at home

As a child, I'd heard of the idea of "wall to wall carpets", and was quite convinced that some houses had carpets going down one wall, along the floor, and up the next wall. When I was in college, one of the lecture halls had exactly this and I realised that part of my brain still had this misconception. Luckily, I managed not to make a fool out of myself on my first day.

I used to believe that there was a ninja living on top of my wardrobe who would jump down at night and chop my arms off if I got out of bed. I also thought that if I let any of my arms or legs hang over the edge of my bed, they would be bitten off by lobsters!

There was a time in my young, impressionable life that I watched an inordinate amount of television. During one evening's sojourn into the Idiot Box, I happened to peruse a commercial for a lovely chocolate confection called a Chunky due to its large and solidly square shape. The advertisement then showed a Chunky growing larger and larger, accompanied by loud thudding sounds. This somehow horrified my prepubescent synapses, and was thereby transposed by my naivete into an under-the-bed monster which lasted throughout not only my horrified childhood, but also the childhood of my sisters offspring, as she told them the story of the hideous Chunky that awaits the appearance of tiny toes over the side of the bed should they try to get out of it during the night.

A candy bar that eats children.

To this day, I have never eaten a Chunky.

i have had, since I was about six, the belief, that something is always behind me, and that I never notice it until i see it in a mirror. I think that if i see something about to jump on me in a mirror that i will be paralyzed with terror. This belief causes me to always stand at odd angles to mirrors, so that i only see a wall in the mirror.

Ever since I was little I swore that there were monsters in your closet and under your bed. If anything was left out in your room they would eat it in the middle of the night. There were nights when I would sleep with EVERY stuffed animal I owned just to make sure they wouldn't get eaten...

I once saw a commercial or something that showed a kid who'd left the faucet running while he was brushing his teeth. the water came from a pond right outside his window, where there was a happy little fish swimming around, but the fish drowned because the kid had left the faucet running and sucked the pond dry. after i saw that i never used faucet water to brush my teeth, because i thought that it was pond water.

I used to think that as long as you were covered up at night, no monsters could eat you. I was sure that if I left even one foot uncovered, it'd be taken right off. There were nights in July & August when I'd be roasting, but I still covered up!

I used to believe there was a crocodile under my crib, waiting to eat me. I can still remember standing up in my crib, crying for my dad to come save me from the crocodile. This must have been one of my earliest memories, as I can't have been more than one and a half or two years old.

My mom has a curio cabinet with a mirror on the back, which reflects the contents of the cabinet. That mirror was always so clean (because it was behind a glass door) that it seemed to be doing more than just reflecting. All the other mirrors in our house weren't quite so shiny. Anyway, I always thought that the mirror harbored another world, an opposite, reversed world where things were different, but where there was a girl who looked just like me. I used to spend hours just looking so hard at the mirror, trying to figure out how to get inside. My mom thought I really liked the stuff in there -- antique glass, music boxes, that sort of thing. But really, I just wanted to trade places with my opposite, and see if the world on the other side was any better.

As a child I used to loose things a lot and I was convinced that there were 3 tiny Arab men living in the closet of our spare bedroom. They would take stuff from around the house and hide it in the closet, but I was always too afraid to go into the closet and retrieve it.

I still loose a lot of stuff but haven't figured out where these men are or where they are hiding my stuff!!

We used to live in this really old cavernous Victorian house in England, which got really cold in the winter. However, our parents told us to never touch the thermostat or it would cause the house to blow up. It tooks me YEARS (like till I was in the mid-20's) before I could comfortably touch the thermostat without thinking my life was in danger.

I used to think there was a monster people-eating pig under my bed. At night, I had to cover up all the way to my chin with the blankets and never let anything stick out or he would bite it off.

When I was little I had a nightmare about crocodiles being on the floor of my bedroom. After that, every time I woke up from a nightmare I would be convinced that the crocodiles would be back as well (it didn't matter what the dream had been about) and I would sit in my bed being very scared to reach out and turn on the light, because I thought a crocodile would bite my arm off if I moved it off the bed. However, I knew that if I managed to turn the light on, this would make the crocodiles go away again.

I think this might have had something to do with having just moved house, with a green carpet in my new bedroom.

When I was little I used to believe that there was a colony of small friendly dragons living behind the wardrobe in my bedroom - they were maybe a foot high, and slim, with pointy noses and tiny little wings which didn't work - and they would come out into my bedroom at night, but go back between the wardrobe and the wall in the morning.

i used to believe there was this man underneath my bed with this sword just waiting to get out from underneath at night and cut my head off in my sleep. so always i would put this doll with her head on the pillow and go sleep at the end of the bed myself. but i would get so warm and so tired fighting my sleep at the end i would get my own head on the pillow instead of the doll thinking let him cut of my head....i am too tired .i rather be dead then just feeling like this.i was always amazed waking up in the morning my head still being on.

When I was 3 or 4, my oldest sister's fiance came to visit for a weekend, and upon waking up one morning I found him washing his hair in the kitchen sink. I was horrified and I began freaking out and pleading with him not to wash his hair in the kitchen sink! I didn't want to tell anyone that the reason was that nobody was supposed to wash their hair anywhere but the bathtub - he was a grownup, and he was supposed to already know this stuff! I still get teased about that to this day.

You know how household products often have a "First Aid" label telling you what to do if someone gets it in their eyes or swallows it? Well, I used to think the "First Aid" instructions explained how to convert the product into some sort of medicine. You would do this if there were a war and you couldn't get to a doctor.