When the cold war got hot, in the '50s and threat of a nuclear war was like an invisible cloud everywhere, well, one summer when it was exceptionally hot I really thought that the school playground would melt under our feet and that that was what a nuclear castastrophe was all about.
the past
1,158 beliefs in this area
When I was in third or fourth grade I read a book about King Tut and heard about his "curse." I thought that from reading the book I was cursed too. I was so afraid I was going to die some sort of horrible death!
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Up until I was 8, I thought that all things in the universe were devoid of color until sometime in the mid to late 60's. Then my parents bought a color TV.
While going to school in Chicago and learning about the great Chicago fire, I was sitting in the back yard with my mother while she was feeling great, young and healthy, I asked "Mom...whatever happened at the end of the world"
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Like many others, I used to think that the world used to be black and white. I didn't question why dinosaurs were in colour, though.
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When I first heard of the "sacking" of Rome, I thought it meant somebody tore down everything in Rome and carried it away in sacks.
I thought that the Middle Ages were make believe until I was around nine or ten. I read a lot of fairy tales and they had knights and princesses and dragons, and I thought that these stories all took place in the middle ages and so I figured they were fake. I thought that what really happened in the time of the middle ages was just a big blank and no one knew anything about it.
Ancient Egypt always seemed to a very young me a very exciting place, but I was scared of actually being there, because historical egyptians were often shown in my pictures with heads of crocodiles, dogs, birds and other animals. I took this to be some sort of occupational hazard in being an egyptian, as they must have existed, or how otherwise could anyone have drawn them?
when i was young i would always been shown the black and white photos of my nan and pop and then one day my mum was talking about how yellow the yolks in eggs were back when she was young and i said to her wasnt everything black and white back them..
When I was small, I used to think that when TV was black and white, the world was black and white.
I was a young kid at the time of the Berlin Airlift. I heard at the time how pro-Russian forces had built the Berlin Wall to isolate East Berlin. I was still vague at the time as to where and what some placenames applied to. I had Berlin and Brooklyn confused at the time, so I thought the Russians had actually occupied a portion of New York city!
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As a small child in the early 80s, I decided the Cold War was so called because of the harsh climate in Russia.
For years I used to have the fear that Russia was going to wipe this country out with a nuclear bomb. I had that thought always in my head until I was around 16 years old. I'm now 37.
This is really the opposite of a silly belief but amusing anyways. I was a very skeptical little kid (and am now a skeptical adult). In addition to realizing by the age of 4 or so that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny weren't real, I went further and refused to believe that dinosaurs had ever actually existed. I had seen pictures of them in books and on TV, but my cynical little self already knew that not everything you read or saw was true, so I figured that dinosaurs were made up. I persisted in this until I was 7 and we went to the Smithsonian museum of natural history, and they had a bunch of dinosaur skeletons. I felt ok about believing them after that because if you acutally observed something for yourself, it was ok to believe in it. As you might imagine, I did well in science classes but had a tough time with CCD...
This is not my belief, but a person (several people) I know's.
A lot of my friends ant the age of 8 believed that in sword battles you had to hit the opponent's sword and NOT in fact the person. This aggrivated me, as I had a granddad who did archery and simulated knights battles as a past time. I decided to just have my imaginary sword slice off one of their heads.
Needless to say they threw a mental at me!
I used to believe that because some older films and tv programmes were black & white, up to a certain point in time, the whole world was actually black & white and colour was only invented recently. How people managed to colour the sky used to baffle me, but i assumed they must have sprayed deodorant into the air until it turned blue!!
During World War II we lived in Sydney's harbour suburb Balmain, and government warnings included taking shelter under a staircase or strong piece of furniture in a confined space during air raids. When japanese submarines raided Sydney Harbour in 1942 all sirens went off and our terrified Mum put my sister and me under a heavy table she had dragged to the hallway. At age 7 I thought the japanese must be very exciting people because I was never allowed to play under the table at other times. My belief was strengthened when the Royal Australian Navy buried the recovered japanese bodies with full military honours - which surprised even the japanese, who had not suspected that "barbarians" could behave with such honour!
Like many others, as a child in World War II Australia, I thought wars were fought in some kind of huge arena fitted out with hills, trenches and towns, with huge scoreboards at each end. The side with the highest score won, and you could probably buy tickets to watch from the sides, like Sydney Cricket Ground. Then the news that our Cruiser HMAS Sydney had sunk the Italian Cruiser Bartolemeo Colleoni ruined my theory. I had seen the great "Sydney" in Sydney harbour, and nothing that size, let alone two of them with miles of water between them could fit into my imaginary arena, and still leave room for all the other things going on.
when i was little n saw black n white films on tv, i thought that evry one was actualy black n white, and that the whole world was in blak n white until they invented colour tv.
When I was a child, my mother and I were discussing television and she told me that they had invented color (t.v.'s} when she was a child. I mistook this and spent the next couple of years believing that everything (all of life) was black in white and that color had been invented. I never did figure out how to mix black and white to get blue.