This account floored me, particularly when other people started chiming in to say “me too.” I got glasses when I was 8 years old, but I don’t think I really *needed *them until about 2 years later – I could see the words on the chalkboard in class; they were just a tiny bit fuzzy. So my vision got progressively worse, but I always understood what trees, etc. really looked like because when I was born my vision was okay. And because hardly anyone had glasses when they first started school (there was only one person in my Kindergarten class who wore glasses), my perception of the world was that everyone was born seeing clearly and their vision got progressively worse. (Obviously people who were born blind didn’t see clearly, but I figured people who were born not seeing clearly had some sort of obvious medical condition.) So the idea that you could be ten years old and not know that trees had individual leaves just never, ever crossed my mind.
And it’s made me forget what I was going to contribute to this thread. I’ll come back when I remember it.
That my parents were never scared or worried. Especially, my dad, he was our protector. Now I think of myself as an adult and how many sleepless nights I’ve had worrying about so many things. I know now my parents felt the same way.
Okay I remember now, and it’s really creepy thinking back on it. When I was a child, say, three years old or so, when I would try to go to sleep at night, I would close my eyes and often picture this sort-of monster/person. It was a man, but his “skin” was this dark reddish orange, rough-textured like a crater, and covered in cracks. And he would stand there staring, never moving. It would scare me, and I would go into my parents’ room to sleep with them and tell them I had had a nightmare. They used to ask me what the nightmare was about.
Thing is, I thought the man that I saw when I closed my eyes was, essentially, named Nightmare. That when you said you had a nightmare, it meant that you saw the man. So the whole idea of a nightmare being “about” something confused me, because nothing happened, I had just seen (“had”) a nightmare.
tl;dnr: My misconception was that I thought a nightmare was an actual person/creature.
We didn’t really start using the blackboard at normal letter sizes until I was in 4th grade; I was one of several kids who would need to walk up to it (if it was the end of the class) or ask to have something spelled out loud so we could copy it down. And geometry involved a lot of formulas and a lot of picky drawings!
I have very high visual acuity, which my optometrist cousin explained as “the ability to interpret visual data independently of how good the data is.” Between that and having very little use of the blackboard, yeah, I didn’t need glasses the same way I needed shoes, but there’s a lot of landscapes I missed.
I thought Ronald Reagan lived inside our television set. I knew he liked jellybeans, so I tried to feed him by smushing them through the little slits in the back. Fortunately, my dad caught me before we ended up with caramelized jellybeans gumming up the TV
When I was about twelve, my parents wanted to go for a driving vacation to Mexico. They took me out of school for two weeks so that I could accompany them.
My best friend (possibly miffed because I got to be out of school for two weeks) told me that when people crossed the border into Mexico, they had to be strip-searched in the most invasive way possible. I was a bashful little girl and this idea terrified me. I did ask my mom about it, but she only laughed at me and didn’t reassure me about it at all.
I spent the whole way down to the border sick with dread about the crossing. I couldn’t eat or sleep and my parents couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. We crossed without incident, and then I thought that the search would take place on the way back. I was relieved enough to enjoy some aspects of our vacation, but I didn’t feel completely emotionally well until we were north of the border.
When I was five or six years old we were visiting my aunt and uncle (mom’s brother). One night my dad and I were outside looking at the stars, and I asked him if there was anyone who knows everything. He said no one knows everything, then under his breath: “except your uncle.”
I was suitably impressed, and for a long time afterwards I believed that my uncle did, in fact, know everything. At some point it came up in conversation with my mother, who asked me where I got such a silly idea. When I said dad told me, she said “oh really, he did, did he?”
I presume that there was a conversation between my parents shortly following this, but I’ve never asked how it went.
I thought foreign languages were just letter-substitution ciphers and all you had to do was learn the French equivalent alphabet in order to be able to speak French. I was maybe 4 or 5 at the time.
Now image a kid in the early 1990s or later, reading adult magazines (perhaps even ‘woods p0rn’) of that era - they might well have held that misconception for a long time…
The protagonist of Jude the Obscure believes upon entering language school that it is learning when to put an “O” after an English word to speak in a foreign language.
I used to think recipes were created in the same way stories were created; that is, invented from an author’s imagination. I wrote some recipes of my own. Og knows what would have happened if anyone had tried to cook them.
Similarly, I thought there must be someone who had the job of listening to music and writing down the lyrics so they could be put inside the album cover. It didn’t occur to me that the singer must know the lyrics…:smack:
I thought the moon was following us every time we drove in the car at night. It never got closer or farther away and always stayed in the same relative position, so it must be following us.
Also, I thought the phases of the moon were random. I thought it could be full one day and a crescent the next. I didn’t spend a lot of time outdoors at night when it was a kid, and I was probably about ten before I noticed that the visible part of the moon changes shape only slightly from one night to the next.
Let’s see… I thought that when you went to the store, the customer was getting a much better deal than the store was, because the customer gives the store some money, but the store gives the customer both money (the change) and a product. It didn’t occur to me that the amounts of money were different.
I also thought that a bank was a store where you bought money. Whenever Mom needed money, she would go to the bank, and pay them a little money in order to get more money from them.
There was also a time in my childhood when I knew that there was something called “sex” that adults didn’t like to talk much about, and I knew that there was something involving a man putting his convex part inside of a woman’s concave part, and I knew that there was something that parents did to have children, but I didn’t know that all three were the same thing.
I thought that going to another country always meant going on a boat. My parents discovered this on a trip to Scotland, from England, when I was really really excited about the boat trip we would be going on, because I’d never been on a proper boat.
I have no idea why I thought this; I knew Scotland was a different country, but I knew that Wales was too, and we lived less than a mile from the England/Wales border and crossed it multiple times a week.
My birthday is on the 5th of a month. I distinctly remember my 5th birthday, assuming that these two 5’s were correlated (I presumably didn’t remember my 4th or earlier birthdays), and I believed that my 6th birthday would be on the 6th of the month the following year.
In kindergarten the rumors were that eating glue would make you turn into snow. I believed it and refrained from eating the tasty glue.
This was a one-time thing, but I always think about it.
I was probably 10 or so and my mom, sisters and I went to my aunt’s cabin for the day. My aunt drove us. (Background on aunt: my uncle, her husband worked at a car dealership, so they were always driving a different car.) We were on our way home and as we were zipping down the highway at 10:00 pm, my aunt was looking for the “brights”. At that time, "the “brights” weren’t on the steering column like they are now, there was a button-thing on the floor you would depress with your foot. As a kid, I had no knowledge of “brights”. So I heard, “darn it, I can’t find the brakes!” “Every time Ralph gives me a different car, the brakes are somewhere else.” I thought, Oh my God, we are going to crash!! She said it numerous times, each time I became more nervous. I couldn’t figure out why my mom was so calm. I’m not sure when I realized what she was really saying. It was probably years later.
When I first learned Prince Charles of England was referred to as the Prince of Wales, I thought it was actually Prince of Whales. I was a little kid who was always reading fantasy/fairy tales in which cats, dogs, birds, etc., acted like people and had their kingdoms and courts, etc. and I was still of the age when it hadn’t really registered in my mind the difference between animals and humans. Anyway so I had this picture in my head of Prince Charles in one of his dress uniforms going out on the bow of a battle ship and the whales rising up out of the ocean to make some sort of bowing gesture to him as their prince.
