general

I used to think a day was 60 hours long, just like an hour is 60 minutes long and a minute is 60 seconds long. I thought we just slept through most of it.

ebkrj

I used to believe that the world would end in 1970. I just couldn't imagine the year being anything other than 1960-something (the something corresponding to my age...). Even when I warmed up to the possibility that we might survive the decade (which I allowed only after someone convinced me that I really had been born in 1959 instead of 1960), 2000 gave me the creeps; but I figured by then I'd be an old, old, guy approaching 40, doing nothing with my time except lying about on the sofa like my granddad always did maybe watching TV because that's all old guys did, and it wouldn't matter anymore...

Mike

I remember people metioning "Mountain Time" and thinking that time must travel at a different rate at higher altitudes.

Anon

When i was a kid i thought daylight-saving time meant that all the clocks would stop for 1 hour and then start again. I used to try and stay awake to watch the miracle, but always fell asleep before it struck midnight..

Joey

I believed until a worryingly late age that there were 3 one O'Clocks in the day, based on what I had heard people say: there was one in the middle of the day, one late at night, and one very early in the morning.

Andrew, London

I used to think that Sunday came first, then Saturday. I had a reason. Sunday was Sunny and Fun. And Saturday, Sadderday I thought it was, was a day to be sad because the weekend was over. I told my mom and she laughed. Now I have no explaination of why they're callede Sat. and Sun.

Emily

I used to believe that if I concentrated very hard, I could skip a few years and go directly to high school, or some such thing, kind of like in movies. I was always dissapointed when it never worked, and often ended up with a rather large headache.

Xornia

I thought that the day started at 5:00 A.M. I would always get mad when people said the day started at Midnight. And when they said that 1:00 P.M. was 13:00 in military time, I was wondering why they had 13 instead of 8.

Anon

My brother and I were walking around in our orchard and he got bored so he told me to wait beside our fence for a minute while he went inside to get something. He told me to count to 60 because I was really little and didn't know what a minute was and then he left. Well, I didn't know how to count past fifteen, so I was out there for about ten minutes before I went looking for him...man, for the longest time I thought minutes were that long.

Ash Stinson

I used to believe that time travel would one day be possible. I spent years deciding where I would want to get sent back to. Should I do something fun like go to Woodstock, or see Lewis & Martin in Vegas? Or should I try to alter history like try to kill Hitler. Then I decided I would go back to when my mother was younger, and convince her to leave my father.

me again

Before I understood the concept of telling time, I assumed that grown-ups somehow had the ability to know automatically what time it was at any given moment, like maybe they had hidden sensors or something in their bodies. This seemed only natural, as my parents were always able to tell me what time it was whenever I asked.

mollyann

When a 24 hour clock shows 00:00 (midnight) the world stops for 1 whole minute, and at 00:01 it starts again.

I must say i thought this for some time, probably until i was 14 at least *blush*

Rowena

I used to think that the way to count time was to sound it out slowly. e.g. Once my Mum said to wait five minutes so i said f-i-v-e m-i-n-u-t-e-s out loud and really slowly and thought that meant five minutes was up.

Because of this I could never understand how one hour was longer than say twenty minutes because when you say it out loud twent minutes would be longer.

Anon

When I was about 3 or 4, my mother took a trip to the US in summer, and left me at my grandmother´s for about three and a half weeks. FOr little me, that was a long long time! And I went on to tell everybody years after that that I had lived with my grandma for one year...

joana

I used to believe that the later you stayed up, the more sleep you got. I thought time would stop and count backwards from the time you went to sleep. I didn't understand the 24 hour thing.

Amy

When I was little, i thought that there were days in between weeks, and would ask my parents when the next week would happen.

Emily

When I was about 5 or 6 years old, I thought in order for it to be morning, the whole world had to be asleep. So I saw many of my neighbours lights on, and I was like great! Now I have to wait for them to sleep for it to be the next day.
That was before me learning about time zones.

Anon

I used to think that, at the end of every century (and thus, at the beginning of each new one), a giant shooting star crossed the sky. That was the way people learnt it was already a new century.

Anon

when I was 6 I thought 15 was really old. When I was 15 I thought 25 was really old. Now I'm 51 and look at my 6 year old - I just think I'm really old.

johnboy

I was convinced that the TV networks didn't know when midnight was! Every year on New Year's Eve, we would watch the ball drop in New York City at "midnight", but it would always only be 11pm in Dallas where I was! I wish someone would have explained time zones to me earlier.

KevinG