I used to believe that maps were made by placing a pencil tip on a piece of paper while sitting in the backseat of a car, and letting the bumps dictate the outline of the land.

Tiffany Scott

I used to believe that the Earth inside a giant snow globe. I would ask my mom if the clouds were in or outside the glass. She had no idea what I was talking about.

L

I was probably about 8 when I thought of this. Having grown up in a town in Florida where rocks did not occur naturally, the only ones I ever saw were in flowers beds, etc. One day, I was looking at a bunch of them, and it occured to me that all rocks must be dried up gum!

Shishka

When I went on an aeroplane for the first time at 5 years old I believed that the clouds below us was the sea. I had never seen the sea before. I thought it was beautiful.

E Becker

I used to believe that which ever way you looked it was north, never understood how people got lost :-S

Simon

When I was little my dad made my brother and I believe that the wrapped up bales of hay in the fields were marshmellows from outer space.

Smarty

Once as a child I was on a woodland walk with my Sunday school class. At one point I asked if we were going up a certain rather steep hill. The teacher said no, because that was "too steep terrain". I thought she said "too steep to rain". So for quite some time, I thought that, wherever a hillside was sufficiently steep, it never rained.

Christina

Every park that I went to as a kid had a sign that stated 'This Park Closes At Dark'. To me, that ment that the trees went home. Why else would the park close? The trees had to get home to thier families. I spent many hours begging to stay late at the park to find out where the trees lived.

Anacita

When I was very little, my Dad took me to his friends church where they said something along the lines of our being surrounded by God's presence. In my imagination, I pictured the world as being inside God's belly, and much like a snow globe, the sky was the top of His belly (from the inside), and the ground was along His back. When He drank something, it rained; when He coughed, there were earthquakes; when He moved around, the tides rolled in (like when you move in a full bathtub) and when He had gas, the winds would blow. You get the idea. It changed the way I looked at the sky and made me feel just a little claustrophobic.

Silverchild

From years of watching Gilligan's Island, I knew that quicksand (which frightened me) was common on islands. When I learned that Manhattan was an island, I was terrified by the thought of an upcoming trip there. I comforted myself by planning to stay only on pavement or in buildings AT ALL TIMES, fortunately pretty easy in Manhattan. I survived.

Anon

I was going to elementary school at the time when I believed the world was flat and because I lived where mountains surrounded me, I thought that they were what kept you from falling off. I was so confused when we finally went through the mountains to get to the other side...I realized sometime after that, that the world was actually a sphere!

Mae Moriarty

I used to think that when the sun went down, it went underground and it would create volcanoes while under there. Then it would come out of the ground the next day.

Stephen

i used to believe that other countries were in the sky 'couse grown ups pointed at the see whene i asked and there was nothing else there but skies.
i remember being disappointed finding out that other countries were like mine, on the ground....

purple blood

A few miles from my home there is a wind farm on the coast. When I asked what the large twirling things were, my Dad (who loved to kid us) said that they had been left there by a race of extinct giants, and that they were the giant equivalent of those plastic twirly things on sticks you get in seaside shops and put in the sand on the beach.

Samantha Westerby

I used to believe that we lived on the inside of the Earth and that the bumps in footpaths were really the chimneys of other houses underneath us, and I tried to dig a hole in my sandpit to get to them.

Suki

I used to believe that acorns were bullets

Andrea

I gerw up within 100 miles of a portion of the Appalachian Mountains that were then quite sparsely populated and still heavily forested throughout. Numerous times I would ride through the mountains with my family, never seeing the ground on distant mountains, but just treetops. As a result, for a long time I thought that mountains were not big hills, but rather clumps of very tall trees.

Bobby

When I was younger my family would often take trips up into the mountains to our lake house. During my first trip up my mom announced that we were going to start climbing the mountain. Of course, she meant we were going to stay in the car and follow the road up but I was convinced she had packed grappling hooks and harnesses and we were going to climb the mountain like they do Mt. Everst. I immediately burst into tears, scared for my life. My mom eventually calmed me down and, hey, I got an ice cream cone out of it.

Anon

Because Of every Beach i ever went to, there was always a hill going up to it before going down to the beach, i used to believe that there was water behind every hill, only until i was old enough to walk up the hills near my house, to be confronted by horses and more fields :(

Nick Blakesley

Growing up in Roswell, NM I used to believe that the mountains were purple because all I ever saw of mountains was El Capitan and that was the way it appeared. Imagine my surprise when we finally visited the mountains and I found out that they were dirt, trees and rocks just like the plains I grew up on.

Mary