neighbourhood

This isn't me, but my mother. As a kid, she apparently thought that if you saw the street lamps turning off, it was lucky.

Anon

There was this one area of the local pool that I thought was called the "Disney Area". Why? Because I thought it looked like Mickey Mouse's head.

Anon

I thought that the barber sign meant candy because I thought it looked like a candy cane.

Anon

Once when I was little I heard loud electronic music coming from outside. At first I thought it was an ice cream truck but then a voice called out "Hello!" So then I thought it was someone's noisy toy. My mom correctly identified it as an ice cream truck but I thought, "Since when do ice cream trucks have a voice saying 'hello'?"

Karen

I used to believe that the "no outlet" sign on roads was a warning to people driving electric cars.

c

To leave the town in which I grew up you could drive through a tunnel that crossed beneath an estuary, and then came out in the adjacent town. During one of my earliest memories of going through that tunnel, my dad was driving, and as we reached the halfway mark through the tunnel he said, "We're driving under water right now." I thought it was amazing that we didn't have to hold our breath! Also, I remember that there were maintenance doors in the sides of the tunnel, and I imagined that if you opened one of those doors you would see an underwater scene with fish swimming by. Somehow in my imagination, the water didn't just come rushing in through the door and flooding the tunnel.

DeeDub

When I was around 5 years old, I was suspicious of certain mannequins in the department store (the more life-like ones), because I believed that they could move if they wanted to, and that they were experts at standing perfectly still. I remember gazing at one to see if I could catch him moving, even just a twitch. After a moment I gave up, and as I walked past him I believed he was moving his eyes to watch me walk by. Thinking I might catch him looking at me, I quickly turned my head, but by that time he had already resumed his blank expression. Damn! He's too quick. I believed the reason that some of the mannequins had such smirks on their faces was because they knew they were fooling me. I also believed that they furtively communicated across the store to each other by winking one eyelid. That was their version of giving each other a "high five".

DeeDub

I have Aspergers syndrome so I'm afraid of loud noises. I used to get scared when the ice cream truck came down our street because I thought the music was coming from someone's noisy toy.

Karen