[QUOTE=betenoir]
I gotta put a word in for the Tarot. I never “believed” in it. But I think it’s way cool. A convient, artistic, visual (which tends to be how I think) way to access your instincts. .
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I like tarot cards a lot too. I used to read them. Unfortunately, I don’t even believe they can help accessing your instincts. I too thought it was way cool to use them and read them, but it’s extremely frustrating when you really, really, don’t believe there’s anything to it. It’s also very uneasing when people begin to take seriously what you’re telling them despite you stating clearly that yourself don’t believe in it. Net result : it’s no fun when people dont take it seriously at all, and when they do, even slightly, you (or at least I) are reluctant to read the cards, out of fear it would influence them in real life decision-making (say, about a boyfriend or whatever else). Once again, a very frustrating exercise, so I eventually gave up. Sigh. There are so many beautiful tarot decks…
On the other hand, I liked the I-Ching a lot. Because the advices it gave were interesting, by making me think about ways to deal with issues that weren’t my usual ways. Only problem, I still dealt with them in my usual way regardless, even when I thought that actually the I-Ching had more sense than me. I’ not the only one who ask for advices, receive good ones and then proceed to utterly ignore them, surely? Of course I could have opened the book at a random page for an equally useful result, but it was way more fun to actually draw the hexagrams and pretend there’s divination involved.
Free will. Intellectually, I consider it a meaningless phrase. On an emotional level, I’m like everybody else; “We all believe in free will; we have no choice.”
At this moment, part of me seriously believes that I will never sleep well again - I’m into another bout of insomnia, on top of a cold, and the concept of sleep seems very foreign to me right now.
I also believe that my neighbours watch everything I do through our apartment windows. The windows at the back (especially kitchen) are set very close to those of the next apartment over across a very tiny yard, so it is conceivably easy to watch what people are doing. I have no rational reason to think anyone is looking, since blinds are pretty much always closed, but I still worry about it and to make it easier, I narrate what “they” might be thinking about what I’m doing inside my head.
Me? Crazy? Nooooo!!
Quite often when in traffic, I’ve tried to control the people in front of me by repeating, “You want to turn left, you want to turn left,” or other directions. Occasionally it works, so I’ve decided that wishes do come true every once in awhile.
So now, whenever I want to take control of someone in traffic, I say, “I want a million dollars and, by the way, for this guy ahead of me to turn left.”
Just in case.
Also, I believe in love, despite my exceedingly poor track record…
I used to believe
… That I was a foundling or something of that ilk where my parents were from another planet and left me here for some reason. (and no, at that age I’d never heard of Superman)
… That I had the ability to control other people by thought
[QUOTE=Hogwash]
Sorry to quash any intrigue, but it really wasn’t any kind of hardcore delusion or mental illness and my upbringing was not religious in any shape or form.
It was just one of those typical introspective teenage musings that you get when you go beyond the pure knowledge-gathering stage of childhood and start to question life and your existence for the first time. You know, when you stare up at the night sky in the park with your friends and talk about eternity?
It dawned on me that if the concept of Jesus returning to Earth is true, then why couldn’t I could be him (Him?). I mean, all I know and feel and see is inside my own head, so why shouldn’t I be some sort of central focal point of the Universe? I know it sounds silly, but I had a feeling that I really was different, that I really had some purpose to go on to great things. Chalk it up to childhood vanity if you will, but it was never about thinking ‘how great I was’, the feeling ran much deeper.
But haven’t we all had these thoughts at some time in our life? That this is all for us? That we were the Trumans at the centre of a show? That we are somehow unique at a higher level? That we know something that others don’t?
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I’ll admit to entertaining fanciful notions of more or less exactly the same nature; Jesus was 33 when he was crucified, I was going to be 33 in the year 2000, so it’s obvious there had to be some connection.
I also, for a little while, wondered if I was an android and that everybody knew about it, except me.
Question is: if you were wrong about being Jesus, why assume you’re right about being sane now? 
Baseball fans know that when a defensive substitution is made late in the game the next ball put into play will find the new guy.
We know this, and we repeat it to ourselves when we see it happen, and of course we don’t notice any of the majority of times when it doesn’t happen.
Ball finds the new guy. True that.
As cliche as it sounds - “What goes around comes around”
There’s no logic behind it, there’s no scientific certainty of it, but I believe it. I’ve experienced it and seen it, and while I normally balk at such exclamations of “Ooo, Karma!” I can’t help but think it’s true.