general

I thought everyone only had a set number of breaths before they died.

I breathed slowly for a long time.

Anon

I am glad to know that I'm not unique in this belief.

I too thought that little men were running about inside me (think of miniature Ooompa Loompas). They'd move my muscles, send messages when it's time to dispose of waste (and open the valves when it was time to), handling cuts and scrapes by scurring to the site and putting internal bandages on (scabs), resting when I did, etc.

I thought the sole purpose of my eating and drinking was to keep THEM going.

David

I used to believe (through some skanty mis-reading of Judy Blume books too young) that menstruation was masturbation, and that masturbation was menstruation. So then, at the proper age, I asked my mother what masturbation meant, and she said, "Honey, you should never be ashamed."

Took me years to make sense of that. And by then I was pregnant!

Laurel

I used to think that when you waved to say "hello", you had your hand wide and waved it from side to side (like normal waving) and to say goodbye, you had to have your fingers together and wave your hand up and down. I never really wondered what would happen if you didn't...

Uh, dunno...

I used to believe, that if I yawned at the same time someone else yawned, we were automatically the same age. Don't ask me why or how, I just believed it happened.

Gaston

you know how people can burp on command? Well i used to believe that if you did that too many times, your stomach would explode. It was pretty sweet.

DontJello

When I was a kid (1950s) I used to believe that anything you wanted to do that was any fun would either put your eye out or give you lock-jaw according to my parents

kevin eickley

When I was little, I believed that each person had a set amount of blood in their body, and as you got bigger the blood would thin out to fill up your body. I always liked to wear bandaids because they would stop the bleeding if I got cut, so I'd have more blood when I grew up.

Anon

When I was a kid I believed that bodies were operated by little people inside of you. They were little people dressed fully in white tights so that all you can see was their face. They talked to you and had weird machines that made your body work. When you got cuts, some would fall out.

Mikhail

i used to believe that u had to learn to whistle to become an adult...i still can't whistle

whistle

When I was about 8 my older brother [17 at the time] told me that he could shut off his hearing..I belived him and spent hours trying to figure out how!! As a mom now, I tricked my 10 year old into believing it to..for hours she tried turning it off,by feeling for the buttons inside your ears....

MsKeeper

a friend of my mum's used to believe that you shouldn't wear underwear in bed because your bum needed to breathe.Her mum told her this.

dont believe it

When I was younger, I saw a TV show where there was a guy who had passed out and was lying on the ground. A girl got down and started feeling his wrists and his neck for a moment, then shouted, "I found a pulse!" and the guy woke up. From then on, I thought for certain that if you just touched someone's wrist for a while, you could find a pulse and save their life. I wondered why paramedics sometimes weren't able to save people's lives, if it was that easy.

Anon

while my son was crying one day, my little brother announced that "babies cry to let off moisture". ha!

i'm laughing WITH you

When I was little I believed there were creatures/people of some sort (kinda like the builders from Fraggle Rock) that lived inside of me and made my body functional. Every time I would eat I would picture my chewed up food going down a shoot and landing on a conveyer belt where it would be divided. Same with them being in my eyes and all over the rest of me. So when I was sick I thought maybe they were dying.

Steph -

rude-bits, I remember my friends telling me that if I masturbated my eyes would get slanted like an oriental person. Then a band called "The Vapors" came out with a song called "Turning Japanese." The song is about masterbation. AS you can probably tell I wouldn't touch the thing for a long time!

Gump

When I was younger my friend said that she had a sweet tooth and I said 'I've got one of those, but I don't know which one it is!'

Brooke

At the age of 5 or 6 in the very early '60s my mom would take me with her shopping downtown. We took a string of street cars and buses to get there. Along the way I would notice on a regular basis "persons of color" spitting while at the bus stops or out the window of the bus. Their spit was brown. I now know it was from chewing tobacco, but at the time I reasoned that white people spit white, and brown people spit brown.

Don

My Mom told me when I was a kid that the more I cried the more wrinkled my face would become because of all the tears drying on my face. Then one morning as I woke up she approached me with a horrified look on her face and kept telling me to look in the mirror. Of course thinking I was now a shriveled wreck I began to cry, then realized the tears were slowly wrinkling my face even more and broke into hysterics. Eventually so did my Mom, though for her, it was hysterical laughter. She held me in front of the mirror, it was in fact April Fools Day. Love Ya Mom.

Cry Baby

When I was about 5 I used to believe that I could hear an army of soldiers coming after me and getting closer and closer. Later it turned out to be the way I was lying forced my ear against an artery and what I could hear was my own pulse. Which explains why they got faster when I got scared about it...

Simon