From talking swing sets, to the television watching our every move, adults share mind blowing and hilarious theories they had when they were younger.
[Source can be found at the end of the article]
I thought the universe knew if I wanted something to happen/not happen, then the universe would allow the opposite to happen.
So my theory was to trick the universe into thinking I wanted something when I really wanted the opposite to get what I want.
Basically reverse psychologized my life. And it had a high success rate.
BestMasuNA
I thought George Washington was the first man ever. I knew he was the first president, and I knew the president’s wife was called the First Lady, so I came to the conclusion that the first president was the first man on earth.
turtlecannon22
Whenever I got a cookie as a kid I would do this little spiel where I’d break up the cookie in several parts and then would only be allowed to eat one after having broken another one in two. That way the number of cookie parts would always stay the same – infinite cookie supply basically.
I was very well aware that at some point my magical supply always ran out but that didn’t stop me from proudly telling everyone who would hear it about my personal secret to infinite cookies.
Galimathias
That you will get a different name when you become an adult. Like you are ‘Mary’ as a child and then ‘Susanna’ as a grown up.
gafan-
You know how they say before you die your life flashes before your eyes? I strongly believed I was already lying in my death bed and recalling my entire life. I scared myself into thinking I already lived my life. I believed that’s why I had the power to think. Like everything already happened, I felt real but my brain was actually in my dying body which is suppose to be the present and I am merely a figment of my history.
ABB8Unit
I used to think that there was a difference between a Dad and a Father. It always confused me as a kid. Luke Skywalker had a father, why didn’t I? All I had was a dad, and he couldn’t use the force.
DrDudeManJones
I used to have the perfect plan to survive a plane crash: I would prepare by standing on a wing or the roof of the plane, and wait until we were but a few feet off the ground. Then I’d simply jump up. The plane would crash, but I would only drop from where I jumped, thus remaining unharmed. I told everyone I cared about to make sure they also had the tools to defy the forces of gravity.
LeToaster
I thought that all humans and animals shared one huge fast moving invisible electric current that keeps us all alive and moving. And when someone dies it’s because they disconnected from the main current. And when we sleep, we take in less of the current so those on the other side of the earth can have more.
CheekyGrackle
You know the parking spots reserved for handicapped? Well as a kid I always thought the symbol of a man in a wheelchair looked like a man on the toilet. So I assumed you would park there if you were only going in for a quick pee.
NiklasSpZ
I had a horribly distorted idea of the concept of trace elements. I thought there must be some of every substance in every other substance. But not, like, hey this lump of iron might have traces of a Uranium isotope. More like this banana must have traces of mustard in it.
ccwithers
As a kid, but before I could read properly I used to look at the pictures in my brothers childrens’ encyclopedia and look at the internal diagrams of the human body.
There was one showing the skeleton
One showing the muscle system and circulatory system
And one showing the organ system
As a kid, I couldnt comprehend that, the human body could fit all these different things.
So I came to the conclusion, that each one of these diagrams was a theory about what might be inside the human body, but no one knows because its naughty to cut a person open to look inside.
Also, whenever I played a game like ridge racers on the PS1, I always imagined that the other racers were real people I was playing against, like an online match.
night-wing-politics
The squeaky ones could talk a syllable at a time and only when you were swinging on them. If they didn’t make noise, they didn’t have anything to say. I used to have whole conversations with them…..I was a lonely child.
CombatMeatBro
Remember the DS doodle chat thing? Where to send the chat you had to swipe up and it would get sent to the person who your DS was linked to? Well I thought if no one was at the other end then God would just get it so that’s how I would “pray”. I sent DS doodle chat things. I also thought little people never grew because they didn’t have birthdays.
cornpedo
I had moments where I thought my life was secretly being watched by hidden camera’s everywhere. To the point where once or twice I just turned to some random direction and made a snappy one-liner like when cartoon/TV characters do when they break the fourth wall.
I’m pretty sure this was before The Truman Show came out too, though just barely. And even then I never watched that film until years later in my teens anyway so there’s no way I could have been influenced by that. But it does describe those fleeting thoughts I’d get from time to time.
priteeboy
That when you think of something or start day dreaming, you usually stare blankly at nothing, you’re not imagining yourself doing that, you’re actually looking off in the direction of the parallel universe where you actually did do it.
DumbQuestionsAreGood
When I first started learning about cells and basic biology science in 6th grade I imagined that each human cell was an entire universe with its own galaxies and planets inside it, but they were too small to be detected by microscopes. Our entire universe was really just the cell of a much larger creature and it would go on forever like that.
I asked my teacher what she thought of my idea, but she said that’s not possible and wouldn’t call on me anymore in class. I was really disappointed because I was proud of myself for thinking of that all on my own.
Frolic-A-holic
I watched TV a lot when I was younger so I had always thought we were on our own television show and that I was the main character or something. Whenever I thought no one was listening I turned randomly away from everything that was going on and narrated my opinion on what was going on.
The people who knew I did this thought I was trying to be funny, but I actually did believe that someone was always watching me like I did all of the time to my favorite characters. Now, I just figured out that my theory was not wrong…
Micaityl
I thought that I had super powers, such as flying, super strength and the ability to move things with my mind. I think I watched too much Dragon Ball Z and used to dream that I had beat up all the people that I didn’t like at my school. I just couldn’t figure out the correct technique to unlock these powers during the day. This theory was soon quashed when I attempted to ‘fly’ down the stairs after performing it perfectly in a dream the previous night. One broken arm, a fractured orbital bone and 37 stitches later, I realised I was, in fact, just a normal human.
MarineOG
If I ever had anything good happen to me a couple times in a row without anything particularly bad happening in-between those events, then I assumed that something bad was going to happen soon. It was silly because I considered a lot of small things good so of course eventually something bad happened. I didn’t figure out life is a series of bad things happening until high school.
prerejection
I used to believe that when you died, you’d either move up a dimension or down a dimension depending on what you did in this one. So for example, if you were really good in this 3D life, you’d move into the fourth dimension and get to live there with an extra dimension. Conversely, bad people got sent to the second dimension and had to go over people, it sounded so tedious. I still kind of want it to be true, I was a strange seven year old…
DrkVenom
I was really obsessed with superpowers and really genuinely thought I had some that were just dormant and just needed to get to a certain age. Well when I was 11 I remember putting away the dishes that had just gone through the dishwasher. I picked up a glass that, as I picked it up, shattered into 100 pieces. So, for a short while I was convinced I had some kind of pyrokinetic powers.
IHaveAProtuberance
I thought water was infinite. I’d sit in the bath bringing the tips of my two index fingers together very carefully so that a part of a drop of water would jump from one fingertip to the other, and it looked like I had created a copy of the original drop. I assumed I could just keep doing this indefinitely.
SinePittyRunnykine
I was convinced for no reason that all mirrors led to an evil alternate world, and my reflection was keeping me from going there by putting their hand wherever I put mine.
DrProfessorDr
That there were tiny people in the radio. I confided in my sister and she backed it up and told me I was right. Imagine my parents anger when I took apart the radio to free them and couldn’t get it back together.
texassadist
When I was 7 or 8 I thought that all lesbians came from the country Lebanon and would go to other countries who had men and have sex with them to get pregnant. I thought that Lebanon was an all female country and wondered what they did with all the male babies.
This was around the time that Friends had the episode were Rosss wife came out as gay and left him and I think that Lebanon was in the news so I got lesbians mixed up with Lebanese.
zasz211
I had quite a few weird theories as a kid, but my top was that this world was a dream the real me was having. I thought each night in my real life I would dream a lifetime in this world and when I died I would just wake up in the real world. I remember being really proud of myself for imagining everything in the world. And I was very impressed I created God.
A few of the more mild ones were that factories were cloud making machines and every time God wanted to go to heaven he would climb in a smoke stack and ride it up.
Also thought babies were boy or girl if the mom ate broccoli or strawberries when she got pregnant.
punchyourfacein
. I thought that when you reached a certain age a man would come to your house and tell you the “secrets that only adults knew”
I used to wonder if everyone perceived colours differently. I understood that it’s impossible to think up new colours but I thought that everyone saw ROYGBIV differently
I thought that pixels on a TV screen were really a tiny person holding up a “color board” to a window (ie the pixel)
I thought that when I ate something, there would be a little person who lived in my stomach who would put in a bowl and mix it with the rest of my food. When the time came, he would throw the contents of the bowl up my throat so it would come out my mouth. And that kids, is how you vomit.
Once a family friend came over to my house who was heavily pregnant with twins. I was sitting next to her and her shirt didn’t entirely cover her belly. I could see she had one long thin stretch mark and asked if that was where the babies were going to come out.
I was an interesting child.
reneesathie
That the best way to lie to people was to believe the lie myself. So I tested this by preparing lies with detailed back stories. After this was overwhelmingly successful I wanted to see how else I could manipulate people which lead to years of self doubt because I no longer knew if I believed in what I was doing or saying.
ApneaMan
My father was something of an anti-establishment rebel and I heard about the “rat race” often, so 4-7 year old me believed that office jobs included regular literal races of rats.
Also, later (around 11 years old), I was assigned to present a report about newly elected President Bill Clinton. I knew Will was short for William, so I connected the dots and stood in front of class talking about “President Billiam Clinton” for ten minutes.
thruendlessrevisions
I remember reading a chapter in Animorphs where one of them survives the sea by morphing an ant and being trapped in an air bubble.
I came to the conclusion that with enough air bubbles in the water, breathing underwater would be possible and people just weren’t trying hard enough.
I tried it many times by going underwater and forcefully inhaling.
The strangest thing? I have this vivid memory of succeeding at it the first time I tried. Never manage to repeat that success.
OutsideBeng
That you could actually “lose your breath” When I was like 4-5 I thought your breath was like a cloud of air and you had to breathe it back into your lungs after you exhaled. For example I thought you could lose it by exhaling then leaving the room and not coming back before it disappeared.
tmhrkns4
When I was about 7 years old, I didn’t want to pee or shower because I thought aliens were observing me. All quite normal up to then, but the thing is that I believed they were observing me because I was in a play. We all were. Every alien was asigned a human, when that human was born, the script for the play was inprinted in their brain and so we would live our lives for the entertainment of our designated alien that would watch us in some sort of theater.
anauhiram96
I realized that our brain controls every sense of the world that we have. So, our whole experience of the world is basically an agreed upon hallucination. We could all be giant brains floating in space hallucinating trees and other people and the feel of sunshine and the taste of food. For reference, I decided this before I was 10 and the Matrix came out just before I graduated from high school.
salamandah99
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