nature

I believed for the longest time that that huge fireworks couldn't just explode in the sky. That wouldn't do it. I really believed that they had to hit a star before they could explode. I was amazed at how fast the fireworks reached them.

When I was young, I believed that the dark clouds brought the nighttime darkness. I would run in on a cloudy day, and say, is it time to go to bed mummy.

I use to believe that the Sun and the Moon were the same thing - with the Sun on one side and the Moon on the other.

i used to believe that thunder was when God was playing the drums and lightning was when he was throwing lightning bolts at naughty people.

i used to believe rain was when Jesus was having a shower

When I was 4 or 5 I was startled by a white spider that somehow resembled the white "cap" of a dandelion. (Not the seeds or the petals, but the part it all rests on.)

After that, I viewed all of these plants with suspicion. Obviously, they played some part in this spider's life cycle. I inspected every plant cautiously before making my wish, then smashed the rest of the dandelion just to be safe.

This continued for a few weeks until I decided that spiders in fact do not come from flowers.

After I first saw those gruesomely fascinating pictures of ancient people (but who looked like us) caught in the eruption of Vesuvius in Pompeii, I thought that lava was a magical substance that could immediately turn you to stone just by touching your toe.

I was shocked in 1st grade when they told me there was no face on the moon. I hate to say this, guys, I still see it. I used to believe this was because the moon was a person.

I USED TO BEILIEVE THAT ANIMALS CAME FROM PLUTO BECAUSE THERE SPEICIES AND I THOUGHT WE WERE MONKEY THAT TURND INTO CAVE MEN THAT TURNED INTO HUMANS!

When I was 6, my family moved from New York City to the suburbs in Florida. In NYC the sky is usually gray or smoggy so it was the first time I had seen blue skies and clouds. I used to try to lay in the grass and look for shapes in the clouds but I never could stay long enough to find anything because I was absolutely terrified that the clouds would fall on me. I was still uneasy even after I learned that clouds are weightless water vapor.

Like kids everywhere in the English-speaking world, I knew the rhyme "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" from early childhood. Except to me the word 'twinkle' meant not only the light stars gave off, but also the sound!

I was living in the Caribbean, where there were treefrogs singing every night. Now, our particular variety of treefrog made a very pretty, high-pitched sound, just the sort of sound you'd think the word 'twinkling' described. They were also just small, dull grey splotches about the size of a child's fingernail, very very hard to spot at night; and they never came out and sang until after dark, when the stars had come out too. And since I'd never seen a treefrog...of course that was the noise of the stars. Why would there be a nursery rhyme about it otherwise?

Not only did I never question this as a child, I didn't find out the error of my ways until I was 16, when we moved to London. One day I moaned to my mother that you couldn't hear the stars twinkle in the city.... It took her ages to work out what I was talking about!

when i was like 10 or 12 i was so scared of the water because my babysitter pushed my off our dock. i wouldnt even go into a boat for fear that it would crash and i would drown and a monster or big fish would eat my remains!! (im 15)

My brother, when he was little, was CONVINCED that 1) if the sun was out, it was warm, and 2) it wasn't winter unless there was snow on the ground.
This led to some very frustrating attempts on my mother's part to forse a parka on him on certain sunny december days!

I used to think that the weather changed on what God was feeling. If it was sunny, God was happy. If rainy, he was sad. If there was lightning, he was angry. I wondered how the weather men predicted how God felt!

I used to believe that when it rained god was crying, and when it thundered he was rolling over in bed, and when there was an earthquake the dead people were rolling over in their graves!

My lovely older brothers convinced me that the factories with the gross polution coming out of the chimneys were the "cloud-making" buildings and they make clouds and shoot them into the air. I would get really worried if I saw a chimney with no smoke coming out because I thought the clouds would not be able to be made and then the sun would fall down and crush me and my stuffed animals.