As I kid I used to think...

Post Reply New Topic

I thought Corfu was in China.

when movies are dubbed, the movement of the lips doesn't match what the dubs are saying, right?

my mom watches a lot of american movies dubbed to spanish, and when i was a kid i thought that they were latin-american movies made with the actors standing around making their lips move, and the audio was recorded completely separately.
and all the english language movies were made differently.

when i was 7 i asked my dad if i was old.

when i was a kid ...

I THOUGHT WAR WAS OVER!

and now I'm just another kid whose fantasies have become brutal realities

That I'd be fighting in wars all over the world.

I ended up fighting myself.

The photos my parents hung on the wall were connected to the people that were in the photo and they all spied on me while I was practicing violin.

There was a lion monster coming to get me when I walked up the basement stairs. I still do it sometimes, but I try to reason with myself. I've been running away from it for 17 years, and it's never caught me, so it's probably safe to stop running up the stairs.

My cousin told me all sorts of things that I believed until I was older and it didn't make sense anymore. It still confuses me once in a while, but I can't think of any of them right now.

i will have to separate this in to sections.

0-6 years old (partially remembered and largely related to me by my later childhood psychologist)

i thought that i was the only conscious being in the universe. i thought that other people were things that pretended they were alive merely in order to interact with me. i never really reasoned it. i just took it for granted.

i felt that the only purpose of anything i saw in my world was to accommodate me. people were there to get me what i wanted. trees (for example) were there only for the reason that i could see them. i believed i was the only witness to the world, and that all other people were blind automatons that just wriggled instinctively and thoughtlessly around in it. i did believe they were dimly conscious i guess. but of what, i had no idea.

i believed that people who spoke in another language were just babbling nonsensical syllables because they were not smart enough to talk. i believed that like babies, they pretended to talk, but unlike babies, they had a greater degree of motor co-ordination over their tongues and cheek muscles and throats and could utter more complicated sounding but still ultimately nonsensical syllables.
i believed that like babies, they hope that someone will magically understand their random attempt at talking, or pretend that they do.

i believed people with dark skin were dirty and needed to have a shower. i thought they worked hard in jobs where they became covered in oil or grease, and that they just needed a soapy shower to look clean.

i believed that the house that i lived in was the strongest structure in the world.

i believed that my father was amongst the richest people in the world.

i believed our german shepherd dog was stronger than a lion and would beat one in a fight.

i believed that our main family car was able to beat any supercar if given enough straight road and time.

i believed that if only i tried, i could do anything. including moving mountains. i believed that the force of my will would be equal to any obstacle, if only i decided to will hard enough.

i believed that the robot in "lost in space" (b9) was the closest approximation to someone who was conscious because i believed he was like me.

____________
age 7-14 (mainly remembered and also advised to me by my psychiatrist)
i thought that i was able to play with people like they were puppets. i realized that i could cause peoples behaviour to be altered by simply making a random expression on my face, or saying something that causes them to scratch their head or furrow their brow or look up and lick their lips etc etc.

so i learned what things would cause people to be derailed, and i liked to cause people who were talking to each other to become derailed and eventually look like idiots as they tried to salvage the wreckage of their thought trains. that is just an example, but i thought that people were like toys that i could manipulate to behave as i wanted them to. especially toward each other. people were like peons in a video game and they were to be clicked on and allocated to whatever task i felt necessary.

when one reaches about 15, then one is no longer considered a child, and the world becomes much less accommodating to ones whims, and so it is then time to be pragmatic and retire from the world of social currency.

i thought jr high was like high school. and i would be rather popular.

i thought all east asians were Han Chinese.

when i was rather young i thought China and Japan hated each other...then i thought they were the closest of allies and never once warred against each other.

i had no idea where medieval Europe-themed stories would take place, or where they were inspired from. i would have thought that your familiar armor-clad knights, stone castles with moats and jousting fests were all Japanese creations.

I used to think I'd live forever. Oh - to have those days back.

I still wonder about that now, or something similar. I often wonder if I am an element or something in space with a sort of conscience what dreams, and I am dreaming of my life and the universe, but really the Earth, the sun and the moon don't actually exist. Sometimes I look around and think that life is too complex to really exist. So it just exists in a dream of this element, and when I die that is when the element dreams no more.

Yes this, growing up took so long I did not think it was possible.

i believed everything i saw really existed, but i did not believe anything else was conscious. i thought all animated aspects of my environment were merely instinctual entities that performed their actions with inevitability and without consciousness.

it was when i was an adolescent that i discovered that the universe exists in only my mind. i did not include that in my post because i was not a child when i came to that realization. i realized when i was an adolescent (12) that inside my skull it was completely dark, but that was where i "saw" things from. i realized that my eyes simply relayed signals to a part of my brain in the back of my head that was in total darkness, and i "perceived" light only indirectly. only within the circuitry of my brain did i actually see or hear or taste or smell or feel anything. therefore i realized that what i saw was only a product of my neurons perceptions, and not the actual real thing.


but you must also realize that your impression of life is also too complicated to exist. it is even more complicated than what exists. existence of all things in the universe without consciousness of any of it by any being is far simpler than the subjective consciousness of it all.


i could never imagine being dead when i was a child. i still can not imagine it.
people say that sleep is a close approximation to death, but even in NEM sleep, time seems to pass.

if i took a tablet that put me into deep dreamless sleep for 12 hours, when i woke up, i would still perceive that some time has elapsed.

the closest approximation i can imagine to death is being under a general anaesthetic. i was placed under general anaesthetic twice in my life, and it left me with a terrified feeling when i contemplated it after i woke up. no time seemed to elapse at all. i shut my eyes, and a subjective instant later, i opened them and found that 8 hours had passed in reality but not even a second had passed for me.

but i woke up. that is the point that prevented me from being able to realize what death was like.

if i was under anaesthetic for a trillion years, when i woke up, not a second would have passed in my mind, but i still would wake up none the less. if i was under anaesthetic forever, then not one second would pass, but how can that be if it is forever that not one second passes in my mind. it surely must terminate with a reawakening. how can forever be forever if it passes in an instant?

i have already been unconscious forever before i was born, but i was born, and all that "forever" before i was born was no time to me. it must be the same after i die, because i will again be "dead" forever like i was before i was born. that is what i thought when i was an adolescent.

now i do not bother thinking about it.

I used to think that pasta was pronounced "paster" because I first heard about it watching a British comedian on TV.

I also wondered sometimes if everything was imaginary and that I was actually a floating being in a blank land.

I thought cartoons were filmed somehow.

I wondered if dogs and cats talked like humans when we weren't near or looking, and that the reason people use that idea on TV was because people occasionally witnessed it.

I thought the Boobahs were real, and even argued with a little girl who was my age about it.

I thought big dogs were out to get me because I got scared when our big dog tried to play with me, and the only big dog who understood was our other dog (he was shy and kept to himself).

I believed that if I slept on the floor, the germs on the floor would grow into bugs and crawl up to me while I slept (my brother told me this).

I thought bed bugs were colorful, glowing bugs because of a dream I had.

When I was a kid?..

I used to think that Africa was a country

there's plenty of adults that think this too.

I am a kid (12 years old). Therefore, everything I have ever thought of was something that I used to think of as a kid. I have made U-Turns on some of them (going to bed at dusk as I complained about the hours I started sleeping in during DST). I have been punished on a few occasions (school punishments). Some of them are new (joining WP), some of them are old (sleeping in my Mum and Dad's bed). Some of them I have next-to-no idea of now (a PowerPoint shown when I was sort of new to primary school where Classes 1, 2 and 3 - the classes moved up in those days - were eaten up by a creature which caused near-panic in me; I don't know what it did to Class 4, my class, but it certainly didn't eat it and go on a rampage).

- When I was very, very young, I believed that I was born from my mother, and my brother was born from my dad, and that we were actually married like our parents.
- That if I didn't hold my mom's hand when crossing a street or parking lot, the people in their cars would deliberately try to run me over.
- That if I swallowed my gum, it would stick to my heart and I could die (at least that's what one of the kids next door told me).
- That if I swallowed chalk, it would give me a soft, silky voice (something I once read in a fairy tale).
- That if I washed my face in the morning dew, I would become very pretty (something else I read in a story).
- That our teachers kept some sort of medieval device in the school basement that they used to torture or even kill students who didn't behave.
- That I would never learn to tie my shoes, tell time, or know the difference between left and right.
- That only cartoon characters and actors on TV had facial expressions, people in real life did not.

There are a couple of other things but it's too embarrassing for me to talk about.